Special Report: Helplessly Hiring
Harvest season is here and with that the return of migrant farm workers, making it a busy time for the Desert Southwest.
However, some farmers say the worker shortage continues and they feel the lack of labor is only going to become worse.
“Quite frankly I’m not sure how we would do it because out of our workforce. Our workforce probably forty or fifty percent out of the visa workers are out of Mexico,” said Tony Tew, Foothill Packing’s Yuma area general manager.
In Arizona, forty percent of the workforce is under the H2-A visa program. In California, nine in ten farm workers are foreign-born, many from Mexico.
On top of that, according to the Pew Research Center, more Mexican immigrants are leaving the U.S. than arriving.
Among the causes of the labor shortage: politics, policy, and the aging workforce.
“You can imagine the workers that started out in the fields when they were young. You know they can do the back-breaking work. They kind of moved on to the slower paced work or the slower demanding work,” said Tew. “So with that being said their kids are not coming into the industry as well. We are not getting that influx from that along with you know they’re not renewing green cards like they use to. So it’s just a difficult situation that we are in right now.”
According to government records, most Americans simply don’t want to harvest fruits and vegetables. This year alone only one percent of Americans applied to farming jobs.
That’s about the same in our area, even though both Yuma and Imperial counties have some of the highest unemployment rates in the nation.
So where do we see this industry heading towards in next ten years?
“More mechanization. Everybody is working out there striving to figure out how to eliminate more labor.”
From the worker’s point of view, one of the biggest problems is retaining the same workers throughout the years.
“There needs to be a set and stone long-term immigration reform for these workers,” said field supervisor Lucio Ramirez. “Agriculture depends on labor. You can’t produce crops if there is nobody to work on the farms. ”
Tew wants a more accessible guest worker visa program to ensure the next generation can continue to feed A merica .
“Immigration reform would help but we don’t know where that’s going to go.”
