In the wake of Alabama’s passage of a stringent new immigration law, HB 56, earlier this year, immigrants, both documented and undocumented, have been fleeing the state in droves. Not surprisingly, the effect of this exodus has already proved crippling to businesses throughout the state that rely on flexible migrant labor, especially farms. In Alabama, all employers are now required to verify their employees’ legal status to work in this country, using the federal E-Verify system. Now, as the harvest season is reaching its peak in the state, many farm owners are reporting that there is nobody left to pick the year’s crops.
Alabama farmers are reporting that the majority of their pickers left the state even before the official enactment last week of HB 56, choosing to seek employment in Florida instead, where they can live and work with less danger. Despite arguments that, during a time when unemployment in the state stands at around ten percent, the law would open up jobs to U.S. citizens, farmers argue that few legal U.S. workers are stepping in to the open positions, and of those who do, only a handful continue to show up to work after a few days.
Arizona experienced a very similar worker shortage last year after the passage of the state’s own immigration bill, SB 1070. As workers rapidly drained from the state, many Arizona farms went untended. The state’s number one cash crop, lettuce, was hit especially hard by the worker shortage. In fact, a nationwide lettuce shortage last winter was blamed in part on SB 1070 and the resulting effect on migrant labor.
At least one state whose agricultural industry is heavily dependent on migrant labor has openly addressed the importance of these workers to its economy. Last year California approved a twenty year plan for sustaining the state’s farms titled AgVision 2030. The plan explicitly acknowledges the importance of immigrant labor to the state, and seeks overtime to promote immigrant friendly policies, including decriminalizing undocumented farm labor, providing farm workers with access to health care and education, and ending immigration raids on California farms. As seventy-five percent of the state’s agricultural labor force is foreign born, the state realizes that the only practical way to protect California’s farms is to permit and even legitimize these workers.
As immigration laws similar to those which have passed in Alabama and Arizona are poised to sweep much of the nation in the next few years, one can reasonably expect that we may be in for a nationwide produce crisis in the near future. Unless states follow in California’s footsteps and begin to acknowledge our economy’s reliance on migrant workers, the number of fields left untended is likely only to rise with each coming harvest season.
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