Rural poverty has been the subject of some of America's best known literature, including John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which chronicled the reception that Dust Bowl migrants received in California in the 1930s. Reports of "the people left behind," such as Michael Harrington's The Other America, helped to inspire the War on Poverty in the 1960s by calling attention to an invisible, enduring rural poverty.
The rural poverty associated with small farms and sharecroppers for most of the 20th century diminished but did not disappear. Meanwhile, a new type of poverty has appeared in rural and agricultural areas with the arrival of rural Mexicans to fill farm and farm-related jobs. Most of the Mexicans who begin their American journeys as seasonal farmworkers remain in the fields for less than a decade, and their children educated in the United States do not follow their parents into the fields.
This combination of high farmworker attrition and low reproduction of U.S. farmworkers poses a dilemma for rural America. Farmers argue that migrants are needed to sustain and expand agriculture and related industries. However, if newcomers seeking the American dream remain farmworkers for a decade or less, and their children shun farm jobs, rural America becomes an immigration treadmill, serving as a port of entry for newcomers but not providing careers for the immigrants and their children. Immigrants too old to fill farm jobs, and their children who refuse them, could become a new rural underclass, one whose only opportunity for mobility will require migration to urban areas.
The new rural poverty results from expanding labor-intensive fresh fruit and vegetable production and rising Mexico-United States migration. Both processes were accelerated, perhaps unintentionally, by diverse trends, including affluence, healthier diets, and immigration reforms in the mid-1980s and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) a decade later. In the 1960s, no one expected the number of farmworkers to increase, especially after the bracero program ended and the fledgling United Farm Workers union pushed the wages of some California farmworkers to twice the federal minimum wage, spurring a wave of harvest mechanization (O'Brien, Cargill, and Fridley 1983). However, instead of a mechanized agriculture employing fewer and better paid workers, production of hand-picked commodities such as strawberries and broccoli expanded, and the availability of migrants and farm jobs reinforced one another's growth. Migrant workers enabled farmers to plant broccoli or other crops and assume that harvest workers would be available, and expanding harvest jobs encouraged rural Mexicans suffering from peso devaluations and economic restructuring to migrate to the United States.
Legalization of migrant workers and employer sanctions in the late 1980s were expected to return agriculture to the 1960s era of rising wages and mechanization. However, only one side of this legalization and enforcement "grand bargain" was implemented. The farmworker legalization program, often considered rife with fraud, gave immigrant status to a sixth of the adult men in rural Mexico, but employer sanctions were not enforced and did little to stem the flow of unauthorized Mexicans, who obtained fraudulent documents and jobs. Contrary to expectations, many newly legalized Mexicans brought their families to the United States instead of shuttling between seasonal U.S. farm jobs and homes in Mexico, literally changing the face of the U.S. areas in which they settled.
Some of the Mexicans who settled in the United States found upward mobility by leaving California farm fields and moving to midwestern and southeastern towns and cities to fill jobs in farm-related industries. Meat and poultry plants seeking additional workers, as well as construction contractors and hotels and restaurants, often hired a pioneer migrant seeking year-round work and lower housing costs. After the migrant proved to be a good worker, the employer asked him to bring family and friends to fill vacant jobs, and soon migrants moved directly from rural Mexico to such cities as Storm Lake, Iowa, and Rogers, Arkansas. Workers from particular Mexican villages soon dominated harvesting and factory crews in some U.S. workplaces, and information on job vacancies sometimes traveled faster to rural Mexico than to nearby U.S. labor markets.
The wages of newcomer migrants are high by Mexican standards but low by U.S. standards, so the same immigration flows that preserve farm and farm-related industries in rural America are also increasing poverty in many of these new migration destinations. This new rural poverty is the focus of this book. We explain how agriculture became dependent on immigrant workers, how immigration and integration patterns are playing out in specific rural communities and commodities, and the relationship between farm employment, immigration, and poverty. We also explore the policy options to reduce the risk that current Mexico-United States migration will simply transfer poverty from rural Mexico to rural America.
The Changing Face project is a unique collaboration between think tank researchers and academics. We began the project in 1995 with the support of the Rosenberg Foundation and received additional support from the S.H. Cowell, Farm, Giannini, and Kellogg Foundations, as well as from the United States Department of Agriculture under a national research initiative grant. We wish to acknowledge the information and encouragement we received from the farm employers, local leaders, and migrants and their supporters who participated in our seminars and informed us during field trips. We dedicate this book to them and hope that it provides a road map to those grappling with questions that have no easy answers.
This book is organized as follows. Part 1 has three chapters that outline the interdependencies between immigrants and agriculture. Part 2 examines the changing face of rural America in three areas: inland agricultural valleys in California, farm areas in coastal California, and meat and poultry processing centers in Delaware and Iowa. Part 3 turns to the policy challenges and options, assessing the likely impacts of current proposals for immigration reform on rural America. We conclude with the fundamental question, Is one solution to rising farmworker poverty in the 21st century to ensure that migrants are guest workers who eventually return to their countries of origin, as President Bush proposes, or can seasonal farmwork be a first step up the U.S. job ladder?
