This country has always had a hypocritical relationship with the undocumented workers who keep America's agriculture, construction, and hospitality industries running.
On the one hand, we simply cannot function without them. On the other hand, xenophobic politicians stoke fear and distrust of workers at lower economic levels when it serves their purposes.
And voters, who can be angry about all kinds of things, often find it easier to blame outsiders for problems they have nothing to do with, like inflation.
But we cannot fool ourselves: President-elect Donald Trump's promise to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible threatens devastating consequences for the country's economy, for prices and for the people who come to this country to pick our fruits and vegetables. to build our houses and wash our dishes.
California, where some economists estimate that half of our 900,000 farmworkers are undocumented, would be especially hard hit.
Joe Del Bosque, 75, has grown melons, almonds and asparagus on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley for decades. During the harvest season, its employee staff can swell to up to 200 workers, none of whom are native and white. Some of its workers have lived in the United States with “temporary protected status” for years, some have green cards, and the rest have been able to provide documents that satisfy minimum federal requirements.
“Many of these jobs in agriculture are not wanted by American citizens,” Del Bosque told me Wednesday. “And I don't blame them. “It is hard work in extreme conditions that many people do not want to do for any salary.”
Plus, he said, the work is seasonal. Farm workers wander from one crop to another depending on the time of year.
“The people who do it go from one farm to another,” Del Bosque said. “Who can make a living in this country with a three-month job? “It's not easy.”
The prospect of widespread immigration raids and deportations has sent shivers through farmworkers and their bosses, many of whom remember when job shortages left produce rotting in the fields just 10 years ago.
“We need to come together and agree that we need some type of immigration reform, especially for essential workers,” Del Bosque said. “They provide food to the country. There is nothing more essential than that.”
In the mid-1980s, when he managed melon fields, federal government pilots flew small planes over the state's farmland in search of large crews of workers, he recalled. The pilots would radio information about the workers to the field, where vans full of immigration agents would raid the farms to, as Del Bosque put it, “capture as many as they could.”
A raid he witnessed ended in tragedy. Two of the farmworkers fleeing the feds jumped into an aqueduct at the edge of the field and attempted to swim away.
“One didn't make it,” Del Bosque said. “He drowned on the spot. They took him out and he had already died. I remember they had a hearing in Merced and several of us came to testify about what happened. But I don't think anything came of it.”
Human Rights Watch reported that between 1974 and 1986, 15 migrant farm workers were known to have drowned in Central Valley canals during immigration raids. Immigrant rights groups accused Border Patrol agents of deliberately driving workers into irrigation canals, which they used as barriers to prevent escape.
Border Patrol vehicles at the time did not carry lifesaving equipment, which “suggested callousness, if not criminal negligence,” Human Rights Watch argued. In 1984, Border Patrol officials belatedly announced that agents would have to wear life-saving equipment when working near rivers and canals.
Without a doubt, this country's immigration system is broken. It is illegal to hire undocumented workers, but employers do it anyway because they cannot function without this human capital. With rare exceptions, the government looks the other way. In fact, the chances of an employer facing an inspection by immigration authorities, my colleague Don Lee recently wrote, “are even lower than the chances of a taxpayer being audited by the Internal Revenue Service.”
Lee's story focused on E-Verify, the computer program that allows employers to check a potential employee's legal status easily, almost instantly and for free.
The problem, as Lee reported, is that most employers don't use it. They simply I don't want to know that the workers are here illegally; They desperately need labor.
The summer I graduated high school, my sister got me a job waiting tables with her at a restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills. The restaurant, Pages, was a sort of upscale restaurant, with a long counter, a pastry case, and tables by a picture window in the front.
From time to time, we would hear a commotion in the kitchen as the Spanish-speaking men working in the kitchen would warn each other that “the migration” – immigration authorities – were on their way. This was long before cell phones; I don't know who told them.
From inside the restaurant, the boys would climb to the roof, wait for “everything to be clear,” and then return to bussing tables, washing dishes, and cooking. Those who were detained and deported would soon return to work after sneaking across the border, which was much more porous before President Reagan's amnesty in 1986, along with stricter border enforcement. Bosses who encouraged and tolerated such attempts to evade the feds generally faced no repercussions.
It was a ritual dance, almost useless, except that it was disruptive and terrifying.
And it will continue unless and until Congress rectifies our incredible hypocrisy about undocumented immigrants by reforming the immigration system. It might be in Trump's best interest to continue demonizing them, but it's definitely not in our best interest.
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