Illegal Immigrant Crackdown Leads to Severe Agricultural Labor Shortage
Sweet Home Alabama
The Haitian Money-pit
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Squallid conditions of Immigrant Camps...
Immigrant Workers in the U.S. Labor Force
Debates about illegal immigration, border security, skill levels of workers, unemployment, job growth and competition, and entrepreneurship all rely, to some extent, on perceptions of immigrants’ role in the U.S. labor market. These views are often shaped as much by politics and emotion as by facts.
To better frame these debates, this short analysis provides data on immigrants in the labor force at the current time of slowed immigration, high unemployment, and low job growth and highlights eight industries where immigrants are especially vital.
The answers matter because our economy is dependent on immigrant labor now and for the future. The U.S. population is aging rapidly as the baby boom cohort enters old age and retirement. As a result, the labor force will increasingly depend upon immigrants and their children to replace current workers and fill new jobs. This analysis puts a spotlight on immigrant workers to examine their basic trends in the labor force and how these workers fit into specific industries and occupations of interest.
This data analysis primarily uses the 2010 Current Population Survey (CPS) to examine workers by nativity, but also uses Census data and the American Community Survey (ACS) in Figure 1. Both the CPS and ACS questionnaires identify immigrants by their birthplace, but not by their legal status. The terms foreign-born and immigrant are used interchangeably in this analysis to refer to anyone born outside the United States who was not a citizen at birth. This population includes naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents, temporary migrants (including H-1B workers and students), refugees, asylum seekers, and, to the extent to which they are counted, unauthorized immigrants.
Milking cows is a dirty, monotonous job, and as we found out in our latest episode of Immigrant America, it's not a job many unemployed Americans are willing to do. But for some reason the government doesn't give dairy farms a way to recruit foreign workers legally, so most feel forced to hire illegal immigrants. This makes the farms and their workers easy targets for immigration authorities looking to fill deportation quotas.
We went to upstate New York to try to understand the cat and mouse game going on between dairy farms and immigration authorities. We found a lot of wasted taxpayer money, racial profiling, and a broken system that unnecessarily treats family farmers and hardworking immigrants like criminals.
Following the passage of Alabama's strict immigration law, which has caused thousands of undocumented immigrants to flee the state due to fears of deportation, farmers are suffering from a labor shortage that they say won't be filled by unemployed American citizens
Farmers in Alabama and other parts of the country often must rely on undocumented immigrants for labor because they say Americans aren't willing to commit themselves to strenuous, low-paying jobs that immigrants are willing to perform -- and well. Alabama passed its law, widely considered to be the toughest in the nation, in June. Although it was immediately challenged by the Obama administration, a federal appeals court ultimately upheld most of the measure.
While Alabama politicians who support the law -- which allows law enforcement to detain suspected undocumented immigrants who have been lawfully stopped and prohibits state courts from enforcing contracts involving illegal immigrants, among other provisions -- claim over time more Americans will fill the jobs left vacant by illegal aliens, those in the agricultural industry don't agree. At a hearing that attracted more than 100 people to the Blount County Agri-Business Center on Thursday night, The Birmingham News reports that farmers explained to government officials that it has been difficult to harvest their crops due to a severe labor shortage.
Multiple farmers pointed out that immigrant laborers offer work far harder than the Alabama citizens that the immigration law requires them to employ in their stead. Jeremy Calvert, a farmer in Bremen, said he is offended when he hears other state residents refer to him and other farmers as un-American because they rely on immigrant labor. The 80 percent of people are being fed by the 1 percent of us, he told the audience.
Multiple farmers who have spoken to the press have expressed similar grievances. I've had people calling me wanting to work, Keith Smith, a potato farmer, told The Associated Press. I haven't turned any of them down, but they're not any good. It's hard work, they just don't work like the Hispanics with experience.
Wayne Smith, a tomato farmer, told the AP that he has never been able to keep a staff of American workers in his 25 years of farming. People in Alabama are not going to do this, said Smith. They'd work one day and then just wouldn't show up again. Jerry Spencer of Grow America -- a company that purchases and sells locally owned produce -- told the source that a crew of four Hispanic workers can earn $150 each by picking 250 to 300 boxes of tomatoes in a day. Meanwhile, a crew of 25 Americans recently picked 200 boxes in all, earning about $24 a piece.
Alabama is not alone. Several states with harsh immigration laws, including Georgia, have also been hit with a severe shortage of agricultural laborers. A study released by the University of Georgia earlier this month that the labor shortage is expected to cost the Georgia economy $391 million this year, while resulting in the loss of more than 3,000 jobs As a result in the shortage of skilled workers, farmers say they are being forced to downsize or allow crops to die on the vine.
Alabama State Rep. Jeremy Oden told The Birmingham News that he does not regret voting in favor of the bill, despite the resulting labor shortage. However, he said he is open to modifying the legislation by creating a temporary worker program. Two new bills introduced to the U.S. Congress would reform the way the agricultural industry hires temporary workers. One measure, introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Tex., would modify the existing federal H-2A temporary agricultural visa program to allow about 500,000 seasonal workers a year into the country. The other bill, introduced by Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif., would create a new visa category for agricultural workers and allow for their admission into the U.S. for 10 months in any 12-month period.
In-depth look at Alabama after harsh 2011 anti-immigrant bill
“Them Hispanics work hard as hell,” Jesse Durr tells Vice correspondent Thomas Morton during a segment of Friday’s new episode titled “Sweet Home Alabama.” Durr was one of the few people in Alabama who took on one of the thousands of agricultural jobs that undocumented immigrants left vacant after 2011, when the state’s governor signed the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, or HB56, into law.
The law intended to make life so difficult for undocumented immigrants in Alabama that they would have to leave the state or the country. Morton started reporting in January 2014 and spent the next six months checking in on the small independent farmers featured in the latest episode of Vice. What Morton found was that three years after the law’s passage, few officials, including the law’s sponsors and those who voted for it, were willing to stand by the laws harsh provisions. But the Albertville Police Department, Morton found, had not wavered in its enforcement of the law as other departments had done.
Morton interviews the police chief Doug Pollard during the segment. “From his perspective, the law was about stopping the terrorist and drug dealers from crossing the border, so he’s still parroting that line,” Morton said. “It’s a little sad that this didn’t have the effect they wanted.” As for the time he spent interacting with undocumented workers, Morton said he noted an added motivation among the migrants.
“They felt like they had a political awakening. They came here for purely economic reasons. They came to just do work,” Morton said. “As a result of feeling targeted, they were very outspoken and ready to seek us out.” Morton did not gain access to some of the biggest chicken processing plants in the area because most are owned by poultry giants like Tyson. The divide between corporate-owned and independent farms was another aspect of the agribusiness that Morton said he could point out. The independent farmers, Morton said, were also keen on speaking out about their needs and the lack of available migrant laborers.
“They’re on the tail end career of four years of frustration and haven’t been able to figure out making a living by doing what they did,” Morton said. The passage of the law was something of a legislative tantrum, Morton said. After speaking to several legislators, he found that one of the main reasons the law had support was because the law polled well with Alabama voters. Morton said the Alabama case is a clear example of the backlash than can come from taking rash actions on immigration and that he hopes immigration hardliners will take a step back and look at the potentially negative economic and social effects.
“I think it’s very easy for the people who don’t meet immigrants to think of them as a giant faceless mass that is eating up resources and stealing jobs,” Morton said. “I would say that 99 percent of them are people with good intentions who have struggled so much just to have these small opportunities.”
In the spring of 2011, as Alabama lawmakers debated some of the harshest anti-immigration bills in the country, a monstrous twister ripped through the town of Tuscaloosa, flattening neighborhoods and killing 64 people. Everyone needed help—but many of the city's Latino residents stayed cowered in their homes, afraid of being thrown in jail if they emerged to seek food or shelter. Disaster workers were stunned by the reaction, suggesting that it might be a sign of what was in store if Republicans passed the pending legislation.
But within weeks, immigrants weren't just hiding—they were fleeing. The law, Alabama's HB 56, had passed in a landslide vote, and the state had quickly become hostile territory for anyone even suspected of being a foreigner. Officially titled the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, the law targeted immigrants—primarily Latinos—everywhere: in school, at work, in church, and on the street. Cops were not only allowed but required to demand immigration papers from anyone they suspected might be undocumented, and to hold him or her in jail until the individuals proved they had papers. Teachers could ask students about their legal status. HB 56 made it a crime to employ, house, or even give rides to undocumented individuals, effectively criminalizing any contact with illegal immigrants in the state.
Within a year, between 40,000 and 80,000 Latinos had bolted the state, according to a study by the University of Alabama's Center for Business and Economic Research, costing the state up to $10.8 billion in lost income and tax revenues. In the fourth season of VICE on HBO, correspondent Thomas Morton traveled to Alabama to see the effects of the state's so-called "self-deportation" policy firsthand, visiting towns and farms that have dried up in the absence of cheap undocumented labor.
Faced with a backlash from the state's business community—and a federal court ruling that declared many of the law's provisions unconstitutional—Alabama lawmakers had more or less given up on HB 56. That is, until Donald Trump came roaring into the state, telling a crowd of 30,000 ecstatic supporters in Mobile this August that he'd use HB 56-style tactics to drive undocumented immigrants out of the country entirely. The Republican frontrunner has devoted much of his campaign to this type of heated anti-immigration rhetoric, promising to end birthright citizenshipand create a "deportation force" to round up all 11 million illegal immigrants living in the US.
The message seems to be working: A poll conducted by Alabama's News 5 last week showed Trump with 40 percent support among Republican voters. To find out why people would continue to support policies that had demonstrably failed in their own state, we talked to Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute's office at NYU School of Law.
What Donald Trump Can Learn from Alabama’s Failed Anti-Immigration Law
The state's experiment in "self-deportation" reveals what might happen if the US sent 11 million undocumented workers home.
VICE: Alabama isn't the only state that has passed anti-immigration legislation. Why did the state face such a strong backlash? Muzaffar Chishti: Alabama was one of five states that passed broad omnibus immigration legislation that covered a swath of territory, that had police stop people on the street and penalized people for hiring undocumented individuals or renting them accommodations. [But] Alabama got more attention for a variety of reasons. It was the most far reaching and for a brief period the court did allow many of the provisions to go forward, whereas many other states' provisions were blocked. The provision that was particularly problematic was having teachers ask kids their immigration status. Some people stopped sending their kids to school, and kids started getting more teased in school. Then there was a section [of HB 56] about transactions—that [undocumented immigrants] cannot apply for electricity, a water meter, or for a mobile home. Anything that included a transaction was banned for an unauthorized worker, so that obviously had a lot of effect in people's daily life.
You were involved in the lawsuit to block HB 56. What was your side's argument?
We based it on constitutional law violations. A cop cannot ask a citizen for papers—that's an invasion of their constitutional right. The cops were asking people for papers on the grounds of their looks, based on racial profiling. It's a huge social problem, and it violates the 14th amendment.
How has Alabama been impacted economically?
A significant amount of people left the state, and the industries affected the most adversely were agriculture, hospitality, and some construction. Either people went to a neighboring state, or some became independent contractors because the immigration law only applies to employees. When people left the state it reduced the tax base—sales tax, income tax, and overall revenue. Investment went down. People do not want to invest in a state that is perceived to be hostile to immigrants in general.
Given that experience, can you explain why Donald Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric is resonating with Alabamans?
It seems like there's a disconnect there.
The reason these anti-immigrant laws are so popular, and that he is so popular, is that people have anxiety about their economic wellbeing. and they are feeling anxiety about their cultural identity. They see that their state and cultural communities are changing and that is unnerving for people. In the past 20 years, the patterns of immigration settlement have changed in a big way, so parts of the country like Alabama suddenly had a large number of immigrants.
Trump says he can fix that.
Would it be possible implement something like HB 56 on a national level?
There's no specificity in Donald Trump's statements. He makes broad statements that we should throw out all these undocumented workers, but that's a slogan—not a provision or law. Meanwhile, Trump has no idea how many unauthorized people work for him. If all undocumented people stopped working for Trump, his casinos would probably stop operating--that's the nature of our labor market. He knows immigrants are hugely important to our economy.
So why does he want to deport them?
These are feel good provisions, playing to people's anxieties and fears, but they are very difficult to implement in reality. They're unconstitutional. If you went into any neighborhood, how would you know who was unauthorized? Also, we already have a law that says employers should not hire unauthorized workers. We don't have the ability to enforce the laws we already have. His immigration rhetoric does not work in the real world. The laws come in conflict with the Constitution, with the economic needs of the state, and against our values.
Inside the Squalid Living Conditions for the Migrants Building Trump International Golf Club in Dubai
That Friday, April 22, HBO would air a new episode from season four of our Emmy-winning show. Last week, week before - we met the clean energy pioneers helping to solve climate change. This week, VICE investigates the living conditions for workers building the Trump International Golf Club in Dubai and China's massive business investments in Africa.
The United Arab Emirates, and Dubai in particular, are often described as paradise in the Middle East. But the 5 million migrants working there, who make up more than half of the population, live in appalling conditions and often end up with no savings after years of work. VICE's Ben Anderson heads to Dubai to investigate the living conditions for the many migrant workers employed on a project bearing the name of a man who might be our next president.
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