The implications of immigration legislation for U.S. agriculture have been a subject of interest for scholars and policymakers for several decades. The U.S. farm industry spends an average of 17% of its total variable production costs on hired labor. Certain farm sectors are even more labor-intensive such as vegetable, nursery, and fruit farms with hired labor expense shares of 35%, 46%, and 48%, respectively (Zahniser et al., 2012). The National Agricul tural Workers Survey from the U.S. Department of Labor indicates that, over the last 15 years, about half of agricultural crop farm workers have been undocumented (Carroll, Georges and Saltz, 2011). Most efforts to regulate immigration in the Unit ed States have been at the federal level. However, since 2003, the nation has experienced a surge of enforcement efforts at the state and sub-state levels. Pham and Van (2010) discuss the legal and economic significance of such decentralization. For agriculture, this is unchartered territory; previous enforcement efforts at the federal level have typically employed a balanced approach, whereby measures that reduce labor were counterbalanced by measures that provide agriculture special consideration. For example, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) imposed new sanctions on employers who knowingly hired undocumented workers and approved steps to provide legal status to around 3 million illegal workers. Due to the high reliance of agriculture on immigrant workers, IRCA also took measures designed to give special consideration for farm labor. It revised the H-2 guest worker program, which provides work visas to a limited number of immigrants (66,000 in 2013), to establish the H-2A agricultural guest worker program with no numerical limits. States and counties have newfound authority on enforcement, but little control over other tools for regulating immigration (e.g., the H2A-program), making it harder for them to follow a balanced approach.
[1]
J. Taylor,et al.
The End of Farm Labor Abundance
,
2012,
The Farm Labor Problem.
[2]
Shirley Leyro.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
,
2015
.
[3]
C. Escalante,et al.
The Impact of Immigration Enforcement on the U.S. Farming Sector
,
2014
.
[4]
E. Parrado.
Immigration Enforcement Policies, the Economic Recession, and the Size of Local Mexican Immigrant Populations
,
2012
.
[5]
Philip Martin.
Immigration and Farm Labor: What Next?
,
2012
.
[6]
Peter B. Dixon,et al.
Immigration Policy and its Possible Effects on U.S. Agriculture and the Market for Hired Farm Labor: A Simulation Analysis
,
2012
.
[7]
Jeffrey Passel,et al.
Net Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero—and Perhaps Less
,
2012
.
[8]
C. Escalante,et al.
When the Seasonal Foreign Farm Workers are Gone
,
2011
.
[9]
Nclr,et al.
The Impact of Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act on the Latino Community
,
2010
.
[10]
Van H. Pham,et al.
The Economic Impact of Local Immigration Regulation: An Empirical Analysis
,
2010
.