Items related to POVERTY AMID PROSPERITY
Synopsis
California's sprawling San Joaquin Valley is a source of both agricultural abundance and recurring rural poverty. This book examines the socioeconomic links between farm employment, immigration, and welfare use, not only within California's Central Valley but also along the state's central coast and southern regions. Using U.S. Census data and information collected from extensive community-level site visits, the authors find that immigration, largely from rural Mexico, is fueling unprecedented growth in population, poverty, and public service demands in California's agricultural heartland. Their analysis also indicates that upward mobility among these immigrant workers is limited and that recent legislatve changes are reducing public resources available to integrate newcomers just as the number of immigrants is increasing.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
J. Edward Taylor is a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis. He has authored or co-authored more than 50 books, monographs, and articles on economic development, labor migration, and U.S. agriculture. he is the U.S. economist on the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) Committee on South North Migration and is a member of the U.S.-Mexico Binational Study on Migration.
Philip L. Martin is a professor of agriculture and resource economics at the University of California, Davis. He has authored or co-authored more than 100 books, monographs, and articles on farm labor, labor migration, and U.S. agriculture, and edits the monthly newsletters Migration News and Rural Migration News. He was a member of the Commission on Agriculture Workers, which evaluated the effects of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 on agriculture and farm workers.
Michael Fix is the director of the immigration policy program at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. He has authored, co-authored, or edited "Do Minority-Owned Businesses Get a Fair Share of Government Contracts?" (with Mara E. Enchautegui and others), Immigration and Immigrants: Setting the Record Straight (with Jeffrey S. Passel), Clear and Convincing Evidence: Measurement of Discrimination in America (with Raymond J. Struyk), and The Paper Curtain: Employer Sanctions' Implementation, Impact, and Reform.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From Chapter One: Immigration and the Re-creation of Rural Poverty
Rural poverty in California is being re-created through immigration. This poverty may be even more difficult to extirpate than the rural poverty of the past, because it is driven by the expansion of low-wage, immigrant-intensive agriculture. Frequently initiated by U.S. recruitment, the immigration of low-skilled farm workers is sustained by poverty in rural Mexico and then "managed" by family and village networks. This combination of "push," "pull," and "network" effects makes both immigration and the expansion of farm jobs on which immigrants depend self-perpetuating.
Low-skilled workers, primarily from Mexico, migrate into the nation's most prosperous farm economy. Rather than sharing in this prosperity, however, farm workers find low earning and unstable, seasonal employment, with few possibilities for mobility inside the rural sector. The economies and labor markets of rural communities are increasingly layered or segmented in a manner that pushes many of the costs of seasonal farm work onto recently arrived immigrants, the most flexible or absorptive people present. They crowd into rural colonias-incorporated towns resembling overgrown labor camps--whose population during the harvest season often surge to several times their size. California rural colonias now comprise 7 of the 20 U.S. cities in which the highest percentage of people moving in concentrated poverty are foreign-born. some permanent residents of these rural communities benefit by providing needed services such as food and housing to farm workers. However, low farm worker earnings severely limit the potential for economic growth within these communities. Lacking effective demand for their goods and services, business up and down the "Main Streets" of rural California close their doors.
Local policymakers and service providers are struggling to respond to the large and growing public service needs of an impoverished farm worker population. Viewed from one perspective, taxpayers indirectly subsidize the expansion of labor-intensive agriculture (see chapter 3). They provide public services to new immigrants who are drawn to California farms to work but receive poverty-level earnings for the labor. The public assistance needs of low-wage workers are not factored into farmers' decisions to plant labor-intensive crops.
Consumers benefit from low farm wages, but less than many people believe: Farm wages constitute a surprisingly small part of the prices consumers pay at the grocery store. Farmgate prices average approximately one-third of retail prices, and labor costs represent approximately one-third of farmgate prices for fruits, vegetables, and horticultural products. This means, for example, that a 10-percent increase in farm wages would increase retail prices by at most 1 percent.
The expansion of immigrant-intensive agriculture today is occurring in an environment of public pressure against immigration. In 1996, the United States Congress enacted legislation calling for increased border enforcement and new pilot verification systems to weed out unauthorized immigrants in the workplace. Threatened with the loss of their immigrant laborers, farmers lobby for guest worker programs (designed to temporarily admit immigrants for employment-related purposes) to augment their work force; yet rural communities, not employers, are left to provide poor farm workers and their families with needed services. Critics of guest worker programs and of the immigrant-intensification of agriculture argue that labor saving technologies and management practices exist, but that in an environment of abundant immigrant labor, farmers have little incentive to use them. Legal challenges have brought publicly supported farm mechanization research to a standstill, and agricultural engineering departments in universities around the country are downsizing or closing. Perhaps more than any other sector, agriculture epitomizes America's ambivalence toward immigration.
The rural poverty being created to day through immigration is fundamentally different from the rural poverty of the postwar South or that of the Midwest in 1930s and 1940s. today's rural poverty is occurring in a context of agricultural prosperity, via the immigration of low-paid workers into an expanding fruit and vegetable sector that increasingly exports the products of immigrant labor. By contract, in the South and Midwest of the 1930s and 1940s, there was a declining number of jobs for U.S. citizen farmers and sharecroppers in consolidating and mechanizing agriculture. The solution to rural poverty at that time was a great rural-to-urban migration involving 1 million persons annually. It is not yet clear what the solution for today's rural poverty will be.
Through migration, rural poverty affects California cities, as local residents, particularly the children of immigrants, seek a livelihood outside of agriculture. The overflow of rural poverty into urban poverty highlights the importance of education and of other integration assistance to improve the prospects for California's rural-to-urban migrants and the urban economies they come to inhabit.
The United States does not have a deliberate immigrant integration policy like that in place in Canada, Israel, or Australia. As a result, federal programs begun for other purposes have become de facto immigrant integration programs. Curbs on immigrants' access to public benefits, enacted as part of welfare reform, are likely to have far reaching effects on immigrant farm workers and on the agricultural regions in which they reside.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherUrban Institute Press
- Publication date1997
- ISBN 10 0877666709
- ISBN 13 9780877666707
- BindingPaperback
- LanguageEnglish
- Number of pages111
(No Available Copies)
Search Books: Create a WantCan't find the book you're looking for? We'll keep searching for you. If one of our booksellers adds it to AbeBooks, we'll let you know!
Create a Want
