Back immigrant food workers

By Lydia Zepeda

Tribune News Service

If there is one common language across the food system in America, from the fields to the dishwashing rooms, it is not English. It is Spanish.

Immigrants from Mexico and Central America are an integral part of U.S. agriculture. They work in food processing and slaughterhouses; they are milkers and cheesemakers; they prepare and serve food.

About 50 percent of all agricultural workers are undocumented, while 19 percent are immigrants authorized to work. Nearly three-quarters of all agricultural workers are from Mexico or Central America: 68 percent of all agricultural workers were born in Mexico and 6 percent in Central America. Mexicans and Central Americans were also 95 percent of the people rounded up and deported by the U.S. government in 2014.

Over and over again, I have heard farmers, business owners and restaurant owners say they cannot find American workers willing to work as hard as immigrants (or for as little pay, they always forget to add). Why, then, do they not advocate for immigration reform?

The answer can be found by comparing the minimum wage for an agricultural worker on an H2A visa to the wages of undocumented workers who often do the same jobs. Often the workers who are here illegally are paid substantially less than those here legally on an agricultural visa.

The median wage for crop farmworkers was $8.99 per hour in 2011, the most recent data. The H2A visa sets the minimum hourly wage for agricultural workers between $10 to $13.59 per hour depending on the state plus free housing and transportation to the worksite at no charge.

Furthermore, undocumented workers cannot organize, are unlikely to complain, and can be fired if they get injured on the job. So besides being cheaper to hire undocumented workers, employees can treat them however they like. While many employers do treat their workers well, the point is that they do not have to.

Hiring undocumented workers is in fact a systemic pattern and practice of agriculture and the food industry. When I tell people in the local food movement that I have spoken to undocumented workers who work at one of their favorite local food restaurants, they respond that “obviously” the owner or chef did not know they were undocumented.

Fundamentally, our food system depends on these immigrant workers. Our food system literally could not function without them. We need immigration reform that acknowledges and gives basic rights to the people who feed us.

Lydia Zepeda is a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s department of consumer science. She wrote this for Progressive Media Project.