America's Voice Blog

Posted 07/16/10 at 12:02pm By Maribel Hastings

SB 1070 and the Harvest: Reaping What They Sow?

What does Arizona law SB 1070 have to do with the lettuce crop in Yuma? At first glance, not a lot. But when the harvest season for lettuce and other vegetables comes around in November, that could change.

If SB 1070 is implemented, many farmworkers without legal immigration status—or with it—could decide not to go to Arizona out of fear, causing growers to face a shortage of field hands. This, in turn, would affect the amount of vegetables that can be harvested, and ultimately their prices to consumers.

“This could have a tremendous impact on all the fruits and vegetables that are normally harvested in Arizona from November through February. This is the area and season where more vegetables are grown than anywhere else in the United States. It’s important that we have enough workers to do the work,” United Farm Workers (UFW) president Arturo Rodríguez told America’s Voice.

Last week, Rodríguez appeared on the satirical news program The Colbert Report to promote the “Take Our Jobs” campaign, which challenges anyone who thinks undocumented immigrant farmworkers are taking jobs from Americans to sign up to work the fields themselves. The campaign promotes the AgJOBS bill to legalize farmworkers.

More than 60% of the 2.5 million agricultural workers in the United States are undocumented.

“Five thousand people have shown interest in getting information, but only three are currently working in the fields. The rest, once they found out about the working conditions, decided not to do it,” Rodriguez said.

“One man sent us an email saying: ‘I want a guarantee that I will be paid $1200 a week.’ That’s impossible. No one makes that much working in the fields,” he added.

Click here to read more.
Posted 07/09/10 at 12:40pm By Jackie Mahendra

Coming to a Farm Near You: Steven Colbert?

That's right, you heard me. Stephen Colbert has accepted the United Farm Workers' creative challenge to Americans of all stripes to head out to the fields and try their hands at picking fruit, if they want their danged jobs back so badly.

The campaign details are over at TakeOurJobs.org, where would-be farmworkers get matched with struggling growers and immigrant trainers.

Watch Colbert's segment and see UFW's Arturo Rodriguez explain what the campaign is all about, as well as how to say "Yes We Can-wich" in Spanish. (You won't want to miss that).

The Take Our Jobs campaign has received tons of media attention for the way it directly challenges the oft-repeated claim that immigrants are simply "taking American jobs" instead of contributing to and strengthening our economy and our food security.

A couple recent headlines: Colbert teams up with UFW over immigration (AP), Farmers Tackle Immigration Issues (Miriam Jordan, Wall Street Journal), Farmworkers to Colbert: Immigration worries? Work in fields (Dylan Smith, Tucson Sentinel).

It's even spawned DIY-videos and tales of bloggers (like The Unapologetic Mexican) and journalists (like Teresa Puente) heading out to the fields to take on anti-immigrant rhetoric.

The Tucson Sentinel's Dylan Smith writes: 

The "Take Our Jobs" site asks interested parties to supply their name and area code to streamline the hiring process. It cautions, however, that "duties may include tilling the soil, transplanting, weeding, thinning, picking, cutting, sorting & packing of harvested produce. May set up & operate irrigation equip. Work is performed outside in all weather conditions (Summertime 90+ degree weather) & is physically demanding requiring workers to bend, stoop, lift & carry up to 50 lbs on a regular basis."

Click here to read more.
Posted 06/24/10 at 04:30pm By Jackie Mahendra

United Farm Workers Wants YOU… To Come Take Their Jobs?

That’s right, the United Farm Workers (UFW) have commenced what they are calling the “Take Our Jobs” campaign, an unprecedented effort to call attention to the importance of immigrant workers to our food supply -- and the difficulties agricultural employers have in maintaining a stable, legal workforce.  As UFW highlights on their campaign website:

“We are a nation in denial about our food supply."

Watch a farm worker slideshow from their site:

 

According to Marisa Treviño at Latina Lista:

The idea behind it all is to highlight the need for a legal workforce which can only be achieved through immigration reforms -- without which the domestic agricultural industry could be crippled, leading to more jobs moving off shore.

In a letter to U.S. lawmakers, UFW offers farm workers who are "ready to train citizens and legal residents who wish to replace immigrants in the fields," and encourages Members of Congress to refer their constituents to vacant farm worker positions.

It’s clear that undocumented farm workers are the backbone of United States agriculture. They make up the majority of workers in this crucial industry, yet many of these workers have no way to normalize their status – they often live in fear of exploitation and deportation. These workers and their advocates have been asking Congress for years to fix what most everyone agrees is an outdated, ineffective, and inhumane immigration system.

Click here to read more.
Posted 02/12/10 at 05:05pm By Jackie Mahendra

New Farm Worker Rules, Debating the Immigration Dip, and Old Healthcare Myths (Die Hard)

As the week draws to a close, and Washington digs itself out of Snomageddon 2010, here are a couple of key developments on immigration.

Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis announced a set of new farm worker rules, including the rollback of a 2008 Bush-era reversal in labor oversight for agricultural workers in the United States. The measure was promptly heralded as a victory by many farmworker advocates, including the United Farm Workers (UFW):

The new rules would also remedy cutbacks in labor protections and restore the requirement that U.S. workers be hired before foreign laborers are imported, a protection weakened under the Bush regulations.

As reported by the New York Times:

Many of the new measures restore previous procedures for the program, known as H-2A for the type of visa that foreign workers receive, after the rules were changed in the last days of the Bush administration. Farm worker organizations strongly objected to those changes, arguing they had rapidly lowered wages for American agricultural laborers.

It's clear that these new rules are a step in the right direction toward protecting vulnerable workers. More is needed, however, which is why farm worker advocates continue to push for comprehensive immigration reform. To that effect, UFW's President, Arturo S. Rodriguez, cautions:

"We now must focus on addressing the nation's agricultural labor supply through legislation, such as the bipartisan, broadly-backed AgJOBS bill, that would let farm workers currently laboring in the United States legally stay by continuing to work in agriculture."

The Wall Street Journal quotes growers' associations that believe "the new rules didn't address the problems farmers face finding seasonal help." According to the New York Times:

While sharply divided over the new rules, growers and farm workers agreed that the Obama administration should press Congress to pass legislation overhauling the immigration system. Most versions of that legislation include a bill that creates a new guest worker program that all sides in agriculture have long supported.

"AGJobs" is a key component of comprehensive immigration reform that both farm worker advocates and growers insist cannot wait any longer. 

In other news, according to a new study released by the Department of Homeland Security this week, the unauthorized immigrant population in the U.S. has dropped sharply (about 7 percent) over the past two years, for the first time in three decades. It has gone from approximately 11.6 to about 10.8 million.

Click here to read more.
Posted 01/14/10 at 04:12pm By Marjorie Valbrun

A Maribel Hastings Exclusive: The Key Players in Immigration Reform

The immigration reform movement is more sophisticated than ever, encompassing a greater diversity of support among various sectors of American society.  As the immigration debate heats up this year, America’s Voice today releases a special report, “Immigration Reform: Know the Players,” providing an indispensable reference for anyone following the issue of immigration reform.

The series, which was originally published in Spanish on MaribelHastings.com in eight thematic installments, provides background information, statistics, and other detailed information on the roles played in the urgent battle for reform by the following groups of supporters: law enforcement; undocumented students; anti-immigrant groups; the pro-immigrant movement; faith communities; farmers and agricultural laborers; business and labor interests; and, of course, the main actors: the White House, Senate and House of Representatives.

Click here to download a copy of the series “Immigration Reform: Know the Players,” or listen to the audio actuality here.

Posted 12/02/09 at 02:46pm By Maribel Hastings

Legalizing Farm Workers: A Shared Necessity

Check out Part 6 in my series, "Immigration Reform: Know the Players."

Here's a taste:

The debate over legalizing farm workers has always been marked by the controversial question of labor conditions and migrants’ lives, health and housing.

But this time, labor organization and farmers are in agreement that passing an AgJOBS bill is a shared necessity.

Read the full article at MaribelHastings.com.

Posted 12/10/08 at 12:30pm By Web Team

In Midnight Attack, Bush to Slash Farmworker Pay and Protections

farmworkersFarmworker Justice, an advocacy group for those who harvest our nation's food, slammed a new series of midnight regulations by the Bush Administration. The regulations would slash wages and cut protections for the already-vulnerable workers who bring food to our tables.

According to the group, the regulations showed up on the Department of Labor website yesterday evening but have not yet been made public. Here's what Farmworker Justice had to say, in a post called Bush's Midnight Attack on Farmworkers:

These will be the most far-reaching changes in the laws regulating agricultural guestworker programs since 1942.  They will return us to an era of agricultural labor exploitation that many thought ended decades ago.

That's right, these changes are the most sweeping since 1942, the start of the Bracero program. Never heard of it? According to the Kansas City Star:

The term braceros referred to what they were, manual laborers. From 1942 to 1964, millions of men were legally recruited from Mexico to work mostly agricultural jobs in the U.S. They are credited with helping to keep the U.S. afloat economically and families fed during World War II while much of the working-age population fought overseas.

But despite their role helping us to win World War II, many were cheated out of a portion of their wages. [...] 

The plight of the braceros should be a cautionary tale for the next president of the United States. [...] 

One U.S. Department of Labor official in charge of the program termed it "legalized slavery."

So just what would the new regulations do? According to Farmworker Justice:

The changes cut wage rates and wage protections for both domestic and foreign workers, minimize recruitment obligations inside the U.S. and curtail or eliminate much of the government oversight that is supposed to deter and remedy illegal employer conduct. 

The Administration has a record of coddling unscrupulous employers while going after hard working people, and these twilight regulations are no different.  It's time for common-sense immigration reform, including changes to the H-2A temporary foreign agricultural worker program, infamous for its abuses of both foreign and native-born workers.

Now is not the time for throw-backs to bracero-era immigration policy.

Congress must both reverse these midnight attacks on worker justice once Bush leaves office, and work toward a real, comprehensive reform of our broken immigration laws.