Agricultural Labor Markets and Immigration

Foreign workers have been an important part of U.S. labor-intensive segments of agriculture throughout U.S. history. Typically, these are specialty crops such as tree crops, vegetables, and nursery and greenhouse crops. Each requires large amounts of labor relative to other resources used in production. Tree crop and vegetable production on only has very large labor requirements, but the requirements are often concentrated into a very short time span of a relatively few weeks, particularly at harvest time. Nursery and greenhouse production has large, but nearly year-round labor requirements. While there has been considerable mechanization in agriculture, a number of fruits and vegetables, particularly for the fresh market, continue to be hand-harvested. Most greenhouse and nursery production utilizes manual labor. Hired farm employment in the United States is dominated by foreign-born workers: 78% of crop workers were foreign-born in 2001-2002 (Carroll et al., 2005, p. 3). The same report indicated that 53% of crop workers lacked proper authorization to work in the United States during this same time period (p. 6). Most of the recent policy debate has concerned the latter group, the illegal foreign population in the United States. Although agricultural workers are now a small part of this population estimated to be 11.5 12 million in 2006, the proportion of workers in agriculture who are illegal is among the highest of any occupation (Passell, 2006). With the major presence of illegal foreign workers in agriculture and the legislative emphasis on illegal foreign workers, there are two sets of economic issues to isolate: 1) the economic effects of a significant augmentation of the workforce through legal immigration, and 2) the economic effects of working in an illegal immigration status. Emphasis is given to the following economic indicators regarding the agricultural labor market: wage rates, length of time working in agriculture, technology, crop mix, and capital flows.