Chapter One

Immigration and the Re-creation of Rural Poverty

Rural poverty in California is being re-created through immigration. This poverty may be even more difficult to extirpate than the rural poverty of the past, because it is driven by the expansion of low-wage, immigrant-intensive agriculture. Frequently initiated by U.S. recruitment, the immigration of low-skilled farm workers is sustained by poverty in rural Mexico and then "managed" by family and village networks. This combination of "push," "pull," and "network" effects makes both immigration and the expansion of farm jobs on which immigrants depend self-perpetuating.

Low-skilled workers, primarily from Mexico, migrate into the nation's most prosperous farm economy. Rather than sharing in this prosperity, however, farm workers find low earning and unstable, seasonal employment, with few possibilities for mobility inside the rural sector. The economies and labor markets of rural communities are increasingly layered or segmented in a manner that pushes many of the costs of seasonal farm work onto recently arrived immigrants, the most flexible or absorptive people present. They crowd into rural colonias-incorporated towns resembling overgrown labor camps--whose population during the harvest season often surge to several times their size. California rural colonias now comprise 7 of the 20 U.S. cities in which the highest percentage of people moving in concentrated poverty are foreign-born. some permanent residents of these rural communities benefit by providing needed services such as food and housing to farm workers. However, low farm worker earnings severely limit the potential for economic growth within these communities. Lacking effective demand for their goods and services, business up and down the "Main Streets" of rural California close their doors.

Local policymakers and service providers are struggling to respond to the large and growing public service needs of an impoverished farm worker population. Viewed from one perspective, taxpayers indirectly subsidize the expansion of labor-intensive agriculture (see chapter 3). They provide public services to new immigrants who are drawn to California farms to work but receive poverty-level earnings for the labor. The public assistance needs of low-wage workers are not factored into farmers' decisions to plant labor-intensive crops.

Consumers benefit from low farm wages, but less than many people believe: Farm wages constitute a surprisingly small part of the prices consumers pay at the grocery store. Farmgate prices average approximately one-third of retail prices, and labor costs represent approximately one-third of farmgate prices for fruits, vegetables, and horticultural products. This means, for example, that a 10-percent increase in farm wages would increase retail prices by at most 1 percent.

The expansion of immigrant-intensive agriculture today is occurring in an environment of public pressure against immigration. In 1996, the United States Congress enacted legislation calling for increased border enforcement and new pilot verification systems to weed out unauthorized immigrants in the workplace. Threatened with the loss of their immigrant laborers, farmers lobby for guest worker programs (designed to temporarily admit immigrants for employment-related purposes) to augment their work force; yet rural communities, not employers, are left to provide poor farm workers and their families with needed services. Critics of guest worker programs and of the immigrant-intensification of agriculture argue that labor saving technologies and management practices exist, but that in an environment of abundant immigrant labor, farmers have little incentive to use them. Legal challenges have brought publicly supported farm mechanization research to a standstill, and agricultural engineering departments in universities around the country are downsizing or closing. Perhaps more than any other sector, agriculture epitomizes America's ambivalence toward immigration.

The rural poverty being created to day through immigration is fundamentally different from the rural poverty of the postwar South or that of the Midwest in 1930s and 1940s. today's rural poverty is occurring in a context of agricultural prosperity, via the immigration of low-paid workers into an expanding fruit and vegetable sector that increasingly exports the products of immigrant labor. By contract, in the South and Midwest of the 1930s and 1940s, there was a declining number of jobs for U.S. citizen farmers and sharecroppers in consolidating and mechanizing agriculture. The solution to rural poverty at that time was a great rural-to-urban migration involving 1 million persons annually. It is not yet clear what the solution for today's rural poverty will be.

Through migration, rural poverty affects California cities, as local residents, particularly the children of immigrants, seek a livelihood outside of agriculture. The overflow of rural poverty into urban poverty highlights the importance of education and of other integration assistance to improve the prospects for California's rural-to-urban migrants and the urban economies they come to inhabit.

The United States does not have a deliberate immigrant integration policy like that in place in Canada, Israel, or Australia. As a result, federal programs begun for other purposes have become de facto immigrant integration programs. Curbs on immigrants' access to public benefits, enacted as part of welfare reform, are likely to have far reaching effects on immigrant farm workers and on the agricultural regions in which they reside.

Asilomar and Riverside Conferences and Motivation for this Book

The conferences brought together academic and policy researchers, community leaders, and activists to consider how immigration is affecting demographics, economics, and politics in communities in three California regions: the San Joaquin Valley (the heartland of California agriculture); the Central Coast; and Southern California. Community-level fieldwork by researchers provided a micro, or ground-level, view of demographic, social, economic, and political changes related to immigration in rural towns. Between 25 percent and 50 percent of all families in the rural towns featured at the conferences had incomes below federal poverty levels in 1990. Commentaries by community leaders and activists offered both a reaction to academic research and an insider's perspective on the challenges of "making rural communities work" in the face of rising poverty associated with low-wage, seasonal farm work. Policy analyses and findings from statistical studies using data from the U.S. Census of Population presented a macro context for considering the rural community studies that constituted the core of the conference programs.

Conference participants were familiar with towns and cities in the agricultural areas of California. They were asked to consider a simple question with broad socioeconomic ramifications: Are we re-creating rural poverty through immigration? If rural poverty is increasing what is likely to happen to especially poor rural residents and their children? Will they stay in rural areas and accept the jobs available, will they receive education and training and attract industries that transform rural economies, will they rely on public assistance, or will they move--and if so, with what economic prospects outside of agriculture?

Four Themes

This book emphasizes four themes. First, there is no reason to believe the level and composition of current immigration flows from Mexico will change significantly in the near future. Immigration networks evolve to continually supply U.S. farms with low-skill labor from abroad. As these networks expand, they generate access to jobs, housing, government services, and other resources for increasing numbers of new migrants. Seasonal farm work is performed primarily by foreigners who have recently arrived in the United States through these networks and have few other U.S. job options.

Second, there is widespread agreement that the children of farm workers raised educated in the United States avoid seasonal farm work and that immigrant seasonal farm workers traditionally have strived to move on as quickly as possible to more stable and higher paying jobs. At the Asilomar conference, several sons and daughters of farm workers related stories about their parents' efforts to introduce them to farm work in a way that would dissuade them from ever working in the fields again. As keynote speaker Cruze Reynoso explained, "When my father intentionally put me on a bus to harvest grapes on the hottest day of the season, he made the prospect of going to school look attractive."

Farmers seek out and hire seasonal farm workers, and communities and assistance programs will continue to try to provide these workers and their children with the education to move into nonfarm jobs. In theory, this should cause tension between farm employers and those working to integrate their workers into better-paying jobs. However, the integration efforts that encourage and permit farm worker children to find nonfarm jobs also serve to reinforce growers' assertions that U.S. workers will not do farm work and that the only option is to import new workers. Expanding migration networks from Mexico provide the next generation of workers, setting in motion another cycle of escape from the farm labor market and the poverty it represents.

Third, the public resources available to integrate newcomers are declining, even as the number of immigrants is increasing. At the same time, the number of needy people in the towns and cities surrounding California's farms has increased faster than the number of people on public assistance. Unlike the one-to-one relationship between child population growth and school enrollment, the rate at which poor people apply for and receive public assistance in rural areas is slower than the rate at which their numbers are increasing.

This raises the question of whether the gap between need and public assistance simply is a reflection of knowledge and legal obstacles, or whether it represents a choice--that is, are private networks filling assistance needs in rural areas so that only education needs are publicly visible? A question of significant public policy import is whether the gap between need and public assistance in rural America is a short-term or a long -term phenomenon.

Fourth, the binational labor market is so well established between rural Mexico and rural California that the United States must take an interest in rural Mexico. Failure to promote rural development in Mexico will inevitably lead to the need to launch rural development efforts in the United States. In the absence of development in Mexico, rural Mexican s will continue to arrive in rural California, fueling population growth and poverty, despite farm labor surpluses and the combination of factors that prevent immigrant farm workers from finding nonfarm jobs.

Organization of this Book