The farmers who grow most of the nation's winter vegetable crop say they won't have enough workers -- legal or otherwise -- to harvest all the produce when the season hits high gear next month.
Growers in the winter farm belt that stretches east from California's arid Imperial Valley to Yuma County in Arizona will fill barely half the 50,000 field hand positions needed to gather the region's tons of ripening produce, according to Western Growers, a trade group whose members account for 90% of the nation's winter lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower and other vegetables.
"Come January, we could see lettuce rotting in the fields because there will be no one to pick it," said Jon Vessey, who farms 8,000 acres near El Centro.
Growers blame more frequent patrols and raids targeting illegal workers in agriculture, tighter border enforcement and the migration of undocumented workers to better paying or less physically demanding trades.
The effect on consumers, who rarely pay attention to the source of their produce, is negligible so far. But Tom Nassif, chief executive of Irvine-based Western Growers, said the squeeze threatened the continued availability of American-grown winter produce and the U.S. jobs of packers, farm equipment providers and industry suppliers.
The field hand shortage, also seen during other harvests this year, underscores the need for comprehensive immigration reform that includes an "effective" guest worker program that gives foreign citizens permission to work in the U.S. agriculture industry, Nassif said.
"Our crops are going to be harvested by a foreign workforce either here or somewhere else," Nassif said. "So are we going to export all the other jobs affiliated with farming just because we aren't willing to have a guest worker program?"
But the Capitol Hill lobbying efforts of Nassif and other Southwest agricultural interests -- they want at least a temporary guest worker program to see farmers through the coming harvest -- have run afoul of some Republicans and border control activists who view any guest worker program as a form of amnesty for illegal immigrants.
There are at least 6.3 million undocumented workers in the United States, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. As many as 8 in 10 farmworkers are illegal residents; "they all come with documents, but most of those documents turn out to be false," Nassif said. Other big employers of illegal workers include construction, where many former farmworkers have migrated because of higher wages, and the hotel and casino industry.
