THE STATE (Columbia, South Carolina)

October 5, 2006

Seasonal worker supply dwindles for S.C. farms

By JASON RYAN

South Carolina farmers say they’ve been struggling with a dwindling supply of migrant labor for the past five years, endangering crops from not being picked.

Immigrants who traditionally trooped from harvest to harvest are taking better-paying jobs in landscaping and construction, farmers say. Fewer illegal workers are willing to enter the country and move within it because of the national focus on immigration and border enforcement.

“Seasonal migrant labor is definitely getting short,” said Chalmers Carr, owner of Titan Peach Farms in Edgefield County.

An estimated 55,000 undocumented immigrants lived in South Carolina in 2004, according to a study by the Pew Hispanic Center. The Census Bureau says 135,041 Hispanics live in the state, while other experts say the number could be as high as 500,000.

To guarantee Carr’s company picks the 37 million pounds he grows each year in Ridge Spring, Carr relies on a guest worker program that guarantees the 300 workers he needs during the peach season’s peak are available and legal. They usually have been from Mexico, he said.

But the program is difficult to comply with, Carr said.

The guest worker program requires hiring any interested Americans first, and it forces him to provide free housing and transportation for the workers and pay them $8.37 an hour — a comparatively high rate.

“By trying to do the right thing, I’m punished with having to pay a higher wage,” Carr said.

Farmers who rely on migrant labor face the labor shortages and risks that workers have provided fraudulent documentation, said Jim Griffin, national legislative coordinator for the S.C. Farm Bureau.

Griffin was meeting with congressional staffers Wednesday in Washington, lobbying for changes to the nation’s immigration laws, such as treating agricultural guest workers like those in the hospitality industry. Hospitality employers are not required to pay higher wages and provide free housing, Griffin said.

The loss of migrant workers to other industries has forced some costly changes at the farms.

“You either pick less or get a machine to do it,” said Dirk Burris, an office employee at Clayton Rawl Farms in Lexington, where crops are grown year-round.

But the cost and maintenance of a machine can make it difficult for small farmers to afford, Burris said.

Griffin said whatever changes are made to immigration law, the solution is not to seal off the country’s borders because few Americans are willing to take their place in fields.

“We’re going to have to import our agricultural workers or import our food,” Griffin said. “If we were to send all the migrants home today, we wouldn’t eat.”

Reach Ryan at (803) 771-8595.

WHO ARE THE WORKERS?

• According to the Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Survey, 53 percent of the hired crop labor force lacked authorization to work in the United States in 2001-02.

• Worker advocates and grower associations agree the actual figure is probably closer to 80 percent.

• Three-quarters of the hired farm work force in the United States was born in Mexico.

• More than 40 percent of crop workers were migrants, meaning they had traveled at least 75 miles in the previous year to get a farm job, the survey showed.