Despite economy, Americans don’t want farm work

Associated Press

VISALIA, Calif.

It’s a question rekindled by the recession: Are immigrants taking jobs away from American citizens? In the heart of the nation’s biggest farming state, the answer is a resounding no.

Government data analyzed by The Associated Press show most Americans don’t apply to harvest fruits and vegetables. And the few Americans who do usually don’t stay in the fields.

“It’s just not something that most Americans are going to pack up their bags and move here to do,” said farmer Steve Fortin, who pays $10.25 an hour to foreign workers to trim strawberry plants at his nursery near the Nevada border.

The AP analysis showed that, from January to June, California farmers posted ads for 1,160 farmworker positions open to U.S. citizens and legal residents. But only 233 people in those categories applied after learning of the jobs through unemployment offices in California, Texas, Nevada and Arizona.

One grower brought on 36. No one else hired any.

“It surprises me, too, but we do put the information out there for the public,” said Lucy Ruelas, who manages the California Employment Development Department’s agricultural- services unit.

Sometimes, U.S. workers will turn down the jobs because they don’t want their unemployment claims to be affected or because farm-labor positions do not begin for several months, Ruelas said.

Fortin spent $3,000 this year to make sure that domestic workers have first dibs on his jobs in the sparsely populated stretch of the state, advertising in newspapers and on an electronic job registry.

But he did not get any takers, even though he followed the requirements of a little-known, little-used program to bring in foreign farmworkers the legal way — by applying for guest- worker visas.

The California figures represent only a small part of the national effort to recruit domestic workers under the guest-worker program, but they provide a snapshot of how hard it is to get growers to use the program — and to attract Americans to farm labor, even in the San Joaquin Valley, where the average unemployment rate is 15.8 percent.