Arizona immigration law opens farm jobs to unemployed

by Jahna Berry and Michael Kiefer

For years, both sides of the immigration issue have debated whether immigrants take jobs that Americans won't.

Now, high unemployment and a tough new Arizona immigration law will test that idea in a $9 billion industry: Arizona agriculture.

Arizona needs about 50,000 temporary workers to harvest winter produce, and only 25,000 of those workers typically come from the U.S. side of the border, according to an Arizona farm lobby group.

At least some workers from past years say they won't be returning to Arizona this season.

At the same time, nearly 300,000 Arizona residents are unemployed after the worst economic downturn in generations.

So the agriculture industry is waiting to see if Americans will take what are typically immigrant jobs.

The same debate has long applied in other areas that rely heavily on immigrant labor, including the construction and hospitality industries. Changes will be difficult to track in those fields, because both have been slammed by the recession and there have been few job openings.

Farming, on the other hand, continues. Yuma growers will raise most of the lettuce that the country will eat this winter, but they won't be able to harvest it without farm workers.

Recruiting efforts are under way. A new federal registry is making it easier for job seekers to find information about temporary farm work.

But job seekers from metro areas, unfamiliar with agriculture, may be ill-prepared for the conditions and physical demands of the work.

Temporary workers

The temporary workers who head to Arizona's fields and ranches each year are a blend of legal guest workers, citizens and undocumented immigrants, Joe Sigg, director of government relations for the Arizona Farm Bureau.

Typically farmers get workers a combination of ways: through temporary-worker visas, also called H-2A visas, labor contractors and direct hiring. If a farm needs a lot of temporary workers, the farm hires a labor contractor to do the work and the contractor provides the workers.

For years farmers have had "a modified version of don't ask, don't tell" policy when it came to workers' immigration status, Sigg said.

The state's agriculture industry already had been under scrutiny because of Arizona's 2008 employer-sanctions law, which requires employers to verify that all new employees are eligible to work in the United States. Those who knowingly hire illegal immigrants could lose their business license.

The new immigration law, which is scheduled to take effect July 29, may discourage even more seasonal farm workers from returning to Arizona.

The law makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally. It states that an officer engaged in a lawful stop, detention or arrest shall, when practicable, ask about a person's legal status when reasonable suspicion exists that the person is in the U.S. illegally.

Skipping Yuma

Even if a farm worker is here legally, he or she could inadvertently draw attention to an undocumented loved one or co-worker, workers and activists said.

Two undocumented workers who usually come to Yuma to harvest lettuce said they aren't coming.

Hector Lopez, 28, is originally from Oaxaca, Mexico, but has worked in the U.S. for 10 years and lives in Salinas, Calif. Four months a year he harvests lettuce in Yuma, where he earns $10 an hour. But this year will be different, Lopez said.

"The truth is, I'm thinking of finding some other alternative because of the new law," he said.

"What I understand is that now police officers can take on the function of immigration and for whatever infraction, they can arrest you and check your immigration status," said Lopez, who said he earns $4,000 a season in Arizona.

Pastor Espinoza, 30, is originally from Sinaloa, Mexico, but he has lived in Salinas, Calif., for 12 years. He's also traveled to Arizona to pick lettuce and other crops four months a year.

"The way things are, I'm not going," Espinoza said. "The law is very harsh. Everyone here has heard about it and is talking about it, and it's in the news."

A tough job

If any job-seeking Arizonans try their hand at farm work this year, it will be eye-opening for the uninitiated.

As a high-school student, Phoenix defense attorney Otilia Diaz spent a few summers working on her father's farm near Parker.

She and her siblings picked honeydew with a crew of laborers. As a cutter, Diaz had to move quickly though the melon vines, harvesting fruit. Pickers then would take the melons and put them on a nearby truck's conveyor belt.

The attorney said that she's grateful for the life lessons that the job taught, but she still has back problems from those hours hunched over in the fields.

"It's brutal," she said with a laugh.

Farm workers say that it's not uncommon to work 10 to 12 hours a day, sometimes for as little as minimum wage, although job experience and competition for labor also increases pay.

Also farm work requires some expertise, Yuma grower John Boelts said.

"People like to refer to ag as unskilled labor - it's not," he said. "If I went to the center of Phoenix and I rounded up 20 people and I put them in a tractor for a day or harvesting lettuce, regardless of the physical demands of the job, half to a quarter would probably wash out because they're not attuned to that."

Entry level

Traditionally, U.S. workers haven't flocked to farm labor, but the historic economic downturn may change that.

Many Arizonans are now considering entry-level jobs that they would not have applied for during better times. Statewide unemployment is hovering just under 10 percent, and many have been jobless for a year or longer.

And for those who are eyeing farm work, it's now easier to find out who's hiring. Last week, the Department of Labor announced a national registry that lists temporary agriculture jobs, information that was once more difficult to get from a single source.

The listing, one of several H-2A program changes that took effect March 15, will give U.S. workers a chance to apply for jobs usually filled by immigrant guest workers with H-2A visas.

In Arizona, job fairs for harvest time agricultural jobs are usually held around September or October, but no Yuma dates have been set yet, according to Department of Economic Security officials.

"We are always interested in making sure that local workers are able to apply for jobs, if they are interested, before we are able to open them to foreign guest workers," said Joan Oates, an assistant secretary at the Department of Labor

Last year, there wasn't a huge trend of U.S. workers going after farm work, but the agency has heard anecdotally about jobless Americans, such as students, who are more interested in that temporary work, Oates said.

Boelts said that this week he got a call from a former employee who is a U.S. citizen, a child of Mexican immigrants, who quit his farm job several years ago to work in construction. Arizona builders have cut back drastically because of the recession.

"He said, 'Hey, do you have anything?' " Boelts said.

Global trade

When the employer-sanctions law took effect in 2008, it was hard to say whether or not it impacted farm labor, said Sigg.

Farmers feared they would lose laborers, but the law was enacted at the beginning of the recession, so they ended up planting less and hiring fewer people than they normally would have, Sigg said.

There may be few clear-cut answers after Arizona's new immigration law takes effect, either. The state's farmers are part of a global industry, and their fortunes are influenced by a complex web of conditions.

For example, growers face increasing competition from farms in Mexico. There, farmers have cheap labor, as well as improving irrigation, roads and food-handling methods.

For the past few seasons, many Arizona growers have planted fewer vegetables in reaction to many factors, including competition, fluctuating demand and labor worries, experts say.

About five years, ago there were about 200,000 acres of vegetables grown in the Yuma area and California's Imperial Valley combined, estimated Boelts, a former president of the Yuma County Farm Bureau. Today, that number is probably below 150,000, he said.

According to 2007 federal figures, the most recent available, 89,856 acres of vegetables were harvested in Yuma County.

So far, farm customers say that the labor supply is fairly normal, said Gene Peterson, a Wells Fargo senior vice president who handles Arizona agricultural issues for the bank.

Wells Fargo is the largest agricultural lender in the state and the largest in the country.

"That's kind of a wait-and-see," Peterson said of the law and how it is enforced. "How the law is enacted and how the labor supply responds to that."