Farm owner: Without immigrants 'this town would die'

[Honeycombe8]

8. Americans would have commanded higher wages....

and had the protection of some laws. Using undocumented workers is illegal in and of itself, so not covered by all the laws.

My farming community was tiny. There were AAs in the area, but not that many. So the workers had to come from the AA community there, poor white citizens, and/or from neighboring small towns. There was literally no one in the area with a hint of an accent or was anything other than white or AA...possibly some Native American.

I don't recall there being any sharecroppers in the area. But the sharecroppers worked their own small farms, and would have used their family members and hired their own workers.

We had tenant farms in the area, but they are not what you'd think they are. Decent looking, somewhat sizeable farms, run by families who don't own the land. They are hired by landowners to run the farm. It's what you might think of as sharecroppers 20th century style. They earned pretty good money running the farm and were middle class. They hired workers...American citizens, as far as I know. There were strict laws protecting tenant farmers. Almost impossible to kick them off the land.

They liked to have large families so they could use the kids to work the farms, at least for a while.

Anyway, all that changed. Farming is very hard, very dangerous work. Farmers aren't usually rich, either. It's a way of life, as well as a means of making a living. Farmhands are worked very hard....the farmers themselves work very hard. Modern farms use machines more than in the old days, but I think in CA they have lettuce fields which still must be hand picked? Rice/soybean farmers rely heavily on machinery.