In late 2007, Dr. Cesar Escalante began investigating the effects of the nation’s increasingly stricter immigration policies on smaller organic farmers — produce and grain growers—who lack the finances to either mechanize certain aspects of their business or hire federally recognized foreign guest workers.
Among the major findings from Escalante’s case studies is that as the supply of foreign labor, chiefly Latino undocumented immigrants, has diminished, about 67 percent of surveyed farmers in the five Southern states he targeted said they were having a hard time finding workers. These include two states being sued over their new immigration laws.
Continuing shortages, the study says, would result in a 5 percent to 10 percent increase in the price of commodities. Smaller farms, Escalante, a University of Georgia associate professor of agriculture and applied economics said, were more heavily reliant on their own families. In one case, a farming couple asked their two offspring to return home from college to help run the operation.
“There would come a point when they exhausted all members of their families and, yet, it was still not enough,” said Escalante, whose research was funded by the Southern Sustainable Agriculture and Education. “The general sentiment is that they all had difficulty finding what they called ‘motivated labor,’ people who would come to work and do the type of work that foreign laborers would do efficiently . . . even if some of them managed to offer higher wages.”
In some instances, farmers were indeed paying more, they told Escalante, whose “When the Seasonal Foreign Workers are Gone” appeared in the March issue of the Journal of American Society of Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers.
