The fields of California’s Salinas Valley, the so-called “salad bowl of the world” are filled with farmworkers harvesting the fruit and vegetable crops that will soon be sold in supermarkets and restaurants across the United States. But these young men working the fields immortalized in the writings of John Steinbeck are not domestic workers but immigrant farmworkers from Mexico who are in the United States on temporary H-2A visas.
Farmer Steve Scaroni, 58, who has been in farming for more than 30 years, says his business would not survive without immigrant farmworkers.
“The harvest can’t wait for workers so we have to bring in H-2A workers because we just simply cannot find, or we do not have enough local domestic workers to do the work,” said Scaroni, whose company Fresh Harvest Inc. provides labor and harvesting services to farms across the U.S..
“My local domestic workforce is shrinking so we keep having to increase the amount of temporary H-2As we bring in to continue to get the work done that we need to get done,” added Scaroni.
The H-2A visa program allows employers to hire foreign workers on temporary visas to do seasonal farm work when there are no domestic workers available. Employers using the program are usually required to provide foreign workers with set wages, transportation and housing. They must also prove that there are no domestic workers available to do the work.
President Donald Trump has pledged to crack down on illegal immigration, something which could also compound the shortages of agricultural labor.
“We are hoping the Trump administration will give us is a little bit of sanity in the process of bringing H-2A guestworkers into the United States,” said Scaroni, who estimates his company will employing 5,000 H-2A workers in 2017.
Twenty-one-year-old farmworker Rafael Hernandez Bautista from Oaxaca, Mexico said more and more undocumented workers are staying away from agricultural work as they fear an immigration crackdown by the Trump government.
“Yes, the amount of people that are undocumented has gone down. Now there’s hardly any. Right now there are more of us (farmworkers) who are contracted (on H-2A visas) than locals from here, people who are legal,” said Hernandez, who has been on the H-2A program for three years.
Scaroni’s H-2A workers are paid $12 a day and are given housing and transport as part of the visa program.
“It has been a big blessing for me because what you earn in Mexico in a week, here you earn it in a day. With the money you earn here you can do a lot, I’ve already built my house, I’ve bought land,” said Hernandez.
“It’s very good and it facilitates work which there isn’t much of in Mexico,” added H-2A worker Alfredo Hernandez Lopez, 27, who will not see his wife and three children for eight months while he works on farms across California.
The work these farmworkers carry out is physically demanding and often involves working out in the blazing sun and the mind-numbing task of sorting produce on a conveyor. It is work that the U.S. domestic workforce does not want to do.
Scaroni said urgent reforms are need to make the H-2A visa process easier for farmers because agriculture industry depends on it.
“Trump doesn’t even have a full team to be able to engage in any kind of reform or any kind of immigration initiatives because he doesn’t even have a full cabinet right now and we need a secretary of labor, we need a secretary of Agriculture to be able to start working on some reforms to make H-2A a little bit more user friendly,” he said.
“I could not survive without it,” he adds.
“If we don’t continue to use the H-2A program, there is not going to be enough labor to keep production of agriculture at the levels it’s at in the United States.”
