Who Picked the Crops? -- Robert Kuttner - Prospect

[erronis]

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-10-01-who-picked-the-crops/

How ICE favored growers at the expense of farmworkers

Workers harvest cabbages, March 5, 2025, on a field less than ten miles from the border with Mexico, in Holtville, California.

Earlier this summer, there were several news stories that ICE raids were frightening away or deporting farmworkers, endangering the harvest. But the harvest is now over and somehow the crops got harvested. What happened?

Here’s the lead of an emblematic story from Reuters dated June 30, titled “Immigration Raids Leave Crops Unharvested, California Farms at Risk”:

OXNARD, California – Lisa Tate is a sixth-generation farmer in Ventura County, California, an area that produces billions of dollars worth of fruit and vegetables each year, much of it hand-picked by immigrants in the U.S. illegally. …

“In the fields, I would say 70% of the workers are gone,” she said in an interview. “If 70% of your workforce doesn’t show up, 70% of your crop doesn’t get picked and can go bad in one day. Most Americans don’t want to do this work. Most farmers here are barely breaking even. I fear this has created a tipping point where many will go bust.”

Well, it’s now October. And by all accounts, this was a pretty normal harvest. Wine grape production, heavily dependent on migrant pickers, is up 3 percent over 2024. Apples, also reliant on immigrants, had a bountiful year, with a 6 percent increase, according to the USDA.

Basically, two things happened. Farmer organizations, from the American Farm Bureau Federation representing large growers, to the National Farmers Union representing family farmers, and the United Farm Workers union, went into high gear. They pressured both the White House and their elected representatives to get ICE to stay away from the harvest.

. . .

In short, our reliance on migrant workers is a double disgrace. America turns a blind eye to their lack of documentation when growers need them to work for a pittance, but then deports them, either legally under the H2-A program or viciously via ICE, when they are not needed.

The larger disgrace long predates Trump. Take a listen to the song “Deportee” by Woody Guthrie written in 1948, sung by Pete Seeger.

[quaint]

1. Why then is produce poor quality and extremely high priced?

Not normal.

[Cheezoholic]

2. Because they suckered us into believing they would be n/t