For years Americans have been told by journalists, businessmen and politicians that the U.S. Suffers from a farm worker shortage that is easily remedied by importing huge numbers of immigrant workers, mostly from Mexico. Pro-immigration forces have repeatedly insisted, often without supporting data, that farm produce would rot in the fields were it not for the arrival of every increasing numbers of low-wage workers willing to work long hours for low pay under difficult conditions to make sure fruit and vegetables are shipped on time to grocery store shelves.
The New York Times, a major corporate proponent of mass immigration and multiculturalism, reported in September [2007] that “a nationwide farm worked shortage [is] threatening to leave fruits and vegetables rotting in the fields.” And the Wall street Journal claimed in July [2007] that “20 percent of American agricultural products were stranded” because of labor shortages. Sharon Hughes, a lobbyist for mass immigration, asserted, “We are either going to have our food produced by foreign workers here in the United States, or the farming process will move to foreign countries.”
But a new study challenges those assertions. Philip Martin, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California at Davis, reports that the economic evidence for a so-called shortage simply doesn’t exist. In his study, “Farm Worker Shortage?“, produced for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., Martin found that the federal government’s own official reports dispute the popular claims.
Government economic reports, he said, “suggest that there are no widespread farm labor shortages. The Congressional Research Service in September 2007 concluded that farm labor trends suggest ‘no nationwide shortage of workers.’ The GAO [Government Accountability Office] in 1997 similarly concluded there is ‘no national agricultural labor shortage at this time’ and that ‘a sudden widespread farm labor shortage requiring the importation of large numbers of foreign workers is unlikely to occur in the near future.’”
Martin noted that there is no economic or government definition of just what a labor shortage is. In a free market economy, price is the mediator between supply and demand. If the demand exceeds supply, the price will rise. If the supply exceeds demands, the price will fall. He noted that if there were a real labor shortage, the wages of farm workers would be rising. But that is not the case, he said. His study found that the average farm worker earns about $9.06 an hour, compared to $16.75 for non-farm production workers. Wages for farm workers increased only on-half of one percent a year on average between 2000 and 2006. If there were a shortage, wages would rise much more rapidly.
The same is true of the previous decade. Data from the National Agricultural Workers Survey found a slow rate of wage increase for farm workers. Between 1990 and 2001, NAWS reported that the average hourly earnings of non-farm production workers rose from $10.34 to $14.26, or 36 percent.
“These employment and earning data reported do not suggest severe farm labor shortages, especially not in the major fruit and vegetable producing states of California and Florida,” he concluded.
His study also found that there is little evidence that growers are offering workers any new non-wage benefits such as housing in an effort to keep them working on the farm.
“Indeed, as federal and state regulations raised standards for farm worker housing, many farmers stopped providing housing, especially for seasonal workers,” he reported. “If workers are readily available, farmers are less likely to offer what can be an expensive benefit.”
At the same time that the cost of farm labor was rising more slowly than that of non-farm production labor, the production of fruits and vegetables was increasing or remained steady. The study found that the production of non-citrus fruits rose from about 17 million tons in 2001-2002 to almost 19 million tons in 2006, while the products of vegetables remained stable at about 465 million hundredweights since 2001. He said that if farmers feared labor shortages, they would have planted fewer acres of crops.
Martin concluded that even if farm labor costs increased due to a smaller labor pool, the effects on consumer prices would be small.
“Labor cost comprise only 6 percent of the price consumers pay for fresh produce. thus, if farm wages were allowed to rise 40 percent, and if all the costs were passed on to consumers, the cost to the average household would be only about $8.00 per year,” he found.
Mechanization, Martin said, would likely offset any higher labor costs anway. He noted that after the “Bracero” Mexican guestworker program ended in the mid-1960’s, farm wages rose 40 percent, but consumer prices rose very little because the mechanization of harvesting some crops dramatically increased productivity.
Originally printed in “Middle American News“, December 2007
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