With California’s Unemployment at 12 Percent, Suddenly Picking Crops Is Not So Bad

For years, advocates for guest worker amnesty have asked who will pick the crops if cheap labor can’t be imported.

My favorite answer to that question is: “The person who picked them last year.” Given the current economic deterioration, which began more than five years ago, field workers have no longer been able to upgrade, so to speak, their employment status from stoop labor to construction. The mortgage meltdown ended home building. Anyone who was in the United States illegally between roughly 2007 through today and who worked in the field to earn an income would be happy to keep his job.

With nationwide unemployment at 9 percent and California’s rate at 12 percent, American citizens have gone into the fields.

According to a Los Angeles Times story, the children of earlier generations of farm laborers like Salvadoran Geremias Romero are harvesting cantaloupes, earning $8.25 an hour and finding that it isn’t such a bad deal. Central Valley farmer Joe Del Bosque, the Central Valley farmer who hired Romeo and others like him (some of whom have high school diplomas), said:

“We’ve never had so many American-born working in the fields. Farm work is usually the big step for some people to push their kids into the American dream.” [Children of Immigrants Hit an Economic Ceiling, by Alena Semuels, Los Angeles Times, October 30, 2011]

What exactly the American dream may be in the early 21st Century isn’t clear either to Del Bosque or me. For young adults like Romero, prospects are dim. The unemployment rate for 17-24 year olds is 17.4 percent.

But what’s obvious in an economy where job creation lags behind population growth, the last thing needed is a special agricultural guest worker program. David Gewitz, a CNN special contributor, calculates that the U.S. is seven years behind in creating the number of jobs it needs to keep its citizens working.

With the federal government accepting one million new legal immigrants annually, the jobs-to-population deficit will gradually but irreversibly grow larger.

An immigration moratorium is long overdue.