This country has always had a hypocritical relationship with the undocumented workers who keep America's agricultural, construction and hospitality industries running.
On the one hand, we simply cannot function without them. On the other hand, xenophobic politicians incite fear and distrust of workers at the lowest levels of the economy when it suits their purposes.
And voters who are angry about all sorts of things often find it easier to blame outsiders for problems they have nothing to do with, such as inflation.
But we can't kid ourselves: President-elect Donald Trump's promise to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible threatens to have devastating consequences for the country's economy, for prices and for the people who come to this country for our fruit and picking vegetables and building our houses and washing our dishes.
California, where some economists estimate that half of our 900,000 farm workers are undocumented, would be particularly hard hit.
Joe Del Bosque, 75, has been growing melons, almonds and asparagus on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley for decades. During harvest season, its employment roster can grow to as many as 200 workers, none of whom are native-born and white. Some of his workers lived in the United States with “temporary protection statusSome have had green cards for years and the rest have been able to provide them Documents that meet minimum federal requirements.
“Many of these agricultural jobs are not wanted by American citizens,” Del Bosque told me on Wednesday. “And I don’t blame them. It’s hard work in extreme conditions out there that many people don’t want to do at any cost.”
Plus, he said, the work is seasonal. Agricultural workers move from field to field depending on the season.
“The people who do this go from one farm to another,” Del Bosque said. “Who can make a living in this country with a three-month job? It is not easy.”
The prospect of widespread raids and deportations of immigrants has given farm workers and their bosses chills. Many of them still remember how the lack of jobs resulted in produce rotting in the fields just ten years ago.
“We need to come together and agree that we need some form of immigration reform, especially for essential workers,” Del Bosque said. “They provide the country with food. It couldn’t be more essential.”
He recalled that in the mid-1980s, when he was farming melon fields, federal government pilots flew small planes over the state's farmland looking for large crews of workers. The pilots radioed information about the workers to the ground, where vans full of immigration agents were storming farms to, as Del Bosque put it, “capture as many as possible.”
A robbery he witnessed ended in tragedy. Two of the farm workers, fleeing police, jumped into an aqueduct at the edge of the field and tried to swim away.
“One didn’t make it,” Del Bosque said. “He drowned on the spot. They pulled him out and he died. I remember they had a hearing in Merced and several of us came to testify about what happened. But I don’t think anything ever came of it.”
Human Rights Watch reported that between 1974 and 1986, 15 immigrant farmworkers drowned in the Central Valley canals during immigration raids. Immigrant rights groups accused Border Patrol agents of intentionally driving workers toward irrigation canals that they used as barriers to prevent escapes.
Border patrol vehicles at the time were not carrying life-saving equipment, which “suggested callousness, if not criminal negligence,” Human Rights Watch argued. In 1984, Border Patrol officials belatedly announced that officers would be required to carry life-saving equipment when working near rivers and canals.
Without question, this country's immigration system is broken. It is illegal to hire undocumented workers, but employers do it anyway because they cannot operate without this human capital. With rare exceptionsthe government looks the other way. In fact, an employer's likelihood of being subject to an immigration inspection is “even lower than a taxpayer's likelihood of being audited by the Internal Revenue Service,” my colleague Don Lee recently wrote.
Lee's story focused on E-Verify, the computerized program that allows employers to easily, almost immediately and free of charge verify the legal status of a prospective employee.
The problem, as Lee reported, is that most employers don't use it. You just doesn't want to know that workers are here illegally; They urgently need workers.
The summer I graduated high school, my sister got me a job as a waitress at a restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills. Pages Restaurant was a sort of upscale diner with a long counter, a cake box, and booths along a picture window at the front.
Every now and then we would hear a commotion in the kitchen as the Spanish speaking men working in the kitchen warned each other, “the migration“ – the immigration authorities – were on their way. This was long before cell phones; I don't know who gave them the tip.
From inside the restaurant, the boys climbed onto the roof, waited for the all-clear, and then went right back to the tables, washing dishes and cooking. Those who were arrested and deported soon returned to work after secretly sneaking back across the border, which was much more porous before President Reagan's 1986 amnesty and tighter border control. Bosses who encouraged and tolerated such attempts to evade the government generally faced no consequences.
It was a ritualistic, almost pointless dance – except it was annoying and creepy as hell.
And it will continue until Congress corrects our incredible hypocrisy toward undocumented immigrants by reforming the immigration system. It may be in Trump's interest to continue demonizing them, but it's certainly not in ours.
blue sky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Topics: @rabcarian