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 Editorials | Issues | November 2007 
Offshoring Farms
 Julia Preston - New York Times
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 |  | I'm as American red-blood as it gets, but I'm tired of fighting the fight on the immigration issue.
- Steve Scaroni |  | |
Celaya, Mexico – California farmer Steve Scaroni looked across a luxuriant field of lettuce in central Mexico and liked what he saw: full-strength crews of Mexican farm workers with no immigration problems.
Farming since he was a teenager, Mr. Scaroni, 50, built a $50 million business growing lettuce and broccoli in California, relying on the hands of immigrant workers, most of them Mexicans and many probably in the United States illegally.
But early last year he began shifting part of his operation to rented fields here. Now some 500 Mexicans tend his crops in Mexico, where they run no risk of deportation.
"I'm as American red-blood as it gets," Mr. Scaroni said, "but I'm tired of fighting the fight on the immigration issue."
A sense of crisis prevails among American farmers who rely on immigrant laborers, moreso since immigration legislation in the Senate failed in June and authorities announced a crackdown on employers of illegal immigrants.
Western Growers, an association representing farmers in California and Arizona, conducted an informal telephone survey of its members in the spring. Twelve large agribusinesses that acknowledged having operations in Mexico reported a total of 11,000 workers here.
"It seems there is a bigger rush to Mexico and elsewhere," said Tom Nassif, the Western Growers president, who said Americans were also farming in Central American countries.
Precise statistics are not readily available on American farming in Mexico. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., displayed a map on the Senate floor in July locating more than 46,000 acres that American growers are cultivating in Guanajuato and Baja California.
She predicted that more American farmers would move to Mexico for the workforce and lower wages. Ms. Feinstein favored a measure in the failed immigration bill that would have created a guest worker program for agriculture and a special legal status for illegal immigrant farm workers.
In the past, some Americans have planted south of the border to escape spiraling land prices and to ensure year-round deliveries of crops they could produce only seasonally in the United States. But in the last three years, Mr. Nassif and other growers said, labor force uncertainties have become a major reason why more farmers have shifted to Mexico.
While Mexico benefits with the latest U.S. technology and techniques, economists say that thousands of middle-class jobs supporting agriculture are being lost in the United States.
Tromping through one of his first lettuce crops near Celaya, an agribusiness hub in the state of Guanajuato, Mr. Scaroni is more candid than many farmers about his move here. He had made six trips to Washington, he said, to plead with Congress to provide more legal immigrants for agriculture.
"I have a customer base that demands we produce and deliver product every day. They don't want to hear the excuses." Without legal workers in California, he said, "I have no choice but to offshore my operation." |
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