To sum up the future perspective, labor costs for growing fruits and vegetables in the United States are likely to increase. Large-scale mechanization will probably occur over the next decade, but it’s not here yet.
The biggest issue in agricultural labor now is legislation and supply-and-demand.
Current immigration regulations block the free movement of temporary and seasonal workers from Mexico and Central America. The federal government has tried numerous times over the past 75 years to create—or at any rate permit—a feasible solution to this problem but has failed to do so.
With a “transitioning Congress,” as Philip L. Martin, a professor at the University of California at Davis, puts it, it may be possible to create an immigration bill that would allow undocumented laborers to work in the industry.
A new Congress, he notes, could “wipe everything off the chalkboard and have a clean slate.”
What might this entail? The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act reform shows that a one-time amnesty for currently undocumented workers is not a comprehensive solution to the farm labor problem.
There’s a clear need for legal guestworkers, much like the certified ag worker status proposed in the defunct 2019 House bill, or even a suitably modified H-2A program.
Whether, or to what extent, this would lead to the possibility of citizenship is quite another question, though it is bound to come up and to cause divisions.
Solutions appear no closer than ever before.
This is a feature from the the March/April issue of Produce Blueprints Magazine. Click here to read the full issue.
