Wall Street Journal

January 24, 2005

LABOR DEPARTMENT ENDS SURVEY OF MIGRANT FARM-WORKER STATUS

By Miriam Jordan

The U.S. Department of Labor has suspended the only national survey that collects detailed data on employment, health and living conditions of migrant and seasonal farm workers.

The move has caused concern among some policy makers and scholars, who say the survey has documented the rapid growth of immigrant labor in the agriculture industry.  Based on interviews with thousands of laborers, the National Agricultural Workers Survey gathered data that helped the federal government allocate funds to health, education and social programs in rural areas for nearly two decades.

Among the survey’s key findings is that the U.S. is increasingly dependent on illegal immigrants to harvest its crops.  More than half of all crop workers in the country are illegal immigrants, up from just 12% in 1990, according to the latest farm workers’ survey.  The agricultural industry employs about 2.5 million people, whose average annual family income is $10,000 to $12,000.

With immigration such a hot-button issue, some agricultural scholars saw political overtones in the decision. “If somebody doesn’t like that result, one way not to show it is by canceling the survey,” said Phil Martin, professor of agricultural economics at the University of California, Davis.

The farm worker survey was an outgrowth of the Immigration reform and Control Act of 1986 that legalized three million illegal immigrants, including farm workers.  It was created to monitor farm-labor supply in response to concern in the agricultural industry that the amnesty might create a shortage of workers because legal immigrants might seek higher-paying jobs in other sectors.

A representative for the Department of Labor said the survey had been suspended because the congressional mandate to conduct it had expired in 1993 and that the data were mainly benefiting other government departments or agencies, such as Health and Human Services and Education.  Veronica Stidvent, assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Labor, added that “transferring [the survey] to another agency that uses the data to a greater extent is an option we will explore.”

The survey cost the Department of Labor about $2 million a year, according to people close to Aguirre International, a Burlingame, Calif., firm that conducted it and that received a notice to suspend the survey about a week ago.

Until introduction of the survey, little was known about the farmworker population of the U.S., agriculture researchers say.   Surveyors are deployed into the fields three times a year to track wages, migration patterns, English fluency and housing, among other things.  The federal government, which spends nearly $1 billion each year in programs for migrant workers, uses the data to decide how to allocate funds to schools, clinics and nonprofit groups in rural areas.

“Twenty years ago, pathetically little was know about farm workers in the U.S.,” said Rob Williams, executive director of Florida Legal Services, a public-interest law firm.  At a time when new immigration laws are being debated, “the survey could help see the impact of new policies on the agricultural workplace,” Mr. Williams said.