Farmworkers Aff and Neg - MichiganClassic 2018 BO

Farmworkers Aff
***1AC
Plan
The United States federal government should establish a pathway to
permanent legal status that substantially reduces restrictions on legal
immigration for farmworkers.
Labor Shortages Advantage
Restrictive immigration policy is driving an agricultural workforce shortage that
guts the industry – domestic workers can’t fill in.
Cindy Carcamo 1/4/2018, cover immigration for the Los Angeles Times. Previously, she was
Arizona bureau chief and national correspondent for The Times, “Farms face shrinking
immigrant labor pool; U.S.-born workers remain a rarity despite increasing pay”, https://search-
proquest-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/1984012448?pq-origsite=summon
For generations, rural Mexico has been the primary source of hired farm labor in the U.S.
According to a federal survey, nine out of 10 agricultural workers in places like California are
foreign-born, and more than half are in the U.S. illegally. But farm labor from Mexico has been on
the decline in California. And under the Trump administration, many in the agricultural industry
worry that deportations -- and the fear of them -- could further cut the supply of workers. But
try as they have to entice workers with better salaries and benefits, companies have found it
impossible to attract enough U.S.-born workers to make up for a shortage from south of the
border. Del Bosque said he'll hire anyone who shows up ready to work. But that rarely means
someone born in the U.S. "Americans will say, 'You can't pay me enough to do this kind of
work,'" Del Bosque said. "They won't do it. They'll look for something easier." For some immigrants
working the fields, people like Flores are a puzzle -- their sweating next to them represents a kind of squandering of an American
birthright. "It'shard to be here under the sun. It's a waste of time and their talents in the fields," said
Norma Felix, 58, a Mexican picker for almost three decades. "They don't take advantage of their privilege and
benefit of being born here. They could easily work in an office." Most don't last long, she said.
"There is always one or two who show up every season," Felix said. "They show up for three or
four days and turn around and leave." Agriculture's reliance on immigrant labor, especially in the American West, goes
back to the late 1800s, after the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad, said J. Edward Taylor, a UC Davis rural economist.
"The domestic farm workforce was simply not big enough to support the growth of labor-
intensive fruit and vegetable crops," he said. With the notable exception of the Dust Bowl years in the 1930s --
when American migrant workers from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas moved out west after a severe drought devastated their
livelihoods -- there
was never a time when California crops were picked primarily by U.S.-born
farmworkers, Taylor said. Those workers eventually moved on to nonfarm jobs. Now, Mexico is
undergoing some of the same changes the U.S. did around the middle of the 20th century,
Taylor said, with "employment shifting from farms to industry and services." According to
Taylor's research, the number of farmworkers coming out of rural Mexico is decreasing by an
estimated 150,000 a year. That means U.S. and Mexican farmers will have to increasingly
compete for a dwindling pool of labor.
These farmwork shortages spill up to other sectors and tank the economy –
most comprehensive and qualified studies prove.
Bronars ‘15
[Stephen, PhD in Economics @ U Chicago, Partner, Edgework Economics, July, “A Vanishing
Breed How the Decline in U.S. Farm Laborers Over the Last Decade Has Hurt the U.S. Economy
and Slowed Production on American Farms, http://www.newamericaneconomy.org/wp-
content/uploads/2015/08/PNAE_FarmLabor_August-3-3.pdf]
In the last few years, many Americans have heard stories about the difficult labor situation faced by many U.S. farmers. Despite
unemployment rates remaining high in some parts of the country, news reports have described farmers in Texas losing dozens of
acres of carefully cultivated squash due to a lack of available field hands.1 In Georgia, blackberries have been left to rot in the field,2
while in California, asparagus and cantaloupe farmers have been forced to abandon fields of otherwise healthy crops, even during a
time of drought when crop yields are unusually low.3 Past research from the Partnership for a New American Economy (PNAE) and
the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform has found such labor challenges have created a frustrating
reality in the U.S. farming industry: At a time when more Americans are trying to eat fresh and locally grown produce,
farmers don’t have the labor they need to expand their operations and keep pace with rising
demand. From 1998 to 2012, in fact, the share of American fresh produce that was imported grew by more than 79 percent.4 In
this report, we examine more closely the main source of the issue—the declining supply of labor available
to American farmers. Although farmers cultivating labor-intensive crops such as fresh fruits, vegetables, and tree nuts have
long worried about the supply of available workers, few national studies have documented the scale of the
decline in crop laborers that has occurred in recent years on American farms. In this report, we
tackle that gap in the scholarship, relying on data from the National Agriculture Workers Survey,
the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Labor Survey (FLS), and the Census of Agriculture to
produce robust estimates of how the agricultural workforce has shifted in the last decade. Our
work presents a troubling picture for American farms— and reiterates what many U.S. farmers have long known. In the last decade,
as fewer young agricultural workers have come to the United States, the number of field and crop laborers
available to farms has been rapidly declining. This drop has created a severe labor shortage in
many key parts of the country vital to American farmers and iconic crops. It has also had an
impact far beyond rural America: The lack of workers has not only hurt the ability of U.S. farms
to grow and expand, it has cost our economy tens of thousands of jobs in related industries like
trucking, marketing, and equipment manufacturing. When the drought on the West Coast ends
and crop production returns to normal levels, the labor shortages documented here could be even more
dramatic—producing greater economic pain for the region and the country as a whole. Key findings: The supply
of workers available to U.S. farmers has been rapidly declining. Between 2002 and 2014, the number of full-time
equivalent field and crop workers has dropped by at least 146,000 people, or by more than 20
percent. Wage patterns indicate that this caused a major labor shortage on U.S. farms. The labor
shortage has hurt our country’s ability to produce labor-intensive fruits, vegetables, and tree nuts. Had labor shortages not
been an issue, production of these crops could have been higher by about $3.1 billion a year.
Given that farm revenues often trickle down to other industries in our economy, that $3.1 billion in additional
farm production would have led to almost $2.8 billion in added spending on non-farm services like
transportation, manufacturing, and irrigation each year. That spending would have created more than 41,000
additional non-farm jobs in our economy annually. The number of potential farmworkers immigrating to the United
States has greatly slowed over the last decade. Between 2002 and 2012, the number of new field and crop workers immigrating to
the United States fell by roughly 75 percent. This led to a drop in the number of entry-level workers available for difficult jobs like
hoeing, harvesting, and planting. Some parts of the country were particularly hard hit by the recent labor decline. The number of
full-time equivalent field and crop workers in California declined by about 85,000 people between 2002 and 2014. The vast majority
of this decline happened before the drought started in 2011. The southeastern part of the United States was also hard hit. Alabama,
Georgia, and South Carolina lost about 8,500 workers total, or more than one in four of the crop workers employed in 2002.
Colorado, Nevada, and Utah lost 36.7 percent of their full-time equivalent field workforce, or 7,029 people. Today’s field and
crop workers are rapidly aging, signaling even greater potential future challenges when the current
generation of workers retires. While 36.1 percent of field and crop workers during the 1998–2002 period had arrived in the United
States within the past five years, just 11.5 percent were in that situation by 2008–2012. Because many new immigrant farmworkers
tend to be young, this has caused the workforce to age dramatically. While 14.2 percent of farmworkers were 45 years old or older
in the 1998–2002 period, by 2008–2012, that figure had more than doubled, reaching 27.1 percent. U.S.-born
workers are
not filling labor gaps on American farms. From 2002 to 2014, the increase in U.S.-born workers
offset less than three percent of the dramatic decline in field and crop workers on U.S. farms
caused by dwindling foreign-born workers. This report makes clear that the manpower challenges faced by U.S.
farmers should be a major concern for American policymakers. The 41,000 non-farm jobs that could have been
created each year by solving the farm labor shortage would have provided a valuable boost to
the U.S. economy during a time when the country struggled to produce enough jobs. The ongoing
labor troubles faced by farmers also present major questions about how sustainable it will be for small farmers to continue growing
the most labor-intensive fruit and vegetable crops for the long term. Anecdotally, many farmers say they have already shifted some
of their acreage to mechanically harvested commodities like corn, alfalfa, and wheat.5 These crops on average require fewer
workers, generate less revenue for the community,6 and create fewer ancillary jobs.7 . Between 2002 and 2012, some 300,000 acres
of farmland previously used to grow fresh fruit, vegetables, and tree nuts were taken out of production altogether. Despite the
unsustainable situation faced by U.S. farmers and ranchers, however, little
has been done in recent years to
address the underlying labor issue. Key industry groups such as the American Farm Bureau Federation and Western
Growers have long advocated for bills that would allow farmers to bring in hundreds of thousands temporary farmworkers during
times of high labor need.8 The
current temporary farm guest worker program is so cumbersome,
expensive, and unworkable that as recently as 2012, it was used by just 6 percent of all hired
farmworkers.9 For the last decade, however, Congress has failed to pass any sort of concrete temporary
visa program for the industry, and mandatory employer verification programs in some states
have placed many workers already here out of reach. As this report demonstrates, farmers today are greatly
hindered by a situation that forces them to compete for the dwindling supply of workers interested and able to do farm work.
Whether the agriculture industry can escape this cycle—and continue to expand and provide for
the needs of American families—may very much depend on what happens going forward in
Washington.
The economic impact is enormous and can reverse slow growth.

Bronars ‘15
The sharp decline in immigrant labor described above, coupled with the small number of U.S.-born workers who have taken up farm
jobs, has caused the supply of field and crop workers available to farmers to shrink substantially. The resulting reduction in farm
laborers is equivalent to a decline of at least 130,000 full-time equivalent field and crop workers in states and regions outside the
Midwest—the areas where the most labor-intensive crops are grown. The question we address in this section is: How
much
higher would the value of crops produced by U.S. farms in recent years have been if growers had
had access to an adequate number of workers? And also, how much would our economy have
benefitted from that higher production on American farms?
To gain a better understanding of the potential for farm output today, and the loss in farm production experienced over the last
decade, it is useful to compare the amount of fruits, vegetables, melons, and tree nuts sold by U.S. farms during the 1992–2002 and
2002–2012 time periods. We focus on these crops because they are the most labor-intensive and therefore the products most likely
to be adversely affected by a sharp decline in labor supply. Table 6 shows that between 1992 and 2002 the number of acres
harvested for these labor-intensive crops increased by 4.3 percent. In addition, output per acre46 for fruits, vegetables, melons, and
nuts increased by 10.2 percent during the period. Finally, it is important to note that over this time period the number of hours
worked by field and crop workers was also increasing, growing by 5.6 percent.47
These trends were quite different in the decade from 2002 to 2012, indicating the potential impact of recent labor challenges. First,
the number of acres harvested for fruits,
vegetables, melons, and tree nuts declined by more than 300,000 acres, falling 5.0 percent. For some crops, the acreage declines
were particularly steep: The number of acres devoted to fruits and melons during that period, for instance, fell by 14.6 percent,
while growers cut the number of acres they were devoting to vegetables by 13.8 percent. In addition to these declines, output per
acre for these labor-intensive crops increased by only 7.4 percent over the period—almost 3 percent less than in the previous
decade.
Some of the productivity increase in the 2002–2012 decade, as measured by output per acre, can be explained
by the already-mentioned shift to grow more tree nuts in California. We estimate that roughly a third of the increase in productivity
during that decade can be explained by that factor alone. The productivity on acres used to grow fresh fruits and melons as well as
vegetables increased by just 5.0 percent during the period—meaning the impact of any increased mechanization for such crops was
fairly minimal. The decline in harvested acreage and the slowdown in
productivity growth occurred during a decade when hours worked by field and crop workers fell
by about 22 percent.48
The absence of an available and reliable supply of farm labor is an important reason for the decline in harvested acres for fresh
fruits, vegetables, melons, and tree nuts. Had the number of harvested acres of fruits, vegetables, melons and tree nuts increased
between 2002 and 2012 at the same rate as it did from 1992 to 2002, output of these crops would have been higher by 9.5 percent.
The inability of farmers and growers to hire field and crop workers, especially in the peak hiring seasons in the summer and fall, is a
leading explanation for this output gap. The USDA estimates that the value of fresh fruits, vegetables, melons and tree nuts is about
$32.9 billion.49 A
9.5 percent increase in the output of those farm products then would raise the
value of the crops produced by about $3.1 billion per year.
Numerous studies have indicated that the farm sector plays an important role in the American
economy.50 Much of this has to do with how much other industries are intertwined and dependent upon
the products produced by American farms. For example, as the amount of fresh fruits and vegetables produced by a
farm drops, spending on the transportation of
the farm’s produce from farm to market, the marketing and sale of produce, and the production
and maintenance of any equipment used in the process will also decline. A recent USDA study found that
every dollar in fresh fruits, vegetables or tree nuts that a farm is able to produce results in 89 cents of
additional economic activity in the broader economy.51
Using the USDA study, it quickly becomes clear that the

$3.1 billion in missed production of fresh fruits and
vegetables in the 1998–2012 period had a notable impact on the broader U.S. economy. Had
U.S. growers produced $3.1 billion more of those labor-intensive products between 1998 and 2012, the
U.S. economy would have experienced $2.8 billion in additional spending on goods and services
outside of agriculture each year. Over a 12-year period, that spending would have totaled $33.6
billion.
That additional spending would have also resulted in more job creation, particularly in the trade,
transportation, and service sectors. The USDA estimates that each billion dollars of fresh fruits
produced by American growers creates 2,301 additional, non-farm jobs in the economy.52 The
numbers of non-farm jobs produced as a result of a billion dollars of additional vegetable or tree-nut production are 7,386 and
33,149, respectively.53 Assuming that the 9.5 percent increase in fresh produce and tree nut production mirrors current trends
regarding the share of sales devoted to each type of crop, we estimate that the United States missed out on creating
41,300 non-farm jobs each year as
a direct result of the missed production growth that would have been possible without a labor
shortage. Over a 10-year period, that would have translated into more than 400,000 new farm
jobs—a meaningful job boost to our economy that would have occurred even during the
recent recession.
Declining labor productivity and slow growth cause global revisionism and great
power conflict.
Drezner, 16 – professor of international politics at Tufts and Senior Fellow at Brookings (Daniel,
“Five Known Unknowns about the Next Generation Global Political Economy” May,
http://www.anamnesis.info/sites/default/files/D_Drezner_2016.pdf
The erosion of the trade and demographic drivers puts even more pressure on technological innovation to be the engine of
economic growth in the developed world. As one McKinsey analysis concluded, “For
economic growth to match its
historical rates, virtually all of it must come from increases in labor productivity.”78 Growth in labor
productivity is partially a function of capital investment, but mostly a function of technological innovation. The key question is
whether the pace of technological innovation will sustain itself. This remains a known unknown. The pace of innovation relative to
global population has slowed dramatically over the past fifty years.79 Consider that the developed world still relies on the same
general purpose technologies of modern society that were originally invented 50-100 years ago: the automobile, airplane,
telephone, refrigerator, and computer. To be sure, all of these technologies have improved in recent decades, in some cases
dramatically. But nothing new has replaced them. And even these improvements have not necessarily had dramatic systemic effects.
For example, the average speed on a passenger aircraft has actually fallen since the introduction of the Boeing 707 in 1958, because
of the need to conserve fuel. For all of the talk of “disruptive innovations,” the effect of these disruptions on both the business world
and aggregate economic growth have been exaggerated.80 At present, many of the fields that seem promising for innovation—
nanotechnology, green energy, and so forth—require massive fixed investments. Only large institutions, like research universities,
multinational corporations and government entities, can play in that kind of game. Joseph Schumpeter warned that once large
organizations became the primary engine of innovation, the pace of change would naturally slow down. Because large organizations
are inherently bureaucratic and conservative, they will be less able to imagine radical innovations.81 What if the “secular
stagnation” debate is really just a harbinger of a deeper debate about a return to pre-19th century growth levels? An obvious
counter to this argument is that the pace of technological innovation in laptops, smart phones, tablets, and the Internet of things
has accelerated. This is undeniably true—but the problem is that the gains in utility have not been, strictly speaking, economic. Most
of the important innovations that we think about with respect to the Internet—Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube and so forth
—are free technologies for consumers. As Tyler Cowen argues, “The big technological gains are coming in revenue-deficient
sectors.”82 They generate lots of enjoyment but little employment. The largest and most dynamic information technology firms, like
Google and Apple, hire only a fraction of the people who worked for General Motors in its heyday. At the same time, Internet-based
content has eroded the financial viability of other parts of the economy. Content-providing sectors—such as music, entertainment,
and journalism—have suffered directly. The growth of “sharing economy” firms like Uber and Airbnb that develop peer-to-peer
markets are causing similar levels of creative disruption to the travel and tourism sectors.83 The rapid acceleration of automation is
also leading to debates about whether the “lump of labor” fallacy remains a fallacy—in other words, whether displaced workers will
be able to find new employment.84 A
slow-growth economic trajectory also creates policy problems that
increase the likelihood of even slower growth. Higher growth is a political palliative that makes
structural reforms easier. For example, Germany prides itself on the “Hartz reforms” to its labor markets last decade, and
has advocated similar policies for the rest of the Eurozone since the start of the 2008 financial crisis. But the Hartz reforms were
accomplished during a global economic upswing, boosting German exports and cushioning the shortterm cost of the reforms
themselves. In a low-growth world, other economies will be understandably reluctant to engage in such reforms. It is possible that
concerns about a radical growth slowdown are exaggerated. In 1987, Robert Solow famously said, “You can see the computer age
everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”85 A decade later, the late 1990s productivity surge was in full bloom. Economists are
furiously debating whether the visible innovations in the information sector are leading to productivity advances that are simply
going undetected in the current productivity statistics.86 Google’s chief economist Hal Varian, echoing Solow from a generation ago,
asserts that “there is a lack of appreciation for what’s happening in Silicon Valley, because we don’t have a good way to measure
it.”87 It is also possible that current innovations will only lead to gains in labor productivity a decade from now. The OECD argues
that the productivity problem resides in firms far from the leading edge failing to adopt new technologies and systems.88 There are
plenty of sectors, such as health or education, in which technological innovations can yield significant productivity gains. It would
foolhardy to predict the end of radical innovations. But the possibility of a technological slowdown is a significant “known
unknown.” And if
such a slowdown occurs, it would have catastrophic effects on the public finances
of the OECD economies. Most of the developed world will have to support disproportionately large numbers of pensioners
by 2036; slower-growing economies will worsen the debt-to-GDP ratios of most of these economies,
causing further macroeconomic stresses—and, potentially, political unrest from increasingly
stringent budget constraints.89 2. Are there hard constraints on the ability of the developing world to converge to
developed-country living standards? One of the common predictions made for the next generation economy is that China will
displace the United States as the world’s biggest economy. This is a synecdoche of the deeper forecast that per capita incomes in
developing countries will slowly converge towards the living standards of the advance industrialized democracies. The OECD’s
Looking to 2060 report is based on “a tendency of GDP per capita to converge across countries” even if that convergence is slow-
moving. The EIU’s long-term macroeconomic forecast predicts that China’s per capita income will approximate Japan’s by 2050.90
The Carnegie Endowment’s World Order in 2050 report presumes that total factor productivity gains in the developing world will be
significantly higher than countries on the technological frontier. Looking at the previous twenty years of economic growth, Kemal
Dervis posited that by 2030, “The rather stark division of the world into ‘advanced’ and ‘poor’ economies that began with the
industrial revolution will end, ceding to a much more differentiated and multipolar world economy.”91 Intuitively, this seems
rational. The theory is that developing countries have lower incomes primarily because they are capital-deficient and because their
economies operate further away from technological frontier. The gains from physical and human capital investment in the
developing world should be greater than in the developed world. From Alexander Gerschenkron forward, development economists
have presumed that there are some growth advantages to “economic backwardness”92 This intuitive logic, however, is somewhat
contradicted by the “middle income trap.” Barry Eichengreen, Donghyun Park, and Kwanho Shin have argued in a series of papers
that as an economy’s GDP per capita hits close to $10,000, and then again at $16,000, growth slowdowns commence.93 This makes
it very difficult for these economies to converge towards the per capita income levels of the advanced industrialized states. History
bears this out. There is a powerful correlation between a country’s GDP per capita in 1960 and that country’s per capita income in
2008. In fact, more countries that were middle income in 1960 had become relatively poorer than had joined the ranks of the rich
economies. To be sure, there have been success stories, such as South Korea, Singapore, and Israel. But other success stories, such
as Greece, look increasingly fragile. Lant Prichett and Lawrence Summers conclude that “past performance is no guarantee of future
performance. Regression to the mean is the single most robust and empirical relevant fact about cross-national growth rates.”94
Post-2008 growth performance of the established and emerging markets matches this assessment. While most of the developing
world experienced rapid growth in the previous decade, the BRICS have run into roadblocks. Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers,
these economies are looking less likely to converge with the developed world. During the Great Recession, the non-Chinese BRICS—
India, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa—have not seen their relative share of the global economy increase at all.95 China’s growth has
also slowed down dramatically over the past few years. Recent and massive outflows of capital suggests that the Chinese economy is
headed for a significant market correction. The collapse of commodity prices removed another source of economic growth in the
developing world. By 2015, the gap between developing country growth and developed country growth had narrowed to its lowest
level in the 21st century.96 What explains the middle income trap? Eichengreen, Park and Shin suggest that “slowdowns coincide
with the point in the growth process where it is no longer possible to boost productivity by shifting additional workers from
agriculture to industry and where the gains from importing foreign technology diminish.”97 But that is insufficient to explain why
the slowdowns in growth have been so dramatic and widespread. There are multiple candidate explanations. One argument,
consistent with Paul Krugman’s deconstruction of the previous East Asia “miracle,”98 is that much of this growth was based on
unsustainable levels of ill-conceived capital investment. Economies that allocate large shares of GDP to investment can generate
high growth rates, particularly in capital-deficient countries. The sustainability of those growth rates depends on whether the
investments are productive or unproductive. For example, high levels of Soviet economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s masked the
degree to which this capital was misallocated. As Krugman noted, a lesser though similar phenomenon took place in the Asian tigers
in the 1990s. It is plausible that China has been experiencing the same illusory growth-from-bad-investment problem. Reports of
overinvestment in infrastructure and “ghost cities” are rampant; according to two Chinese government researchers, the country
wasted an estimated $6.8 trillion in “ineffective investment” between 2009 and 2013 alone.99 A political explanation would be
rooted in the fact that many emerging markets lack the political and institutional capabilities to sustain continued growth. Daron
Acemoğlu and James Robinson argue that modern economies are based on either “extractive institutions” or “inclusive
institutions.”100 Governments based on extractive institutions can generate higher rates of growth than governments without any
effective structures. It is not surprising, for example, that post-Maoist Chinese economic growth has far outstripped Maoist-era rates
of growth. Inclusive institutions are open to a wider array of citizens, and therefore more democratic. Acemoğlu and Robinson argue
that economies based on inclusive institutions will outperform those based on extractive institutions. Inclusive institutions are less
likely to be prone to corruption, more able to credibly commit to the rule of law, and more likely to invest in the necessary public
goods for broad-based economic growth. Similarly, Pritchett and Summers conclude that institutional quality has a powerful and
long-lasting effect on economic growth—and that “salient characteristics of China—high levels of state control and corruption along
with high measures of authoritarian rule—make a discontinuous decline in growth even more likely than general experience would
suggest.”101 A more forward-looking explanation is that the changing nature of manufacturing has badly disrupted the 20th century
pathway for economic development. For decades, the principal blueprint for developing economies to become developed was to
specialize in industrial sectors where low-cost labor offered a comparative advantage. The resulting growth from export promotion
would then spill over into upstream and downstream sectors, creating new job-creating sectors. Globalization, however, has already
generated tremendous productivity gains in manufacturing—to the point where industrial sectors do not create the same amount of
employment opportunities that they used to.102 Like agriculture in the developed world, manufacturing has become so productive
that it does not need that many workers. As a result, many developing economies suffer from what Dani Rodrik labels “premature
deindustrialization.” If Rodrik is correct, then going forward, manufacturing will fail to jump-start developing economies into higher
growth trajectories—and the political effects that have traditionally come with industrialization will also be stunted.103 Both the
middle-income trap and the regression to the mean observation are empirical observations about the past. There is no guaranteeing
that these empirical regularities will hold for the future. Indeed, China’s astonishing growth rate over the past 30 years is a direct
contradiction of the regression to the mean phenomenon. It is possible that over time the convergence hypothesis swamps the
myriad explanations listed above for continued divergence. But in sketching out the next generation global economy, the
implications of whether regression to the mean will dominate the convergence hypothesis are massive. Looking at China and India
alone, the gap in projections between a continuation of past growth trends and regression to the mean is equivalent to $42 trillion—
more than half of global economic output in 2015.104 This gap is significant enough to matter not just to China and India, but to the
world economy. As with the developed world, a growth slowdown in the developing world can have a feedback effect that makes
more growth-friendly reforms more difficult to accomplish. As Chinese economic growth has slowed, Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s
economic reform plans have stalled out in favor of more political repression. Follows the recent playbook of Russian President
Vladimir Putin, who has added diversionary war as another distracting tactic from negative economic growth. Short-term steps
towards political repression will make politically risky steps towards economic reform that less palatable in the future. Instead, the
advanced developing economies seem set to double down on strategies that yield less economic growth over time. 3. Will
geopolitical rivalries or technological innovation alter the patterns of economic interdependence? Multiple scholars have observed a
secular decline in interstate violence in recent decades.105 The Kantian triad of more democracies, stronger multilateral institutions,
and greater levels of cross-border trade is well known. In recent years, international relations theorists have stressed that
commercial interdependence is a bigger driver of this phenomenon than previously thought.106 The liberal logic is straightforward.
The benefits of cross-border exchange and economic interdependence act as a powerful brake on the utility of violence in
international politics. The global supply chain and “just in time” delivery systems have further imbricated national economies into
the international system. This creates incentives for governments to preserve an open economy even during times of crisis. The
more that a country’s economy was enmeshed in the global supply chain, for example, the less likely it was to raise tariffs after the
2008 financial crisis.107 Similarly, global financiers are strongly interested in minimizing political risk; historically, the financial sector
has staunchly opposed initiating the use of force in world politics.108 Even militarily powerful actors must be wary of alienating
global capital. Globalization therefore creates
powerful pressures on governments not to close off their
economies through protectionism or military aggression. Interdependence can also tamp down
conflicts that would otherwise be likely to break out during a great power transition. Of the 15 times
a rising power has emerged to challenge a ruling power between 1500 and 2000, war broke out 11 times.109 Despite these odds,
China’s recent rise to great power status has elevated tensions without leading to anything approaching war. It could be argued that
the Sino-American economic relationship is so deep that it has tamped down the great power conflict that would otherwise have
been in full bloom over the past two decades. Instead, both China and the United States have taken pains to talk about the need for
a new kind of great power relationship. Interdependence can help to reduce the likelihood of an extreme
event—such as a great power war—from taking place. Will this be true for the next generation economy as well? The
two other legs of the Kantian triad—democratization and multilateralism—are facing their own problems in the wake of the 2008
financial crisis.110 Economic openness survived the negative shock of the 2008 financial crisis, which
suggests that the logic of commercial liberalism will continue to hold with equal force going forward. But some international
relations scholars doubt the power of globalization’s pacifying effects, arguing that interdependence is not a powerful constraint.111
Other analysts go further, arguing that globalization exacerbates financial volatility—which in turn can lead to political instability and
violence.112 A different counterargument is that the continued growth of interdependence will stall out. Since2008, for
example, the growth in global trade flows has been muted, and global capital flows are still
considerably smaller than they were in the pre-crisis era. In trade, this reflects a pre-crisis trend. Between 1950 and 2000,
trade grew, on average, more than twice as fast as global economic output. In the 2000s, however, trade only grew about 30
percent more than output.113 In 2012 and 2013, trade grew less than economic output. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates
that global flows as a percentage of output have fallen from 53 percent in 2007 to 39 percent in 2014.114 While the stock of
interdependence remains high, the flow has slowed to a trickle. The Financial Times has suggested that the
global economy
has hit “peak trade.”115 If economic growth continues to outstrip trade, then the level of interdependence will
slowly decline, thereby weakening the liberal constraint on great power conflicts. And there are
several reasons to posit why interdependence might stall out. One possibility is due to innovations reducing the need for
traded goods. For example, in the last decade, higher energy prices in the United States triggered investments into conservation,
alternative forms of energy, and unconventional sources of hydrocarbons. All of these steps reduced the U.S. demand for imported
energy. A future in which compact fusion engines are developed would further reduce the need for imported energy even more.116
A more radical possibility is the development of technologies that reduce the need for physical trade across borders. Digital
manufacturing will cause the relocation of production facilities closer to end-user markets, shortening the global supply chain.117
An even more radical discontinuity would come from the wholesale diffusion of 3-D printing. The ability of a single printer to
produce multiple component parts of a larger manufactured good eliminates the need for a global supply chain. As Richard Baldwin
notes, “Supply chain unbundling is driven by a fundamental trade-off between the gains from specialization and the costs of
dispersal. This would be seriously undermined by radical advances in the direction of mass customization and 3D printing by
sophisticated machines…To put it sharply, transmission of data would substitute for transportation of goods.”118 As 3-D printing
technology improves, the need for large economies to import anything other than raw materials concomitantly declines.119
Geopolitical ambitions could reduce economic interdependence even further.120 Russia and China have territorial and
quasi-territorial ambitionsbeyond their recognized borders, and the United States has attempted to
counter what it sees as revisionist behavior by both countries. In a low-growth world, it is possible that leaders
of either country would choose to prioritize their nationalist ambitions over economic growth. More
generally, it could be that the expectation of future gains from interdependence—rather than existing levels of interdependence—
constrains great power bellicosity.121 If
great powers expect that the future benefits of international trade
and investment will wane, then commercial constraints on revisionist behavior will lessen. All else
equal, this increases the likelihood of great power conflict going forward.
Labor shortages have devastated the industry and artificially increased wages,
further straining farms.
Bronars ‘15
The steep decline in the number of available farm laborers between 2002 and 2014 on its own does not indicate that a labor
shortage actually occurred. Could the decline in the number of workers be the result of more machines taking the place of workers
in the agriculture industry? Or could it be due to farmers choosing to take more of their land out of production altogether? In this
section, we discuss recent wage
data for farm laborers, and how trends in those statistics indicate that the driving
force behind the recent declines was a drop in the labor supply, which caused shortages on U.S.
farms. To understand what the wage data means it is useful to first understand the labor patterns on American farms, and in
particular, fresh produce operations. U.S. agriculture relies heavily on seasonal and part-year employment because of the nature of
agricultural production.27 Typically, crops must be harvested within a narrow time frame or the considerable investment in the
season’s harvest will be squandered or lost. According to the 2012 U.S. Census of Agriculture, 63.5 percent of farm jobs in the United
States are seasonal, lasting fewer than 150 days during the course of the year. In the case of field and crop workers, who are so
essential to fresh produce operations, the season is often far shorter. Based on 2012 Agricultural Census data, we estimate that the
average duration of a seasonal farm job is about six weeks. (See the Methodology Appendix for more detail on how we arrived at
this and other estimates.) One consequence of the reduced supply of available farm labor is that it has
become much more expensive for farms to hire seasonal farmworkers, a development that has
placed a strain on many U.S. farms. Studies have shown that foreign-born farmworkers are much more
likely to hold seasonal jobs than U.S.-born field and crop workers, who make up a small share of
the industry.28 It should be little surprise then that in recent years—as immigration has slowed—wages for seasonal positions
have increased. What is surprising, however, is by how much such wages have grown. Using Census of
Agriculture data, we estimate that the average payroll cost per seasonal employee increased by 89
percent between 2002 and 2012 while the average cost per full-year employee increased by 33 percent
in nominal, non-inflation adjusted, terms. This has meant that seasonal workers have increasingly taken up a larger and larger share
of total farm payroll costs. In 2012, 42 percent of growers’ payroll costs were being used to pay for seasonal labor, compared to just
36 percent in 2002. It is worth noting that some of the wage increase that occurred between 2002 and 2012 is likely due to longer
duration seasonal jobs. Using U.S. Census of Agriculture data, we estimate that in 2002 the average seasonal job lasted four or five
weeks, compared to the six-week average duration in 2012. The addition of one or two weeks to the average seasonal worker’s
schedule, however, cannot alone explain the full wage increase that has occurred in recent years. Offering jobs with a longer
duration may also be a sign that farmers are trying to better compete for a limited number of workers, who can be more selective
about the jobs they choose. To understand the different dynamics at play in the farm sector, it is useful to look at how the real,
inflation-adjusted, wages of field and crop workers changed compared to the real wages of other less-skilled jobs during the 2002 to
2014 period. Figure 2 shows that between 2002 and 2014 the average hourly wage of field and crop workers increased by 7.9
percent. While that figure might sound small on the surface, it
is notable how much it differs from the eight
other occupations considered, which represent a wide range of less-skilled jobs across a number of
industries, theoretically drawing from similar pools of workers. In all the other occupations, real,
hourly wages actually declined between 2002 and 2014, in come cases, quite notably. The wages for cashiers, for
instance, shrunk by 5.8 percent between 2002 and 2014, while the wages of laundry and dry cleaning workers dropped by 5.0
percent. Comparatively then, field and crop workers saw their wages grow roughly 13 to 14 percent faster than less-skilled workers
in those three occupations during the 2002–2014 time period. While field and crop workers represent the only occupation that
experienced real wage growth during the period we consider, the
divergence between wage patterns for the
field and crop sector and other industries becomes more pronounced beginning in 2008. This
indicates that as the economy has improved and employment has increased, employers in non-
agricultural industries have been able to find enough workers to fill job vacancies without up-
ward pressure on wages. Farmers, on the other hand, faced a hard time finding sufficient
numbers of laborers and have had to bid up wages to attract and retain workers. One sign of
how acute the situation has been in recent years for growers is that farmers have raised the
wages of field and crop workers despite a variety of outside pressures that have made it difficult
for them do so. Between the 1998 and 2012, the amount of fresh fruits and vegetables imported into the United States grew
by 94.6 percent. The amount of fresh fruits grew by 58.1 percent.29 That surge in imports—and the downward pressure they placed
on prices—hindered the ability of farmers to raise the cost of their goods. From 1998 to 2012, for instance, the price of fresh fruits in
the country grew by 39.0 percent— almost 2 percentage points slower than inflation.30 The price of fresh vegetables grew by 41.5
percent.31 Had prices grown more rapidly, it would have been easier for farmers to raise wages for their workers; as it is, they had
to do so despite it being potentially harmful to the bottom line. While fruits and vegetables are still largely harvested by hand,
machines, of course, improve each year, and farmers gain access to tools that can at least somewhat lessen their reliance on labor.
This was certainly true in the 2002 to 2012 period considered here,32 a time when some crops, such as baby leaf lettuce, became
more widely machine harvested.33 However, wage and employment data indicates that the available supply of field and
crop workers has declined even more than any decline in demand for labor that has occurred
since 2002 due to mechanization. Figure 3 shows that the employment of field and crop workers has declined more
rapidly than the employment of other less-skilled workers since 2002.34 A decline in the demand for field and crop
workers due to mechanization would reduce both their employment and relative wages. In
contrast, a reduction in the available supply of needed field and crop workers would reduce their employment but increase their
relative wages substantially. Looking at Tables 3 and 4 together, it is clear that is what has happened, indicating that a real shortage
occurred. It is also worth noting that we observe both a 19 percent decline in employment and a 14.5 percent increase in relative
wages over the period 2002 to 2014 for field and crop workers outside the Midwest.35 If the demand for field and crop workers
remained stable over this period, the correlation described above is consistent with a labor demand “elasticity,” or relationship
between wages and employment, of 1.3 percent. Put simply, this
elasticity means that each 1.3 percent drop in
the available supply of labor results in a one percent increase in the wages paid to field and crop
workers. These co-movements in field and crop worker wages and employment are consistent with economic theory and existing
studies of the demand for farm labor.36 The co-movements in wages and employment of field and crop workers that we observe are
well within the range of elasticity estimates found in a large meta-study on farm labor shortages conducted by researchers at
Clemson University and Colorado State University in 2000.37
High farm wages force the industry to automate and make it impossible for
small farms to keep up.
Plaven 1/9 (George, staff writer for Capital Press, coverer of agricultural news, “As minimum
wage increases, farmers look to adapt”, Published, January 9, 2018, Online, Capital
Press)//SMSUSVA
Farmers are adapting to rising minimum wages around the Northwest through new technology
and more efficient cropping systems, according to industry groups and economists. Minimum wages
are on the rise in cities and states across the country, from California to Maine, as workers and businesses charge headlong into
2018. As of Jan. 1, the minimum wage in Washington state is $11.50 per hour, with planned increases to $13.50 per hour by 2020. In
California, the rate is now $11 per hour for companies with 26 or more employees, and $10.50 per hour for companies with 25 or
fewer employees. By 2023, all companies will pay at least $15 per hour. The minimum wage in Oregon is based on a three-tier
system established during the 2016 short legislative session. Wages won’t increase again until July 1, when the standard rate goes
up to $10.25 per hour, $11.25 in the Portland metro area and $10 in non-urban counties, which include most eastern and southern
Oregon. Farmers, meanwhile, are having to adapt quickly in the face of growing labor costs and
slumping markets. Jenny Dresler, state public policy director for the Oregon Farm Bureau, said
the issue is make-or-break for some operations. “These are tough decisions,” Dresler said. “The goal is to stay in
business, obviously.” Unlike other industries, Dresler said, farms and ranches are price takers as opposed to
price setters, meaning they are largely dependent on trade markets when it comes to return on
product. Without raising prices, Dresler said, farmers must look to cut costs elsewhere, automating where
they can or planting less labor-intensive crops. “It does make agriculture a special case,” she said.
Clark Seavert, a professor with Oregon State University in the Department of Applied Economics, said
the impact of higher minimum wage varies by commodity, but figures the increase in cash costs for cherry
orchards may amount to $700 per acre by 2022, when wage increases are fully implemented.
The labor costs for apple growers in Washington may also increase from $24.93 per bin to $35.54, Seavert
said. “The only thing you can do is try to make cropping systems more efficient, or (integrate) technology to reduce labor,” he said.
“It’s a fact of life. You know it’s coming.” For example, Seavert said farmers may turn to growing more hazelnuts, which have less
labor demand and more mechanized harvesting systems available in the field. Mike Doke, executive director of the Columbia Gorge
Fruit Growers in Hood River, said most farms already pay over minimum wage, but every time the state makes another increase they
are forced to raise everyone’s pay to avoid wage compression. “It’s another added cost of doing business,” Doke said. “I think the
biggest concern is the small growers.” Dresler, with the Oregon Farm Bureau, said the group pushed for a bill in 2017
that would have created tax credits to help with maintenance of worker housing. The proposal ultimately died in committee.
Agriculture is also facing legislative pressure from a proposed cap-and-trade energy policy looming this session, Dresler said,
potentially raising the cost of fuel. “This issue isn’t in a vacuum,” she said. Fruit growers in the Columbia Gorge remain concerned
about pesticide exclusion zones under the federal Worker Protection Standard, which Doke said may result in orchards having to pull
trees and cut deeper into their bottom line. Across the state in rural Malheur County, farms are competing across state lines for
business with neighboring Idaho. Shay Myers, general manager of Owyhee Produce, said the difference in minimum wage does have
an economic impact, though worker demand in nearby Boise has so far kept the disparity to a minimum. “At this point, operating in
both states, what we pay in Oregon versus Idaho is nominal in terms of employee wages,” Myers said. Owyhee Produce grows sweet
potatoes and asparagus in Idaho, and onions in Oregon. Former state representative and now Sen. Cliff Bentz, R-Ontario, pointed to
the development of a special economic development region in Malheur County which has resulted in a new onion rail reload facility
to support Oregon farms. “That was done in part because I explained if they were going to raise the minimum wage on this side of
the (Snake) River, the state needed to invest substantially in infrastructure,” Bentz said. The
future of farming, Dresler
said, will lie in continued innovation and technology to solve the industry’s labor woes. “Farmers
are innovative, and they’re always looking at the best technologies to maintain their operations
into the next generation,” she said.
Further automation of the workforce will cause leadership turnover

Spence 16 (Michael, Professor of Economics at the Stern School of Business, “Economic
decline is leading to political instability. What's the solution?," March 24, 2016. World Economic
Forum, Online)
Over the last 35 years, Western democracies have seen a rapid rise in political instability,
characterized by frequent shifts in governing parties and their programs and philosophies,
driven at least partly by economic transformation and hardship. The question now is how to improve economic
performance at a time when political instability is impeding effective policymaking. In a recent article, one of us (David Brady) shows the
correlation between rising political instability and declining economic performance, pointing out
that countries with below-average economic performance have experienced the most electoral
volatility. More specifically, such instability corresponds with a decline in the share of industrial
or manufacturing employment in advanced countries. Though the extent of the decline varies somewhat across
countries – it has been less sharp in Germany than in the United States, for example – the pattern is fairly ubiquitous. Over the last 15
years, in particular, increasingly powerful digital technologies enabled the automation and
disintermediation of “routine” white- and blue-collar jobs. With advances in robotics, materials, 3D
printing, and artificial intelligence, one can reasonably expect the scope of “routine” jobs that can be
automated to continue expanding. The rise of digital technologies also boosted companies’ ability to manage complex multi-source
global supply chains efficiently, and thus take advantage of global economic integration. As services became increasingly tradable, manufacturing
declined steadily as a share of employment, from 40% in 1960 to about 20% today. But, in
most advanced countries, the
tradable sector did not generate much employment, at least not enough to offset declines in
manufacturing. In the United States, for example, net employment generation in the third of the
economy that produces tradable goods and services was essentially zero over the last two
decades. Partly driven by these trends, the share of national income going to labor, which rose in
the early post-war period, began falling in the 1970s. While globalization and digital
technologies have produced broad-based benefits, in the form of lower costs for goods and an
expanded array of services, they have also fueled job and income polarization, with a declining
share of middle-income jobs and a rising share of lower- and higher-income jobs splitting the
income distribution. The magnitude of this polarization varies by country, owing to disparate social-security systems and policy responses.
Until 2008, when economic crisis roiled much of the world, the concerns associated with rising
inequality were at least partly masked by higher leverage, with government expenditures and wealth effects from
rising asset prices supporting household consumption and propping up growth and employment. When that growth pattern broke
down, economic and political conditions deteriorated rapidly. Most obvious, the drop in growth and
employment has amplified the adverse effects of job and income polarization. Beyond the
obvious practical problems this has raised, it has impinged on many citizens’ sense of identity. In
the post-war industrial era, one could reasonably expect to earn a decent living, support a family, and contribute in a visible way to the country’s
overall prosperity. Being shunted into the non-tradable service sector, with lower income and less job security, caused many to lose self-esteem, as well
as fostering resentment toward the system that brought about the shift. (It did not help matters that the same system bailed out the main driver of the
economic crisis, the financial sector – a move that exposed a stark disparity between exigency and fairness.) While
technology-driven
economic transformation is not new, it has never occurred as rapidly or on as large a scale as it
has over the last 35 years, when it has been turbocharged by globalization. With their experiences and
fortunes changing fast, many citizens now believe that powerful forces are operating outside the control of existing governance structures, insulated
from policy intervention. And, to some extent, they are right. The
result is a widespread loss of confidence in
government’s motivations, capabilities, and competence. This sentiment does not appear to be
mitigated much by a recognition of the complexity of the challenge of maintaining incentives
and dynamism while addressing rising inequality (which, at its most extreme, undermines equality of opportunity and
intergenerational mobility). As Brady points out, during the more stable period immediately following World War II, growth patterns were largely
benign from a distributional perspective, and political parties were largely organized around the interests of labor and capital, with an overlay of
common interests created by the Cold War. As outcomes have become increasingly unequal, there has been a fragmentation of interests across the
electoral spectrum, leading to instability in electoral outcomes, political paralysis, and frequent changes in policy frameworks and direction. This
has several economic consequences. One is policy-induced uncertainty, which, by most accounts, amounts to a
major impediment to investment. Another is the distinct lack of consensus on an agenda to restore growth, reduce
unemployment, reestablish a pattern of inclusiveness, and retain the benefits of global interconnectedness. On one level, it is hard not to
see this as a self-reinforcing destructive cycle. Political instability reduces the likelihood of
defining and implementing a reasonably comprehensive, coherent, and sustained economic-
policy agenda. The resulting persistence of low growth, high unemployment, and rising
inequality fuels continued political instability and fragmentation, which further undermines officials’ capacity to
implement effective economic policies.
Leadership turnover causes great power wars.

Malone 15 (Iris, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Political Science Department at Stanford University,
“Autocratic Leadership Turnover and International Conflict” June 27, 2015. Stanford University,
Online)
A second field of research, largely borne from work on democratic turnovers, argues that leadershipchange heighten
the risk of conflict-involvement for new leaders because of inexperience handling diplomatic
crises, insecurity, and private information about the costs of war. The literature on democratic turnover
argues that the frequency of democratic turnovers perpetually results in less experienced leaders
assuming office. These new leaders lack the knowledge and familiarity to successfully navigate international crises leading to
an increased risk of bargaining failures and an inability to credibly deter outsiders from opportunistic attacks (Daxecker 2007; Bak
and Palmer 2010). Empirical evidence shows that new democratic leaders are particularly prone to
targeted attacks, but this risk erodes the longer they are in office (Gelpi and Grieco 2001; Chiozza and
Goemans 2004b; Potter 2007). 9 Second, leadership turnover can generate private information problems
because of changes in offense-defense balances and missing information about each other’s
foreign policy intentions (Maoz 1996; Walt 1996). In order to develop reputations as tough types, new leaders are
motivated to bluff and misrepresent their preferences. 10 Outsiders, conversely, have an
incentive to challenge new leaders to learn about and gauge their resolve (Wolford 2007). Together,
asymmetric information increases the probability that either side will miscalculate their
opponent’s willingness to use force and lead to a bargaining failure and war. New leaders may
also face diversionary incentives for conflict due to their political insecurity (Enterline and Gleditsch
2000). Facing an imminent risk of removal, leaders are likely to “gamble for resurrection” by initiating
conflict to mobilize domestic support with the hope a foreign victory will ensure their political
survival (Downs and Rocke 1994). General Leopoldo Galtieri’s 1982 invasion of the Falklands four months into his rule is typically
treated as a classical example of diversionary logic. The invasion failed to muster support for Galtieri and he was forced to leave
within days of defeat. Most new democratic leaders generally enjoy comparatively high levels of
personal and political security when they gain office due to institutional design (Bienen and van de
Walle 1991). Gaubatz (1991) notes this relative security means democratic leaders are more likely to
initiate wars early soon after election. This security also means empirical tests on democratic
turnovers have found no link between diversionary conflict and new democratic leaders (Leeds and
Davis 1997; Oneal and Tir 2006). However, unlike democratic leaders, new autocratic leaders remain insecure because they come to
power with limited support and experience to deter additional challenges. Leaders who enter violently or undertake coercive
measures to gain power are likely to lack broad support for their rule rendering them weak and vulnerable to political challenges by
other elites. This
insecurity generates a commitment problem between the new leader and
domestic elites as he would like to commit to acquiesce to the demands of oppositional forces
in order to stabilize his rule, but these commitments are not credible because both parties
recognize that the shock is only temporary (Fearon 2004). Non-democratic leaders may find diversionary conflict an
attractive option because they remain insecure and often face worse personal outcomes after expulsion. Diversionary incentives
may be particularly compelling for autocrats as a favorable outcome can actually lengthen their tenure (Chiozza and Goemans
2004a; Debs and Goemans 2010). Lai and Slater (2006) argue military regimes are more likely to use diversionary conflict because of
pre-existing organizational biases in the junta towards the use of conflict. This complements newer research by Colgan (2013) and
Horowitz and Stam (2014) that revolutionary or militaristic leaders are likely to pursue more risk-acceptant policies that increase the
likelihood of war. Another motivating factor that can increase the appeal of diversionary war is a
leader’s personal concerns for survival after office (Goemans 2000). When institutions lack the
capacity to credibly protect leader after irregular turnovers, leaders facing a forcible removal
may choose to “fight for survival” by rationalizing that the costs of war are comparable to the
costs of expulsion should they fail (Chiozza and Goemans 2011). These theories all suggest the conflict-
propensity of new leaders rises because of inexperience, instability, and private information, but
make a few simplifying assumptions. First, experience-based mechanisms do not accommodate
previous times served in office, the experience other advisors or political elites may bring from
past administrations or the rate at which leaders may acquire this experience to overcome their
hindrance. Variation in incoming experience levels could produce heterogeneous effects among new leaders that moderate their
conflict-propensity. Second, in contrast to the reputational-based predictions posed here, Powell (2004) argues uncertainty
about the perceived costs of conflict can, in some circumstances, introduce a delay in fighting
because outsiders prefer to screen each other with attractive offers in order to learn about the
other state’s true type rather than initiating conflict. Third, support for diversionary war theory remains tepid as
scholars have found little empirical evidence in support and note the theory over-exaggerates the willingness of elites to gamble on
conflict.11 Further, some scholars have determined this vulnerability is likely to ameliorate the risk of conflict due to strategic
avoidance logic (Smith 1996; Fordham 2005). Given a credible belief the vulnerable leader is likely to act belligerent, outsiders may
strategically avoid engaging in conflict for fear of reciprocation or escalation. New
leaders after a turnover may be
hampered by inexperience and insecurity that temporarily change the perceived costs of war in
ways that increase the risk of international conflict. As a consequence, the conflict participation
of new autocratic leaders may temporarily rise as they maneuver to establish tough reputation,
strong diplomatic relations, and domestic support.
Unresolved labor shortages make it impossible for small farms to exist.

Bronars ‘15
In this report, we explore data on the labor challenges that have made the last decade so difficult for fresh fruit and vegetable
growers like Talbott. Consistent with Talbott’s recent experience, we find that in the last decade there has been a huge drop in the
number of new young farm laborers joining the U.S. workforce. In fact, in the parts of the country where the most labor-intensive
fresh fruits and vegetables are grown, the size of the full-time equivalent workforce has shrunk by almost a
fifth. This has created fierce competition among U.S. farmers for the dwindling number of field
laborers that are left—driving up farm wages, leaving huge holes in the workforce, and pushing
smaller farms out of business altogether. It has also changed the face of today’s farmworkers: Currently, more than
one out of every four field laborers is older than age 45, leaving many farmers worryng the situation may only worsen in
the coming years as more workers find less physically demanding jobs or retire.
Large industrial farms destroy the environment and causes extinction.

Good 18 (Kate, the Editorial Manager for One Green Planet and has been with the company
since 2014. She runs editorial operations for the Animal, Earth, Life, and Buzz Monster channels
and coordinates petition content, One Green Planet's newsletter, and assists with social media,
“5 Ways Factory Farming Is Killing the Environment” April 19, 2018. One Good Planet,
Online)//RB
Industrial agriculture is one of the most unsustainable practices of modern civilization. From start to
finish, factory farming is responsible for the abuse of land, animals, and natural resources all for
the express purpose of providing cheap, unhealthy food to the large amounts of people. Industrial
agriculture only really crept its way into normative American culture in the 1970s (thanks to President Nixon’s Agricultural Secretary,
Earl Buttz), but in just four decades, it has spread like a disease across the globe. Our
current global food system is
responsible for one-third of global greenhouse emissions and it completely depends on fossil
fuels for transportation and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Replacing small-scale farms,
where a variety of crops and animals were raised in congruence with single-crop farms and
“animal production facilities,” factory farming has wrought economic problems, public health
concerns, inhumane conditions for billions of animals, and a huge carbon debt on the world’s
agricultural system. With rising concerns over food security and the future of our rapidly deteriorating environment, more
attention has been put on the multitudinous ways factory farming contributes to these issues. It is easy to fall into the traps of
contradictory information that Big-Ag manufactures to justify their unsustainable practices, but I urge you not to believe a word of
it! Below are the top five ways that factory farming harms the planet — read, learn, and pass it on! 1. Air
Pollution Over 37
percent of methane emissions result from factory farming. Methane has a global warming
potential 20 times higher than carbon dioxide. But that doesn’t make the carbon dioxide
emissions any less staggering…the fossil fuels used in energy, transportation, and synthetic
pesticides/fertilizers emits 90 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. On a
lesser note, factory farming also releases harmful compounds like hydrogen sulfide and ammonia
that can cause immediate negative health effects in humans. 2. Deforestation In the United States
alone, over 260 million acres of forest have been cleared to make room for crop fields, most of
which are used to exclusively grow livestock feed. This is not a practice that only occurs in the
U.S., land clearing in Brazil to grow chicken feed is responsible for the destruction of about 3
million acres of rainforest. And these numbers only account for land cleared to feed animals.
Clearing land to grow soybeans in the Amazon rainforest is responsible for clearing over 100 million hectares of forest, releasing
enough carbon into the atmosphere to increase the rate of global warming by 50 percent. 3. WaterPollution Industrial
agriculture sucks up 70 percent of the world’s fresh water supplies. To follow up that staggering
number, the EPA estimates that 75 percent of all water-quality problems in America’s rivers and
streams. Water polluted with agricultural run-off can destroy whole ecosystems and be toxic, if
not lethal to humans and animals alike. Industrial livestock farms, known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations
(sounds warm and fuzzy, right?), contain massive cesspools that store animal waste. These “factory-farm lagoons” have
been known to leak into adjacent waterways. Nitrates, dangerous microbes, and drug-resistant
bacteria run rampant in these lagoons. When these by-products get into local water ways, they
cause toxic algae blooms which lead to “dead zones” and massive fish kills. High levels of
nitrates in drinking water can cause spontaneous abortions and blue baby syndrome and
bacteria outbreaks from agricultural water pollution is responsible for several disease outbreaks
across the United States. Click here to see how levels of animal waste impact your state’s water supplies. 4.
Monocultures Monocultures in industrial farming poses an incredible threat to future food
security across the globe. Single-crop farms are one of the “ingenious” developments that has
come out of industrial agriculture. To support the livestock industry, a small group of
“commodity” crops have taken up the majority of the world’s agricultural land. In the United
States, corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans are planted at unprecedented rate, yet only a small
percentage of these crops feed people. Planting millions of acres of genetically similar plants has become a global
phenomenon due to the high-yields that these plants can produce under certain conditions. The problem with this, however, comes
when environmental conditions change (good thing our climate is so stable…) or in the form of a crop epidemic (the potato famine
sound familiar?). Large-scale
farming of monocultures depends on massive amounts of synthetic
fertilizers to replace nutrients that are continually drained from soil. This practice also requires
high levels of synthetic pesticides to stave off insects that are attracted to certain crops. If
farmers did not receive subsidies for growing commodity crops, then crop fields could be
populated with a diverse mixture of plant species that can naturally fix nitrogen into soil and
control insects. 5. Fossil Fuels and Carbon Emissions In the satirical web series “Farmed and Dangerous,”
industrial farms begin feeding livestock “petro-pellets,” animal food that is really concentrated
pills of fossil fuels. While this outrageous practice does not happen in real life (…yet), it does
highlight how heavily factory farms rely on fossil fuels to raise animals and grow crops. Synthetic
fertilizers and pesticides are derived from petroleum, the majority of crops grown with the use
of these chemicals are turned into animals feed – hence the comedic irony of cutting out the
crop-middle man and just feeding animals straight petro. Between transportation, synthetic
fertilizers/pesticides, and the incredible amount of energy it takes to run Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, factory farms
uses about 5.5 gallons of fossils fuels per acre. The
average farm in the United States spans 418 acres,
meaning it will devour about 2,300 gallons of fossil fuels. Just think about how many thousands
of farms there are across the globe.
Agriculture Advantage
The current Immigration system creates a dangerous working environment that
risks collapsing the agricultural system. A pathway to citizenship is key to
reform working conditions and recruit agricultural workers.
Schorn 17 (Tracy, is , October 2017 “The Hands That Feed Us: Immigration Policy and the
Nation's Food Supply “
https://libproxy.law.umich.edu:2132/HOL/Page?collection=barjournals&handle=hein.barjournal
s/washinglyr0032&id=85)
Under the U.S. Department of Justice’s new immigration enforcement guidelines,

undocumented farmworkers are priorities for deportation, a situation that does not bode well
for the agriculture industry, or the farmworkers themselves. The relatively small percentage of
the workforce on H-2A visas cannot possibly make up for the labor shortfall. “The issue of
immigration status is critically important for farmworkers,” says Adrienne DerVartanian, an attorney and
director of immigration and labor rights at the nonprofit Farmworker Justice. “So many of farmworkers’ conditions
are linked to their immigration status. [Undocumented status] makes it difficult for workers to
improve their wages and working conditions.” The H-2A visa is not a solution but a “very
troubling program,” says DerVartanian. The structure “lends itself to abuse” because it ties workers to one
employer. If the worker loses their job, they lose their ability to work in the United States. Often
workers gain entry to the jobs through a middleman to whom they are indebted, which “makes
them more desperate to keep their jobs” and tolerate abuse, she says. DerVartanian also rejects the notion
that a domestic workforce won’t do farm work. “There are still U.S. workers . . . who want these jobs, and it’s important they have
access to the jobs. We’ve seen employers who have a preference for H-2A workers [because] they can’t leave. [The employers]
handpick a young male workforce who are not here with families and who are housed with the employer. As a captive workforce,
they must work when the employer asks them to,” she says. Immigration crackdowns are creating a “very high
level of fear,” DerVartanian adds. “We’ve seen a 38 percent increase in arrests, and the anti-immigration rhetoric has an impact
on farmworkers and their communities. That plays out when workers don’t seek health care, don’t bring
their children to school, or won’t speak up about wage theft and working conditions.” The fear is
“harmful to our whole food system,” DerVartanian says. “If workers can’t speak up about conditions
that may impact the safety of our food, we’re all affected. We should all care about what’s
happening with farmworkers. These workers are doing difficult, dangerous work. They produce
food in difficult conditions — the work is arduous and repetitive. We strongly support
legalization for the current workforce.” Protections granted to other U.S. workers, like a
minimum wage, overtime pay, or occupational safety and standards, have often been excluded
from the agricultural sector, making the employment law issues surrounding farmworkers —
legal and undocumented — exceptionally thorny. “Farmworkers face a lot of discrimination in our labor and
employment laws,” says DerVartanian. “[The laws] were rooted in discrimination against African Americans who were historically
doing the farm work in the South.” Farmworker Justice supports recently proposed legislation, the Agricultural Worker Program Act,
which would shield undocumented farmworkers from deportation and give them a pathway to citizenship. The act was introduced in
May 2017 by Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris of California, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Michael Bennet of
Colorado, and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii. Under the act, farmworkers who have worked in agriculture for at least
100 days in each of the past two years may earn lawful “blue card” status. Farmworkers who
maintain blue card status for the next three or five years, depending on the total hours worked
in agriculture, would be eligible to adjust to a green card or legal permanent residency. “It’s a
challenging time for immigration reform,” says DerVartanian, “but there’s a lot of recognition of the value
farmworkers bring and the impact to our [agricultural] system if we don’t keep a steady labor
supply.” Some policymakers recognize that the country needs the economic contribution of
undocumented immigrants to state and federal tax base. According to a recent report by the Institute on
Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants contribute 8 percent of their annual income
to state and local taxes — or collectively $11.7 billion a year. “To put this in perspective, the top 1 percent of
taxpayers pay an average nationwide effective tax rate of just 5.4 percent,” the report states. Sequeira, the Maryland
immigration attorney, will be there to field calls when the day comes that undocumented immigrants are granted a pathway
to citizenship. “It’s a good time to be an immigration lawyer,” she says. In these uncertain times, she’s encouraged other lawyers to
expand their practices to include immigration. She’s doubtful
a domestic workforce comprised entirely of U.S.
citizens will be adequate to meet the need for farm labor currently supplied by immigrants. “[Not
enough] U.S. workers are willing to do that job in intense heat, with strict long hours and no air conditioning,” Sequeira says, not to
mention low wages and the nonpermanent, seasonal nature of farm labor. “I feel for [immigrant farmworkers]. If
we didn’t
have them, we’d be paying twice to three times the cost for our food. We owe these guys
thanks.”
Lack of protections for undocumented workers threatens public health and puts
national food security at risk
CLF 17 The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future works with students, educators,
researchers, policymakers, advocacy organizations and communities to build a healthier, more
equitable, and resilient food system. [https://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-
institutes/johns-hopkins-center-for-a-livable-future/news-room/News-Releases/2017/lack-
protections-for-undocumented-workers-puts-public-health-food-system-at-risk.html]
United States immigration reform efforts should address serious health risks faced by
undocumented agricultural workers, according to a new report released today by the Johns Hopkins
Center for a Livable Future (CLF) in the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental
Health and Engineering. Researchers argue that the current systemic lack of protections for
undocumented workers threatens both public health and national food security. According to the
report, health risks linked to agricultural work include pesticide exposure, injuries, poor air
quality, contact with animal waste, exposure to antibiotic resistant bacteria, and exposure to
novel strains of the flu virus. Additional factors like frequent migration, poor housing conditions,
lack of access to healthcare, and fear of job loss or deportation make undocumented immigrants
and their families especially vulnerable. “The significant mental and physical health risks
undocumented agricultural workers face demand urgent attention and action,” said Claire Fitch,
lead author of the report and Program Manager of CLF’s Food System Policy Program. “Until workers have
authorization to work in the U.S. and other legal protections such as the right to organize, wages and
working conditions will remain depressed for all U.S. agricultural workers.” According to the report,
protecting the health and safety of agricultural workers is critically important for the U.S. food
system, which relies heavily on the work of undocumented immigrants. An estimated 50-75
percent of the nation’s two million farmworkers are undocumented. Hundreds of thousands more
undocumented workers are employed in slaughter plants and food-processing facilities. Groups like the
American Farm Bureau Federation increasingly acknowledge that the impermanent, underrepresented,
and at-risk agricultural workforce makes the industry susceptible to worker shortages, which cost
American farms more than $300 million in 2010. Researchers argue that comprehensive immigration
reform is needed to protect workers, the U.S. food system, and public health. Key steps that
policymakers can take toward this goal include: Extending eligibility for health insurance benefits for
workers and their families Removing exemptions for agricultural workers and increasing minimum wage
in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) Mandating that agricultural employers provide full workers’
compensation coverage Removing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) exemption
for the number of employees required for enforcement and inspection Ensuring that agricultural workers
and their families have access to safe, affordable housing Replacing the H-2A visa with a variation of the
Blue Card program Expanding and increasing funding for the National Institute for Occupational Safety
and Health (NIOSH) and OSHA Strengthening enforcement of human trafficking violations and sexual
harassment in agriculture Strengthening protections for workers who report hazards, exposures, and
health conditions, and protecting workers’ right to organize “Vilifying political rhetoric and enforcement
actions that aim to punish undocumented immigrants fail to confront Americans’ reliance on these
workers for the food they eat,” said Bob Martin, co-author of the report and director of CLF’s Food
System Policy Program. “We need to change the debate and discuss immigration reform in a way
that acknowledges these workers’ contributions to our food system, prioritizes occupational
health and safety, and empowers workers to demand fair and safe working conditions.”
Lack of skilled immigrant labor will cause higher food prices and food shortage
Thorn 17 Bret Thorn is responsible for reporting on culinary trends in foodservice. He joined
Nation’s Restaurant News in 1999, after spending about five years as a journalist in Thailand,
where he wrote business and food stories. His columns in NRN won the 2006 Jesse H. Neal
National Business Journalism Award for best staff-written editorial or opinion column. A magna
cum laude graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., with a bachelor’s degree in history,
Thorn also studied at Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine in Paris.
[http://www.supermarketnews.com/news/lack-skilled-immigrant-labor-could-cause-higher-
food-prices]
American
U.S. relies on international trade and immigrant workforce for food supply Bret Thorn 2 | Mar 22, 2017
agriculture has long depended on immigrant labor — particularly labor by undocumented
workers. A 2014 study commissioned by the American Farm Bureau Federation put the percentage of undocumented farm
laborers at between 50 percent and 70 percent of the total workforce. President Donald Trump has vowed to crack down on illegal
immigration. Shortly after his election in November, he told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that he planned to deport millions of undocumented
immigrants immediately. “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members,
drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or
we are going to incarcerate,” Trump said. He then said that once that initial group was eliminated and “the border is secure,”
immigration officers would make a “determination” about the remaining undocumented workers. The
current admiration’s
rhetoric on illegal immigration and reports on crackdowns on undocumented workers have
brought jitters not only to immigrant workers, but also to their employers. It’s unclear exactly what a
crackdown on labor would do to produce pricing, particularly considering other trade-related and taxation issues that are up in the
air. Those potential initiatives include mentions by the Trump administration of a tax of up to 20 percent on imports from Mexico to
pay for the proposed border wall, and a new corporate tax structure proposed by Congress that would give tax breaks to exporters
and remove tax exemptions from importers. The border adjustment tax would basically change how goods are taxed, taxing them
where they’re consumed rather than where they’re produced. Several companies have come out in support of a border adjustment
tax of some kind, according to the American Made Coalition. The group lists MillerCoors and Blue, Diamond Growers among the list
of supporters. “While
our global competitors continue to improve their tax codes by cutting rates
and encouraging investment and job creation, our tax code remains frozen in place. The result is
lost investment, fewer jobs and lower wages,” the American Made Coalition states in its press materials. Although
the idea behind the tax is to encourage domestic production, the National Retail Federation opposes it, saying in a statement on
Feb. 28 that the costs on “everyday necessities like food, gas, clothing and prescription medicine” for the average American
household would go up by $1,700 in the first year. American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall also expressed concerns
about the tax. “We’re still studying that tax reform, and we’re hoping some common sense comes to that area. We want to make
sure it doesn’t roll over into a trade situation and cause a trade war that would not be good for anyone in agriculture,” Duvall told
agriculture publication AgFax. DeWayne Dove, vice president of purchasing for purchasing cooperative SpenDifference, said items
besides avocadoes (the U.S. imports 75% of the fruit from Mexico, according to the USDA) that would be affected by a tax on
imports from Mexico would include Brussels sprouts, strawberries, tomatoes, “wet vegetables” such as broccoli and cilantro,
peppers and squash. “The earliest experts say [such a tax] could occur, based on the need to work itself through the legislature and
then be executed, is the end of 2017,” Dove said. With the more than $115 billion in agricultural imports, according to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, possibly being squeezed (of which $9.5 billion are fresh fruit and vegetables from Mexico), laborers in
the United States become even more important, and past crackdowns on undocumented workers have not gone well. After Georgia
passed HB 87 in 2011, economists and marketing professors at the University of Georgia surveyed farmers and calculated that the
state’s farming sector lost $140 million due to labor shortages that meant crops weren’t harvested. Add to that other segments
affected, such as distributors and retailers, and the figure was estimated to be as high as $400 million. “The potential impacts to the
supply chain of zealous enforcement are real,” said Joe Kefauver, managing partner of public affairs firm Align Public Strategies. “The
White House may want to look at what happened in Georgia and other Southern agricultural states. … [A] significant portion of their
crops went un-harvested and literally died in the fields, greatly impacting both price and availability of products,” Kefauver said.
“Those jobs were not back-filled by non-immigrants as anticipated by state lawmakers, and, in fact, were not filled at all.” Those jobs
couldn’t have been back-filled, according to Kathy Means, vice president of industry relations at the Produce Marketing Association,
noting that farm workers are skilled laborers performing jobs that native-born Americans don’t
want. In a speech on Feb. 28, Trump advocated implementing a merit-based immigration system focused on skilled workers.
Experts say farm workers would fit into that category. “It does take a special person to get out and work in the
fields in the hot sun, stooping, lifting. It’s just hard work,” said Charles Hall, executive director of the Georgia
Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association. He added that you have to know what you’re doing to harvest properly. “You have to
know when that peach or tomato or pepper is ripe. Someone who is not skilled with that sense of touch, they’re going to be picking
product that’s not ripe, and consumers will not appreciate it.” Since farm workers are paid by the amount that they pick, he said, it’s
not uncommon for skilled workers to earn $15 to $18 per hour. Unskilled workers would earn less, he said, making the job
undesirable to locals. Produce isn’t the only food likely to be affected by a labor shortage. The National
Milk Producers Federation said half of the workers on U.S. dairy farms are immigrants, and, according to a report released in
September 2015, losing
them would increase retail milk prices by 90 percent and cost the U.S.
economy $32.1 billion in economic output. However, it should be noted the survey does not distinguish between
undocumented and documented immigrant workers. Means of the Produce Marketing Association said her industry is used to
adjusting to changes in everything from weather to labor to economic policy. “We deal with everything from freezes to hurricanes to
port strikes. … It’s not that [the current situation] is situation-normal, it’s that the produce industry is highly adaptable,” she said.
Illustration: SN/Anna Kang But it’s a global industry, and disruptions in long-established networks might not just devastate individual
farmers and packing lines, but pricing as well. “It’s an inter-tangled web,” said David Anderson, a livestock and dairy economist at
Texas A&M University. He noted that the United States imports about one million head of calves from Mexico, which go to ranches
and then to feedlots and then to packing plants, from which they could then be exported back to Mexico or other countries that buy
beef from the United States. “We’ve
got both sides of that, benefiting from importing feeder cattle,
which helps us keep up our processing capacity, and then we export the [finished] beef back,”
Anderson said. None of these factors takes into consideration the possibility of retaliatory
tariffs by other countries, he said. “I think in the food context, that’s really important,” he said.
The impact on food prices is enormous

Garfield 17 Leanna is a reporter at Business Insider, covering innovations in urban design,
architecture, and environmental sustainability. Her work has also appeared in Slate,
Entrepreneur, The Independent, Inc, and the World Economic Forum.
[http://www.businessinsider.com/trumps-immigration-agriculture-food-policy-2017-1]
Donald Trump has been very clear about his intentions to deport an estimated 11 million
undocumented immigrants in the US and build a wall along the southern border. Besides the human cost, Trump's
anti-immigration stance could also strain American farms. Of the 1.5 to 2 million people working
in agriculture today, at least 50% to 70% of farm workers are undocumented, according to a
recent report by the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF). If the agriculture sector were to
eliminate all undocumented workers, the US would be left with a $30 to $60 billion food
production loss, the researchers write. Retail food prices would increase by 5% to 6% on average, with some categories seeing
higher jumps than others. For example, the National Milk Producers Federation expects a 90% increase in milk prices if the country
removes the immigrant labor supply, Modern Farmer reports. The report also states that few
US workers would be able
to fill these farm labor jobs, mainly because they are grueling. Shifts in 100-degree Farenheit weather over
12-hour shifts without overtime pay are common. The demand for farm labor far exceeds the local supply of
workers who are skilled, legal citizens, according to the AFBF report. This is especially true in agriculture-heavy parts of
states like California and Texas. Some parts of the US are already experiencing the effects of stricter immigration laws on farms. In
2011, after
Georgia passed an immigration enforcement law called HB 87, the state experienced
an estimated $140 million in agricultural losses. Farms in Georgia were about 40% short of the number of workers
they needed, according to a University of Georgia study. As Quartz notes, one farmer let a third of his crops die in his field because
he couldn't find enough workers. Georgia's former governor, Sonny Perdue — whom Trump nominated for the Secretary of
Agriculture position on January 18 — will be in charge of mitigating all this.
Food prices are skyrocketing now.

Yaukey 17 (John, Economics analyst, “When will food prices stop rising? No time soon, experts
say” January 2017. ABC News, Online)//RB
Unfortunately, for
millions of cash-strapped consumers, the cost of putting a meal on the table or a
beer on the bar is likely to remain high for years, economists say. Typically, food price swings go through
cycles that can last a few years. That was the case in the 1970s, when food prices were pushed up by high energy costs, decreased
supplies and regional droughts. But those forces were fairly elastic, and prices contracted again. From the mid-1970s until recently,
food prices on average fell dramatically. This
spike is different. "Some of the reasons are rooted in the new
world economy," said Edward McLaughlin, an expert on food retailing at Cornell University. Those reasons include
the use of grains for fuel and the developing world's increasing demand for a higher-protein
diet, which also cuts into grain supplies. Add those factors to more typical trends, like soaring
energy costs, and it's clear the latest jump in prices has unique twists for consumers the world
over, economists say. Perhaps most worrisome, some leading causes of the recent price increases show no signs of receding,
prompting some economists to warn of "the end of cheap food." The Agriculture Department expects U.S. food
prices to rise beyond inflation for the next few years. "The question now is the rate of the increase," said
Ephriam Leibtag, an economist with the department's Economic Research Service. Overall, food prices in this country
have gone up almost 5% during the past year, the highest annual increase in almost 20 years,
according to the Labor Department. Some staples have risen well beyond that. Egg prices have shot up
more than 30%, dairy prices have jumped 12% and the price of baked goods has risen 9%. In 2008, the consumer price
index for all food is projected to increase 4% to 5% as retailers pass on higher energy and
commodity costs to consumers. That's almost twice the inflation rate of about 2.6%. Despite the
recent price hikes, Americans spend less of their income on food now — about 9% — than they have historically. In the 1950s, they
spent about 21% on food, according to The Economist magazine. But that doesn't mean much to shoppers trying to keep pantries
stocked. "The prices just inch up every week without stop," Joanne Krebble said while shopping at the Brookville
Market in Washington. "It's everywhere you look."
US agricultural production key to global food supply.

Huguley 17 (Shelley, has earned an Agriculture Communications degree from Texas Tech
University and has worked in numerous ag media positions, October 24 2017, “U.S. dominates
agricultural exports, NAFTA ‘very important’ for agriculture” ,
http://www.southwestfarmpress.com/legislative/us-dominates-agricultural-exports-nafta-very-
important-agriculture nicwha)
About 35 percent, or one-third, of U.S. farm income comes from this nation’s export market, making trade
with other countries not simply a good idea, but “very, very important,” says Dr. Luis Ribera, professor and director of the Center for
North American Studies at Texas A&M University. The U.S. is the largest agricultural exporter in the world, he
notes, shipping $135 billion in commodities in 2016. “We depend on agricultural markets,” he said at
the Rural Economic Outlook Conference at Stillwater, Okla. “We need to maintain the markets that we have —
and possibly expand them.” In 2015, 71 percent of the cotton grown in the U.S. was exported,
along with more than 55 percent of sorghum and rice. U.S. agricultural imports are a multi-billion
dollar industry, accounting for $115 billion in 2016. Of the coffee and limes Americans consume, 100 percent are
imported. “What would happen if we didn’t have coffee?” Ribera asked, getting a laugh from conference attendees when he jokingly
answered: “Chaos!” Americans spend about 6.4 percent of their consumer dollars on food. Contrast that with countries like Nigeria,
where consumers spend 56.4 percent of their income to eat. “The 6.4 percent U.S. consumers spend is the cheapest in the whole
world,” Ribera says. “That means we cover our food needs with only 6.4 percent of our income, leaving the rest to buy other things,
like gadgets, or homes, or travel. With 25 percent of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP), trade
with the U.S. is of
great interest to other countries, he says. “We have 350 million people [in the U.S.] with money, who control about 25
percent of the world economy, so there’s no question about why other countries want to get their
products into the U.S. market.” And that’s where the North American Free Trade Agreement comes into play. NAFTA,
the trade pact between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, signed into law in 1993 during the Clinton administration, was designed to
reduce tariffs and tariff barriers, as well as increase trade in services among countries. And, according to Ribera, it has been very
successful in fulfilling its objectives. “We have quadrupled our exports to NAFTA countries, while only tripling exports to the rest of
the world,” Ribera says. “NAFTA is very important for U.S. agriculture. There are a lot of things about it that can be improved, but
there’s no question it has been successful in terms of agricultural trade.” U.S.
agricultural exports have increased
from $46.2 billion in 1994 to $134.9 billion in 2016, a 192 percent increase, he says. During the same
period, U.S. agricultural exports to Canada and Mexico grew from $10 billion to $38 billion, a 288 percent increase, making those
nations the second and third largest markets for our exports. With all the discussion by the Trump administration about
renegotiating NAFTA, Ribera says, it is important to point out that, if agriculture were the main issue, he thinks it would be easier to
get an agreement done. But agriculture constitutes only about 7 percent of trade between the three countries. “So basically, non-
agriculture issues have dominated the NAFTA discussion,” he says. “There are some agricultural issues — for example, the Canadian
dairy, poultry and egg supply system, but those are smaller issues compared to the larger issues of, say, the automobile industry.
“The country of origin rule is a main issue of the Trump administration. In order for a car to move between the three countries and
be considered tariff-free, about 62.5 percent of the parts have to be produced in NAFTA countries. The Trump administration wants
to increase that percentage to near 85 percent, or have a specific quota on how much needs to be produced in the U.S. for that car
to be sold in the U.S. tariff-free.”
Food storage causes war and state collapse ---- historical quantitative studies
prove.
Zhang et al 07 (David, (Associate Prof. Geography @ U. Hong Kong), Peter Brecke, (Associate
Prof. @ Sam Nunn School of Int’l. Affairs @ GIT), Harry F. Lee, (Dept. Geography @ U. Hong
Kong), Yuan-Qing He, (Cold and Arid Regions Env’tal and Engineering Research Inst. @ Chinese
Academy of Science), and (Jane Zhang, (Dept. Anthro. @ U. College London), Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science, “Global climate change, war, and population decline in recent
human history”, 104:49, p. 19214-19219)
Recently, important attempts have been made to use highresolution, reconstructed paleo-climatic data to elucidate individual cases
of prehistoric cultural/population collapses caused by agricultural failure in the Middle East, United States, and China (2–4).
Webster (5) pointed out that warfare was an adaptive ecological choice in prehistoric societies
with limited resources and growing populations, although he was not able to use systematic, scientific data to
support his conclusion. The concept of environmental conflict has been suggested by several researchers, but they focus only on
conflicts caused by shortterm climate variations and meteorological events (6–9). Galloway (10) found that long-term climate
change controlled population size in middle-latitude areas. However, his finding lacked quantitative precision because of the
absence of highresolution climate records at the time. We studied a long span of Chinese history and found
that the number of war outbreaks and population collapses in China is significantly correlated
with Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperature variations and that all of the periods of nationwide unrest,
population collapse, and dynastic change occurred in the cold phases of this period (11–13). As a result of recent scientific
breakthroughs in establishing more precise paleo-climatic records [see supporting information (SI) Text],
we extend the earlier study to the global and continental levels between A.D. 1400 and A.D. 1900, during the
Little Ice Age (LIA; see SI Text). The hypothesis we propose posits that long-term climate change has significant direct effects on
land-carrying capacity (as measured by agricultural production). Fluctuation of the carrying capacity in turn affects the food supply
per capita. Ashortage of food resources in populated areas increases the likelihood of armed
conflicts, famines, and epidemics, events that thus reduce population size. As a feedback mechanism,
population decline has a dominant tendency to increase the food supply per capita (seen in
decreasing food prices), which results in relative peace and fast population growth. The interactions among
these components in a social system create an important rhythm of macrohistory in agricultural societies. The simplified pathways
of the above chain reactions and feedback loops are represented in SI Fig. 3. With respect to the character of the causal pathways,
the relation between climate and agricultural production has been demonstrated by many empirical studies (10, 14). Under
ecological stress, adaptive choices for animal species are the reduction of population size, migration, and dietary change.
Depopulation typically takes place through starvation and cannibalism. Humans have more pathways, social mechanisms, to adapt
to climate change and mitigate ecological stress. Besides migration, they include warfare, economic change, innovation, trade, and
peaceful resource redistribution. We believe that in late agrarian society established political boundaries in populated areas limited
mass migration; the result of such mass migration, when it occurred, often was war. Economic change was a costly and slow process
that involved changing cultures, technologies, and habits. When the speed of human innovation and its transfer were not fast
enough to keep pace with rapid ecological change, famine and disease became difficult to avoid. Trade and redistribution under the
condition of shrinking resources would not help much because the ecological stress was at a global or very large regional scale.
Finally, humansocial development in the form of international and national institutions was not
strong enough to buffer the tensions caused by food resource scarcity. Therefore, war and
population decline became common consequences of climate-induced ecological stress in the late
preindustrial era. Recent developments in resource and environmental studies (e.g., refs. 8, 9, 15, and
16) suggest that limited resources and environmental degradation would have caused armed
conflicts in human history. However, these perceived climate–war– population decline sequences have never been
substantiated with scientific evidence consisting of long-term time series. In the following sections, we verify our hypothesis and
evaluate the role of climate change on war outbreak and population decline with empirical data at global and continental scales.
Those wars go nuclear.

Campbell and Weitz 2007 Kurt M. CEO and co-founder of the Center for a New American
Security and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asia and the Pacific and Richard is
a senior fellow and director of program management at Hudson Institute, “Conclusions” CSIS,
November, p. 95, [http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/071105_ageofconsequences.pdf]
In the case of severe climate change, projected massive nonlinear events in the global environment give rise to massive nonlinear
societal events. In this scenario, nations
around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change
and pernicious challenges, such as pandemic disease and water and food shortages. The internal cohesion
of nations will be under great stress, including in the United States, due to a dramatic rise in migration, changes in
agricultural patterns and water availability, and wealthier members of society pulling away from the rest of the population.
Protests, civil unrest, and violent upheaval of governments are possible. The flooding of coastal
communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to
challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources and even
territory, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely, and nuclear war is possible. Globalization could halt and alliances
collapse.
Dangerous agricultural working conditions create an environment for antibiotic

resistant bacteria to develop and spread.
Fitch, Hricko, and Martin 17[Claire, Director of Outreach at Farm Forward and a Masters of
Science in Public Health, Carolyn, a research program manger with the Food System Policy
Program and has a Master of Public Health degree in Global Environmental Sustainability and
Public Health, Robert, Direct of Food Systme Policy at Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future,
Spring 2017, “Public Health, Immigration Reform and Food System Change,”
https://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/johns-hopkins-center-for-a-livable-
future/_pdf/research/clf_reports/public-health-immigration-reform-and-food-system-
change.pdf]ZZ and Box
The adverse health effects and risks associated with working in U.S. food production and
processing systems may follow workers to their homes and communities. The majority of
undocumented farmworkers are married and have children (though their family members may
not live with them or in the U.S.), and 49% live in households with children under the age of 18.7
Moreover, the majority of migrant, seasonal, and immigrant farmworkers stay or live
immediately within agricultural areas, either in on-farm dwellings or labor camps, or in private
market single-family houses or apartments.12 While the risk of workplace injury may not transfer to the families or
peers of agricultural and meat processing workers, these populations may face other health hazards related to
the agriculture industry, including pesticide exposure, poor air quality, contaminated water, and
increased pathogen presence. Children living in agricultural communities are especially
susceptible to pesticide exposure and have an increased risk of exposure to environmental
contaminants, as compared to adults, due to their physiology and behavior (e.g. crawling and
putting objects in the mouth).125-127 Multiple studies, conducted across various U.S.
agricultural regions, have detected pesticide metabolites in the urine of children of farmworker
households.126-130 Exposure to organophosphorus pesticides—detected in the urine of pregnant
women and children living in agricultural communities130—has been associated with decreased
mental development and attention deficits.131,132 A 2012 study found an inverse association between birth weight
and the number 21 of pesticides detected in cord blood, leading to calls for more research on the effects of exposure to mixtures of
multiple pesticides in addition to individual pesticides.133 Residents
of agricultural areas may also be exposed
to air and water contaminated by agricultural inputs and wastes. Just as workers may be exposed to
particulate matter, gases, VOCs, pathogens, and pesticides via air, people living near farms and/or animal production operations are
also exposed to agricultural air pollution and may experience health impacts similar to those observed among workers.62,134-136
Odor from animal production operations has been found to induce eye, nose, and throat
irritation, trigger nausea, vomiting, headaches, stress, and negative mood, and disrupt nearby
residents’ daily activities.136 Often, animal production is concentrated in rural, low-income areas; swine feeding
operations, for example, are located disproportionately in low-income communities of color,137 and researchers have
predicted that a fear of reprisals—in areas where employment options are limited—may
discourage residents from reporting malodor or related health concerns to their representative
officials.138 Harmful nutrients, drug residues, pathogens, and other contaminants from crop fields and animal operations can run
off into surface water or leach into groundwater,139 putting those who rely on those water sources at risk. Environmental
inequities have been observed in drinking water quality, with higher nitrate levels found in
community water systems that serve areas in which a larger percentage of the population is
Latino and homeownership rates are lower.140 Residents of agricultural areas and workers presumably face a
similar level of risk associated with water contamination by manure and agricultural wastes, since exposure to
contaminated drinking and/or recreational water often happens near the farm, though workers may
face less or varying exposure depending on whether they live near the farm and if they are traveling from farm to farm. Families
and nearby residents of agricultural workers may also face a greater risk of contracting an
antimicrobial-resistant infection, as workers in animal production have been found to have a
greater risk of carrying antimicrobial-resistant bacteria than the general population,70 and
studies have suggested that workers may transport resistant bacteria out of the workplace to
their families and communities.70,141 There has been a documented shift in farm labor housing in recent years, with
fewer employers offering on-farm housing or labor camps and more workers seeking private market housing, which is not subject to
federal regulation.12 Poor housing conditions in agricultural areas may place children and families HEALTH IMPACTS EXTEND 22 of
farmworkers at increased risk of certain health problems, and the housing environments in which people live early in life may have
long-term negative health effects.142 Many
farmworker households are located near agricultural fields,
and pesticide drift and residues have been documented in these homes; since children live in
the majority of these households, they are thought to be at risk of pesticide-related illness and
developmental disorders.127,130 Crowded living conditions have also been found to increase
residents’ exposure to environmental toxicants and communicable disease.143 The California
Agricultural Workers Health Study found that overcrowding is common in farm labor housing
and that extremely overcrowded conditions are prevalent when multiple families share an
apartment or house (41% of male participants and 31% of female participants in the survey
reported sharing housing with unrelated persons).144 While the majority of participants reported renting, 11%
lived in informal dwellings—a place of residence not recognized by the U.S. Postal Service or county tax assessors—including mobile
homes, garages, sheds, abandoned equipment or animal facilities, or cars.145 As the authors of a review of housing characteristics
of farmworker families in North Carolina concluded, “Farmworker housing is generally characterized as crowded, in disrepair, lacking
basic facilities (e.g., indoor plumbing) and appliances (e.g., washing machines, fully functioning stovetops), located near fields in
which pesticides are applied, and costly.”145 Sanitation issues have been documented in both employer-provided and private
housing. In
many cases, there are no laundry facilities, ventilation is poor, and plumbing is
inadequate or nonexistent.44 This means that contaminated clothing worn at work may be
washed in the same sink or basin in which food is prepared, or in the bathtub where children are
bathed.44 And when agricultural workers cannot find or afford housing, they may resort to sleeping outdoors or in tents or
cars.44 These private housing situations may be hidden from public view or government officials, so it is difficult to assess the
sanitation risks facing workers and their families. Aware of these issues, the Department of Labor announced in July 2016 that it
would provide $81 million in grants through the National Farmworker Jobs Program to assist migrant and seasonal farmworkers with
training, employment, and housing.146 Poor worker health and hygiene are frequently linked to foodborne outbreaks, as reflected
in food safety policy and discussions. But worker health and hygiene are also subject to social determinants of health and influenced
by workers’ limited economic resources, which may lead to increased vulnerability to disease.147 Recent
research has
called for a shift in the food safety 23 narrative to address the broader social and structural
factors influencing worker health and hygiene.147 Efforts to address food safety through
improved worker health must not only focus on increasing workers’ education of health and
hygiene practices, but must also confront the socioeconomic factors and poor and unsafe
working and housing conditions that may lead to food safety concerns in the workplace.
ABR diseases cause the apocalypse.

Sample 13 [Ian, science correspondent at the guardian, 1/23/13, “Antibiotic-resistant disease
pose ‘apocalyptic’ threat top expert says,”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jan/23/antibiotic-resistant-diseases-apocalyptic-
threat]ZZ
Britain's most senior medical adviser has warned MPs that the rise in drug-resistant diseases
could trigger a national emergency comparable to a catastrophic terrorist attack, pandemic flu
or major coastal flooding. Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, said the threat from infections
that are resistant to frontline antibiotics was so serious that the issue should be added to the
government's national risk register of civil emergencies. She described what she called an "apocalyptic
scenario" where people going for simple operations in 20 years' time die of routine infections
"because we have run out of antibiotics". The register was established in 2008 to advise the public and businesses on
national emergencies that Britain could face in the next five years. The highest priority risks on the latest register include a deadly flu
outbreak, catastrophic terrorist attacks, and major flooding on the scale of 1953, the last occasion on which a national emergency
was declared in the UK. Speaking to MPs on the Commons science and technology committee, Davies
said she would ask the Cabinet Office to add antibiotic resistance to the national risk register in
the light of an annual report on infectious disease she will publish in March. Davies declined to
elaborate on the report, but said its publication would coincide with a government strategy to promote more responsible use of
antibiotics among doctors and the clinical professions. "We need to get our act together in this country," she told the committee.
She told the Guardian: ""There are few public health issues of potentially greater importance for society than antibiotic resistance. It
means we are at increasing risk of developing infections that cannot be treated – but resistance can be managed. "That is why we
will be publishing a new cross-government strategy and action plan to tackle this issue in early spring." The
issue of drug
resistance is as old as antibiotics themselves, and arises when drugs knock out susceptible
infections, leaving hardier, resilient strains behind. The survivors then multiply, and over time
can become unstoppable with frontline medicines. Some of the best known are so-called
hospital superbugs such as MRSA that are at the root of outbreaks among patients. "In the past,
most people haven't worried because we've always had new antibiotics to turn to," said Alan
Johnson, consultant clinical scientist at the Health Protection Agency. "What has changed is that
the development pipeline is running dry. We don't have new antibiotics that we can rely on in
the immediate future or in the longer term." Changes in modern medicine have exacerbated the
problem by making patients more susceptible to infections. For example, cancer treatments
weaken the immune system, and the use of catheters increases the chances of bugs entering
the bloodstream. "We are becoming increasingly reliant on antibiotics in a whole range of areas of medicine. If we don't have
new antibiotics to deal with the problems of resistance we see, we are going to be in serious trouble," Johnson added. The supply of
new antibiotics has dried up for several reasons, but a major one is that drugs companies see greater profits in medicines that treat
chronic conditions, such as heart disease, which patients must take for years or even decades. "There is a broken market model for
making new antibiotics," Davies told the MPs. Davies has met senior officials at the World Health Organisation and her counterparts
in other countries to develop a strategy to tackle antibiotic resistance globally. Drug
resistance is emerging in diseases
across the board. Davies said 80% of gonorrhea was now resistant to the frontline antibiotic
tetracycline, and infections were rising in young and middle-aged people. Multi-drug resistant
TB was also a major threat, she said. Another worrying trend is the rise in infections that are
resistant to powerful antibiotics called carbapenems, which doctors rely on to tackle the most
serious infections. Resistant bugs carry a gene variant that allows them to destroy the drug.
What concerns some scientists is that the gene variant can spread freely between different
kinds of bacteria, said Johnson. Bacteria resistant to carbapenems were first detected in the UK in 2003, when three
cases were reported. The numbers remained low until 2007, but have since leapt to 333 in 2010, with 217 cases in the first six
months of 2011, according to the latest figures from the HPA.
Solvency
Giving unauthorized farmworkers a pathway to legal immigration would solve
labor shortages and exploitation of H-2A visa workers
Daniel Costa 2017, is the former director of Economic Policy Institute’s Immigration Law and
Policy Research, “Proposal to change the H-2A program via appropriations would allow
agribusiness to fill hundreds of thousands of permanent, year-round jobs with temporary
guestworkers”, October 25, 2017, https://www.epi.org/blog/proposal-to-change-the-h-2a-
program-via-appropriations-would-allow-agribusiness-to-fill-hundreds-of-thousands-of-
permanent-year-round-jobs-with-temporary-guestworkers/
It’s become a time-honored tradition. Every year for almost a decade, members of Congress—spurred by
corporate lobbyists who can’t gather enough support from their fellow colleagues for an immigration
policy that will lower wages and degrade working conditions for migrant and American
workers—use the appropriations process to get what they want. Few people pay close attention to the
deliberations about how to fund the government, so members of Congress can quietly tack their bad idea as a
“rider” onto an appropriations bill that is folded into an “omnibus” appropriations bill to keep
the government running. If the president vetoes the omnibus budget, the government may shut
down. This makes a veto unlikely, which allows riders to become law without facing a debate
and vote on the merits of it in the House and Senate. Appropriations riders have become
common in U.S. labor migration policy. President Obama’s attempts to improve wages and
working conditions for American and migrant workers in the H-2B guestworker program—for jobs in
landscaping, forestry, construction and seafood processing, for example—were thwarted again and again through appropriations
riders that lowered minimum wage rates for workers and prohibited the Labor Department
from enforcing key rules. Senators Grassley (R-IA) and Feinstein (D-CA) took a bipartisan stand against the practice when it happened
again this year. This time around, the rules in the H-2A program—which allows agricultural employers and
farmers to hire workers from abroad to fill temporary or seasonal jobs lasting for less than one
year—may also be modified via an appropriations rider. There is no annual limit on the number of H-2A workers that
can be hired, and H-2A is the fastest-growing U.S. guestworker program, more than doubling over the past decade, with over 200,000 farm jobs
The vast majority of H-2A workers are employed on crop farms, picking fruits and
certified in in 2017.
vegetables. The House appropriations committee in charge of funding the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) has now added a rider that would allow H-2A guestworkers to be employed in year-round
jobs, thus drastically expanding the scope of this program. By allowing year-round employment,
employers could seek to bring in guestworkers for jobs on dairy, livestock, and poultry and egg
farms, as well as in nurseries and greenhouses and other non-seasonal agricultural occupations.
Next week, the Senate appropriations committee is expected to consider its DHS appropriations bill. If this year-round rider becomes
law, there would be a major change in immigration policy, converting the H-2A program from a
safety valve for farmers who cannot find enough seasonal workers into a program admitting
guestworkers to do year-round, permanent jobs. The H-2A program could radically change in
purpose and size without ever being debated in either the House or Senate Judiciary
Committees which are responsible for crafting immigration legislation. This is troubling because H-2A is a
guestworker program that has facilitated the exploitation of migrant workers and even human
trafficking; so much that it has been dubbed “Close to Slavery” and “The New American
Slavery.” Many H-2A workers arrive in debt to labor recruiters who in effect sell them their
temporary jobs. They cannot change employers, and become deportable if they are fired by their
employers, which keeps them from complaining about unpaid wages and other workplace
violations. The title of a recent government audit reflected this reality: “H-2A and H-2B Visa Programs: Increased Protections Needed for Foreign
Workers.” It’s also difficult for H-2A workers to bring their families with them and they have no path
to permanent residence and citizenship. The terms and conditions of the program give employers an
inordinate amount of power over their workers, as well as other benefits, like being exempt
from paying payroll taxes on H-2A workers and the ability to hand-pick workers from abroad by
age and gender without being subject to U.S. anti-discrimination laws. Those are major reasons why employers
prefer to hire H-2A workers instead of U.S. workers. We know that this is the case because occasionally they get caught discriminating against American
workers in favor of H-2A workers. Despite its poor track record and the repeated warnings of farmworker advocates, the H-2A program has earned
bipartisan support in Congress, including from lawmakers who have voiced support for allowing dairies to hire year-round workers via the H-2A
program—a long-time goal of dairy farmers—who claim they cannot find enough U.S. workers willing to work on dairies. Many of the
current employees on dairies are unauthorized immigrants: the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and
HuffPost called unauthorized immigrants the “Backbone of Dairies.” The combination of a largely undocumented
workforce with the Trump administration’s increasing number of arrests of unauthorized

immigrants have left dairy farmers seeking an insurance policy against losing their workforce.
That’s understandable, but what about the current workforce employed on dairies? The year-round rider will push
unauthorized workers into the informal labor market, which will push down wages and labor
standards in agriculture. And, of course, making H-2A year-round won’t improve the few
protections for migrant workers in the H-2A program, which some members of Congress like Rep. Goodlatte are trying to
eliminate through other legislative measures. The H-2A year-round rider raises two key questions: (1) How many permanent, year-round jobs might be
impacted and (2) does it make sense to fill permanent jobs with temporary-and-virtually-indentured guestworkers? First, most
of the year-
round agricultural jobs that would be eligible for the H-2A program are in “animal production”,
industry code NAICS 112, which includes jobs in cattle ranching and farming, hog and pig farming, dairies, poultry and egg production, sheep and goat
farming, and animal aquaculture. (Although there are a handful of other job categories that might be eligible as well). Nearly 260,000 persons were
employed in animal production in 2016, an increase of 20 percent from 2006 (see Table 1), including 40 percent who worked in “dairy cattle and milk
production” (NAICS 11212), where employment increased by nearly one-third, from 78,618 to 104,377. [table omitted] Source: Quarterly Census of
Employment and Wages; all employees in privately-owned establishments. Series Ids: ENUUS000105112 and ENUUS 000105111212 Share Tweet
Embed Download image If the year-round rider becomes law, ag employers and especially dairy farmers
will have a strong incentive to begin replacing their unauthorized workers with H-2A workers
because H-2A workers can’t change employers if a competing farm offers a higher wage and
they’re safe from deportation by virtue of their nonimmigrant visa. Unfortunately for U.S. workers and other
authorized immigrants, ag employers also like the H-2A program because it insulates them from free
market forces that would lead them to improve wages and working conditions in order to
attract U.S. workers. If the year-round rider is renewed every year, as may happen if it becomes
law this year, ag employers may eventually fill many of the 260,000 jobs in animal production
(plus any other eligible job categories) with H-2A workers, increasing the H-2A program to
460,000, approximately the same number of workers admitted through the Bracero guestworker program during its peak in the mid 1950s. The
second question is whether the U.S. government should fill permanent jobs with guestworkers. The seasonal nature of farm jobs is
what arguably makes it more difficult to find and retain local workers, but the same argument
cannot be made for stable, year-round jobs. That’s why allowing employers to fill permanent
jobs in agriculture with guestworkers who have few rights is particularly repugnant. To the
extent a bona fide labor shortage exists, employers should first try expanding their search for
workers nationwide, and offer higher wages and better working conditions and benefits. The
recent publicized reports of dairy workers dying in manure ponds in Iowa serve as a stark
reminder that conditions on many farms and dairies are substandard and too often deadly. But
there must also be a recognition that there are already people doing this valuable work, and that many of them are unauthorized immigrants. Rather
than seeking to displace these experienced workers with new H-2A workers, Congress
should pass legislation giving
unauthorized workers the opportunity to earn legal status and continue working without fear
of deportation. The Agricultural Worker Program Act, introduced by Sens. Feinstein and Leahy (D-VT), proposes to
do just that. If the dairy industry truly needs immigrants to save it, as so many assert, then dairy
farmers should support this proposal and let Congress know about it. If—after legalizing the
current workforce—a bona fide labor shortage in agriculture still exists, then why not recruit
and hire permanent immigrants rather than guestworkers to fill those jobs? Migrant workers in
the United States who fill labor shortages should have an opportunity to fully integrate and
become citizens. It’s the bare minimum the country owes them for their contributions to the
American labor market. Rather than looking for ways to expand the H-2A program through
arcane and unethical parliamentary tactics, Congress should explore how to reform the H-2A
program so that it gives migrant workers equal rights and an eventual path to permanent
residence and citizenship.
A path to citizenship is key to solving—the guest-worker, H2A system fails; A

permanent citizenship is needed to ensure workers’ rights and economic
competitiveness
Oates, ’17: (Bryce Oates is a writer covering agriculture, conservation, ecology, politics and the
complicated relationship between human communities and the landscape,
http://www.dailyyonder.com/immigration-proposal-nothing-address-ag-worker-
shortage/2017/08/08/20745/, “IMMIGRATION PROPOSAL DOES NOTHING TO ADDRESS AG-
WORKER SHORTAGE”, August 8th, 2017) WM
While the Trump administration is getting behind a bill to limit immigration to highly skilled workers, farmers and worker groups
alike say what the
nation needs is a more reliable supply of agricultural workers. A path to citizenship
is key, say worker advocates. The Trump Administration’s latest dive into the immigration debate leaves
farmers without needed laborers while farmworker groups call for a permanent path to
citizenship as a solution to the agricultural labor crisis. To fill the labor need, farmers have turned to two
controversial sources of labor for supporting the nation’s vast vegetable, fruit, nut and livestock operations: hiring illegal immigrants
and utilizing a “guestworker” visa program that allows immigrants to work for a specific farm for up to 10 months before returning
home. “This is a nation of immigrants, not of guestworkers,” said said Bruce Goldstein, president
of Farmworker Justice. “We have to address the reality that more than half of farmworkers today
are undocumented, that they live in constant fear for deportation, of being removed from their
jobs and their families.” Goldstein said the worker shortage is well documented. “There’s a story
in a major newspaper, across the media every day about the lack of agricultural workers in the
labor force,” he said. “This is difficult and productive work, work that’s the backbone of the food
system. Immigrant farmworkers, both legal and the undocumented, are the people working
these jobs.” The Agriculture Workforce Coalition is a network of farmers that is urging the Trump Administration to help solve
the farm labor shortage. The coalition says the problem with an inadequate labor supply affects both
farmers and rural America in general. The economic health of food and fiber producers, and the rural
communities in which they live, is threatened by the lack of a reliable, stable and legal workforce. Our
farmers face growing shortages of legally authorized and experienced workers each year. Jobs in
agriculture are physically demanding, conducted in all seasons and are often transitory. This
shortage of labor negatively impacts our economic competitiveness , local economies, and
jobs. Reforms are necessary to address the agricultural labor shortage. For farmers looking to hire
additional workers, and for farmworkers looking for jobs, one of the critical programs is the H2A Program. Administered by the
Department of Labor, the H2A program provides temporary visas to immigrant farm laborers as “guest workers,” usually for periods
of 10-months or less. H2A visas tie a worker to a specific farm or labor organization for the season, and then workers return to their
native country, usually Mexico. “The H2A program is expanding, period,” said Dr. Philip Martin, Professor of Agricultural and
Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis. He edits Rural Migration News, has served on several federal commissions,
and testifies frequently before Congress. “H2A will continue to grow just like it has in the past decade.” Graph via the Economic
Policy Institute Martin says that the number of H2A workers has increased to replace geographically settled workers who have long-
term, on-farm jobs. “Farmworkers don’t move much,” he said. “Only 2% of farmworkers follow the harvest, as a lot of people
assume they do. They pretty much stay where they settle.” President Trump announced last week that he is supporting legislation
that slashes the number of permanent legal immigrants allowed into the nation from 1 million per year to 500,000. The legislation,
proposed by Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR) and David Perdue (R-GA), would change immigration rules to a “merit-based system” that
favors English speakers, the highly educated, and those with job skills that are in high demand. Farmworker Justice, using USDA and
Department of Labor Statistics, estimates that there are 2.5 million farmworkers laboring on our nation’s farms and ranches. Though
the data is imperfect due to the difficulty of collecting information from undocumented immigrants, the organization estimates that
roughly 1.2 million to 1.75 million farmworkers are undocumented and approximately 750,000 to 1.3 million farmworkers are
United States citizens or lawful immigrants. The National Agriculture Worker Survey finds that about 33% of farmworkers are United
States citizens, 18% are lawful permanent residents and another 1% have other work authorization. The
economic
consequences of the agriculture labor gap are huge, according to economists. Dr. Stephen G. Bronars,
of Edgeworth Economics, has studied the economic impact of the farm labor shortage. His
report, A Vanishing Breed: How the Decline in U.S. Farm Laborers Over the Last Decade Has Hurt
the U.S. Economy and Slowed Production on American Farms, finds that the farm labor shortage
costs $3.1 billion a year in direct economic activity. : Bronars writes, “given that farm revenues often
trickle down to other industries in our economy, that $3.1 billion in additional farm
production would have led to almost $2.8 billion in added spending on non-farm services like
transportation, manufacturing, and irrigation each year. That spending would have created
more than 41,000 additional non-farm jobs in our economy annually.” The H2A guestworker
system is not a good solution to the farm labor shortage, according to both the farmers and farmworkers who
testified at a House Judiciary Committee Hearing on the issue in July. Farmers said that program is overly bureaucratic, and the
administrative burden can lead to workers arriving too late for their seasonal labor needs. Livestock producers, whose animals
require daily labor rather than seasonal demands, criticize the program for not allowing a year-round labor option. Farmworker
groups don’t believe that H2A system adequately protects worker rights, and that H2A workers are
burdened with excessive fees and predatory debts for navigating the guestworker visa
paperwork and transportation process. They are collaborating with House and Senate
Democrats to propose a different immigration process for needed agricultural laborers, the
Agricultural Worker Program Act. “The core issue, the solution to the long-term issue of agricultural employment,
is establishing a path to citizenship for farm workers,” said Farmworker Justice President Goldstein. “The
Agricultural Worker Program Act accomplishes this goal and H2A doesn’t. This is fundamentally an issue of economic freedom, of
democratic rights, and of addressing the reality of the food system’s labor needs in a fair way.” The Agricultural Worker Program Act
is being proposed both in the House and Senate. Supporters include the United Farmworkers of America, Farmworker Justice, the
Southern Poverty Law Center, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Farm Labor Organizing Committee of the AFL-CIO, National
Council of La Raza, and many other groups.
An offer of permanent legal status is the only way to create a sustainable and
safe agricultural workforce.
Werner, ’13: (Erica Werner is a congressional economic policy correspondent for The
Washington Post, http://www.businessinsider.com/immigration-reform-farm-worker-program-
path-citizenship-2013-4, “New Bill Will Address The Desperate Need For Immigrants On
America's Farms”, April 3rd, 2013) WM
WASHINGTON (AP)— Sweeping immigration legislation taking shape in the Senate will aim to overhaul the nation's
agriculture worker program to create a steady supply of labor for farmers and growers, who rely more than any other industry on workers
who have come to the country illegally. Farm workers already here would get a speedier path to legal status than
other immigrants in the country illegally, and a likely new visa program would make it easier for foreign workers
to come to the U.S. Policymakers aim to install such workers in place of the half or more of the nation's farm labor workforce estimated to
be in the country illegally. Negotiators have been working to finalize an agreement in time for the measure to be included in bipartisan legislation
expected to be released next week, but disagreements on wages and numbers of visas are proving tough to solve. Labor groups are accusing growers of
pushing to lower farmworkers' wages, while growers dispute that and say they want to pay a fair wage. Meanwhile, labor is resisting growers' attempts
to increase the potential numbers of new workers who would come in, as growers argue their industry's viability depends on a strong new labor supply.
"It comes down to either we're importing our labor or we're importing our food, and if we don't have access to a legal supply of labor we will start
going offshore," said Kristi Boswell, director of congressional relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation. The issue has gotten little public
attention in an immigration debate focused on securing the border, creating a path to citizenship for the 11 million immigrants living in the country
illegally, and designing a new visa program for low-skilled workers outside of agriculture. But for states from California to Georgia to Florida with
booming agriculture industries, it's a critical part of the puzzle. At least 50 percent and as
much as 70 or 80 percent of the
nation's farm workers arrived illegally, according to labor and industry estimates. Growers say
they need a better way to hire labor legally, and advocates say workers can be exploited and need
better protections and a way to earn permanent residence. "One thing that we know is that there's not an
industry that will benefit more from a new immigration program than agriculture," said Giev
Kashkooli, United Farm Workers vice president. "The problem is industry needs people who are both willing and able to do the work. And it's difficult
work." The reason agriculture uses so much illegal labor has to do with the need for workers, but also the inadequacy of current immigration programs.
There is a 10-month visa program for farm workers, called the H2A visa, but growers argue it's so hard to use that once they've completed the
paperwork whatever crop they needed picked may well have withered. There
were about 55,000 H2A visas issued in
2011, representing a small percentage of the nation's approximately 2 million farm workers.
Part of the solution, growers and unions say, is to create a more permanent agricultural workforce. Senators
would likely accomplish this by giving a new "blue card" visa granting legal status to farm workers who've worked in the industry for at least two years
and intend to remain in it for at least five years more. At that point, potentially, these workers could become eligible for green cards, which allow
permanent residency and eventual citizenship — faster than the 10-year path to a green card that other immigrants in the country illegally are
expected to face under the Senate immigration bill. Separately,
growers are pushing to replace the H2A visa
program with an entirely new program with visas offering multiyear stays. But there is
disagreement over how many such visas would be offered and how much money workers
would make — the same issues that hung up a deal between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO over nonagricultural low-skilled
workers before a resolution was reached over the weekend. The UFW contends that growers are trying to push farm workers below their current
average wage of $10.80 an hour, but growers say that wage is skewed by a small number of high earners and that most farm workers make less. In light
of the dispute, the UFW has begun to argue that a new visa program may not be necessary at all. The two-pronged structure of the emerging deal is
similar to legislation called AgJobs negotiated in years past that never became law. Because of that history, the agriculture issue is being handled
differently from other parts of the Senate immigration bill. It's being negotiated by four senators — Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Orrin Hatch, R-Utah,
Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Michael Bennet, D-Colo. — only two of whom, Rubio and Bennet, are part of the so-called Gang of Eight senators writing the
overall bill. All involved hope for a resolution of an issue that has been in need of one for years, ever since the last major immigration overhaul, in 1986,
failed to establish a workable visa program for farmworkers and others. "We made our bed and have been lying in it ever since so this is a chance to get
it right and not repeat those failures," said Craig J. Regelbrugge, co-chair of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform.
***Ag Workforce Shortage Adv
***Econ
Labor Shortages/Hurts Econ
The agriculture industry is declining – current deportations will cause a
workforce shortage and drive consumer prices up
Mary Jo Dudley 6/25/2018, is the Director of the Cornell Farmworker Program and a faculty
member of the Department of Development Sociology. She has extensive research interests in
immigrant workers, farmworkers, US-Latin American relations, migration from Latin America to
the US, and immigrant communities in the US, “These U.S. industries can't work without illegal
immigrants”, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/illegal-immigrants-us-economy-farm-workers-
taxes/
Since agriculture is the industry that's most reliant on undocumented workers – and it's my area of expertise
and research – let's zoom in on it. Overall,the agricultural industry in the United States has been on the
decline since 1950. Back then, farming was a family business that employed more than 10 million workers, 77 percent of whom were
classified as "family." As of 2000 – the latest such data available – only 3 million work on farms, and as noted earlier,
an estimated half are undocumented. Increasingly, dairy farms such as those in New York rely
on workers from Mexico and Guatemala, many of whom are believed to be undocumented.
Currently, there is no visa program for year-round workers on dairy farms, so the precarious status of these workers poses serious concerns for the
economic viability of the dairy industry. In
recent research conducted by the Cornell Farmworker Program, 30
New York dairy farmers told us they turned to undocumented workers because they were
unable to find and keep reliable U.S. citizens to do the jobs. That's in part because farm work can
be physically demanding, dirty and socially denigrated work. More importantly, it is one the
most dangerous occupations in the U.S. A study commissioned by the dairy industry suggested
that if federal labor and immigration policies reduced the number of foreign-born workers by 50
percent, more than 3,500 dairy farms would close, leading to a big drop in milk production and a
spike in prices of about 30 percent. Total elimination of immigrant labor would increase milk
prices by 90 percent. The U.S. fruit, vegetable and meat industries are similarly at risk, and
without the help of unauthorized workers, production would drop and consumers would likely
see higher prices. This has become of particular concern as immigration enforcement in
agricultural communities intensifies.
Current immigration restrictions drives up prices and inflation– effects are

nationwide
Keith Good 2017, Keith Good is well known in agricultural circles for the daily FarmPolicy,
which for 12 years (2003-2015) provided a succinct recap of U.S. agricultural policy
developments and current issues impacting the agricultural economy. FarmPolicy.com enjoyed a
diverse reading audience of Congressional and USDA staff, university professionals, journalists,
and farmers, March 21, 2017, “Immigration Policy: Rural and Agricultural Concerns”,
https://farmpolicynews.illinois.edu/2017/03/immigration-policy-rural-agricultural-concerns/
Wall Street Journal writer Justin Lahart reported last week that, “The
first impact of President Donald Trump’s
changes to U.S. immigration policy will fall on businesses that grow, process or sell food. Recent history
shows that labor shortages could drive up prices and labor costs, and hurt profits. Little
attention is being paid to the threat to food prices from a drop in immigrant labor. “What is known so
far is generally anecdotal and regional. But the impact of a nationwide hit to the supply of workers could
be large. Food price increases, which have been low, would boost already accelerating
inflation.” Recall that last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service
(ERS) pointed out that, “Food-at-home prices declined overall in 2016, falling 1.3 percent below
2015 levels. This marks the first annual decline in supermarket prices since 1967…Looking ahead
to 2017, supermarket prices are expected to rise between 0.0 and 1.0 percent.” (Graph from USDA-
ERS). More specifically on Trump administration immigration policies, the Journal article explained that, “Mr. Trump last
month introduced sweeping changes to U.S. immigration policy, broadening the number of
undocumented immigrants subject to immediate deportation, calling for hiring more Border
Patrol and immigration enforcement officers, and ordering that construction begin on a border
wall. “People spooked by the rules are staying home, whether they live in the U.S. or abroad.
The number of people apprehended illegally crossing the border from Mexico fell sharply last
month from January, and there are reports of undocumented immigrants reluctant to go to
work for fear of getting caught.” Mr. Lahart noted that, “As of 2014, there were 8 million unauthorized
immigrants in the U.S. labor force, according to Pew Research Center estimates. Construction firms, restaurants and
hotels hire many of those workers. But farms and other food-producers are where they matter most. Some 17% of
agricultural workers are unauthorized immigrants, according to Pew. Last week’s article stated that, “Farmers
in several states are concerned about labor shortages, and farmworkers have expressed anxiety
about the crackdown.” View image on Twitter View image on Twitter Farm Policy @FarmPolicy Frt Pg today's @latimes,
"Wages rise on California farms. Americans still don’t want the job"- https://goo.gl/B5Zj0U 12:53 PM - Mar 19, 2017 1 See Farm
Policy's other Tweets Twitter Ads info and privacy Meanwhile, Natalie Kitroeff and Geoffrey Mohan reported on the front page of
Sunday’s Los Angeles Times that, “[Arnulfo Solorio, who has been recruiting farmworkers for the Napa Valley] is one of a
growing
number of agricultural businessmen who say they face an urgent shortage of workers. The flow
of labor began drying up when President Obama tightened the border. Now President Trump is
promising to deport more people, raid more companies and build a wall on the southern
border.” Sunday’s article noted that, “Farmers are being forced to make difficult choices about whether
to abandon some of the state’s hallmark fruits and vegetables, move operations abroad, import workers
under a special visa or replace them altogether with machines.” An article in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times noted that, “Wages for
crop production in California increased by 13% from 2010 to 2015, twice as fast as average pay
in the state.” Kitroeff and Mohan pointed out that, “But the raises and new perks have not tempted native-
born Americans to leave their day jobs for the fields. Nine in 10 agriculture workers in California
are still foreign born, and more than half are undocumented, according to a federal survey.”
Graph from the Los Angeles Times. Sunday, March 19, 2017. The Los Angeles Times article added that, “‘You don’t need a deep
analysis to understand why farm work wouldn’t be attractive to young Americans,’ says [Philip Martin, an
economist at UC Davis and one of the country’s leading experts on agriculture]. “If farmers upped the average wage to, say, $25 an
hour, people born here might think twice. But that’s a pipe dream, many argue. “‘Well before we got to $25, there would be
machines out in the fields, doing pruning or harvesting, or we would lose crops,’ Martin says.” Also on Sunday, Barbara Soderlin
reported on the front page of the Money section in the Omaha World-Herald that, “[Daniels Produce farm manger Kelly Jackson]
worries a crackdown on illegal
immigration could create a flood of employers applying to use the
[seasonal H2-A visa program for agricultural workers] and make it less likely her application will be
processed on time. (Employers using the H2-A visas file the initial applications on behalf of their
seasonal workers.) She’s also concerned by Trump’s recent comments about prioritizing visas for
highly skilled workers, wondering if that might mean fewer farm laborers allowed into the
country.”
The link is massive – the industry has lost more than 20% of its labor force and
hours.
Bronars ‘15
To assess how the number of field and crop workers has declined in recent years, we rely primarily on the USDA’s Farm Labor Survey
(FLS), which reports farm employment separately by broad occupations. The survey finds that from 2002 to 2014, the
total
number of full-time equivalent field and crop workers hired by farms declined by 21.8 percent. In other
words, the size of the workforce farmers had to draw from dropped by more than a fifth. A drop was
seen among both full-year field and crop workers and seasonal workers involved in shorter harvest seasons. From 2002 to 2014,
the number of full-year field and crop workers dropped by 22.8 percent, while the number of full-year equivalent seasonal
employees dropped by 18.5 percent. Of course, a drop in the total number of field and crop workers does not tell us the whole story,
as a smaller pool of workers could be putting in more hours on the job. To answer this concern, we also examined this variable,
looking at the number of hours worked by field and crop workers.19 Once again, we found that in 2014, field and crop workers as a
group put in roughly 80 percent of the hours they worked as recently as 2002. Specifically, we found that the
aggregate
number of hours worked by such farm employees fell by 22.4 percent. While the shortage is
already dramatic in percentage terms, the figures are equally powerful when translated into the
number of farm laborers missing from the 2014 labor force. Using FLS data and the U.S. Census of Agriculture,
we can estimate how the recent drop in the labor supply has impacted the total supply of full time equivalent field and crop workers
in the country. Figure 1 indicates that between 2002 and 2014, the
number of full-time equivalent field and crop
workers in the United States declined by between 146,000 and 164,000 people.20 Even after excluding
states in the Midwest—where mechanized agriculture is most likely to replace manual farm labor—the decline in full-time
equivalent employment during the period was between 130,000 and 139,000 workers. That represented a decline of almost 20
percent in the parts of the country where the most labor-intensive crops are grown—a
major shock to the supply of
available field and crop workers. Farmers who have worked in the industry for decades say that
in recent years they have experienced the most severe labor shortages of their careers. That is
certainly what Gary Wishnatzki, the owner of Wish Farms in Plant City, Florida, says he has seen recently. To bring in the harvest on
his 1,500-acre farm, Wishnatzki typically needs 700 or 800 workers. Strawberries, his primary crop, are incredibly labor-intensive,
requiring pickers to revisit each bush every three days to pick the rapidly ripening fruit. “Two years ago, the situation got so bad, we
were barely keeping our heads above water,” Wishnatzki recalls. That year, despite extensive recruiting, he had only 500 of the
workers he needed. He lost about a fifth of his crop, an event he says cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Wishnatzki says
that because the situation has not improved since then, he’s had to substantially cut back on his active acreage. This year, he’s
harvesting just 500 acres of strawberries, despite demand for his product rising dramatically in recent years. With a lighter crop
load, Wishnatzki was able to find enough workers this year to get the job done, but he still has major struggles. “We are so
desperate for workers, we can’t really put any requirements on the people who show up,” Wishnatzki says, “We tolerate
absenteeism; our workers pretty much come and go as they please. As an employer, you feel like you’ve pretty much lost control of
the labor force.” He says he hopes Congress passes some sort of guest worker bill before the situation deteriorates further. “I
worry that Congress isn’t going to act until the farming industry is in a full-blown crisis,” he says,
“but by then, it might be too late.”21
Labor shortages have devastated the industry and artificially increased wages,
further straining farms.
Bronars ‘15
The steep decline in the number of available farm laborers between 2002 and 2014 on its own does not indicate that a labor
shortage actually occurred. Could the decline in the number of workers be the result of more machines taking the place of workers
in the agriculture industry? Or could it be due to farmers choosing to take more of their land out of production altogether? In this
section, we discuss recent wage
data for farm laborers, and how trends in those statistics indicate that the driving
force behind the recent declines was a drop in the labor supply, which caused shortages on U.S.
farms. To understand what the wage data means it is useful to first understand the labor patterns on American farms, and in
particular, fresh produce operations. U.S. agriculture relies heavily on seasonal and part-year employment because of the nature of
agricultural production.27 Typically, crops must be harvested within a narrow time frame or the considerable investment in the
season’s harvest will be squandered or lost. According to the 2012 U.S. Census of Agriculture, 63.5 percent of farm jobs in the United
States are seasonal, lasting fewer than 150 days during the course of the year. In the case of field and crop workers, who are so
essential to fresh produce operations, the season is often far shorter. Based on 2012 Agricultural Census data, we estimate that the
average duration of a seasonal farm job is about six weeks. (See the Methodology Appendix for more detail on how we arrived at
this and other estimates.) One consequence of the reduced supply of available farm labor is that it has
become much more expensive for farms to hire seasonal farmworkers, a development that has
placed a strain on many U.S. farms. Studies have shown that foreign-born farmworkers are much more
likely to hold seasonal jobs than U.S.-born field and crop workers, who make up a small share of
the industry.28 It should be little surprise then that in recent years—as immigration has slowed—wages for seasonal positions
have increased. What is surprising, however, is by how much such wages have grown. Using Census of
Agriculture data, we estimate that the average payroll cost per seasonal employee increased by 89
percent between 2002 and 2012 while the average cost per full-year employee increased by 33 percent
in nominal, non-inflation adjusted, terms. This has meant that seasonal workers have increasingly taken up a larger and larger share
of total farm payroll costs. In 2012, 42 percent of growers’ payroll costs were being used to pay for seasonal labor, compared to just
36 percent in 2002. It is worth noting that some of the wage increase that occurred between 2002 and 2012 is likely due to longer
duration seasonal jobs. Using U.S. Census of Agriculture data, we estimate that in 2002 the average seasonal job lasted four or five
weeks, compared to the six-week average duration in 2012. The addition of one or two weeks to the average seasonal worker’s
schedule, however, cannot alone explain the full wage increase that has occurred in recent years. Offering jobs with a longer
duration may also be a sign that farmers are trying to better compete for a limited number of workers, who can be more selective
about the jobs they choose. To understand the different dynamics at play in the farm sector, it is useful to look at how the real,
inflation-adjusted, wages of field and crop workers changed compared to the real wages of other less-skilled jobs during the 2002 to
2014 period. Figure 2 shows that between 2002 and 2014 the average hourly wage of field and crop workers increased by 7.9
percent. While that figure might sound small on the surface, it
is notable how much it differs from the eight
other occupations considered, which represent a wide range of less-skilled jobs across a number of
industries, theoretically drawing from similar pools of workers. In all the other occupations, real,
hourly wages actually declined between 2002 and 2014, in come cases, quite notably. The wages for cashiers, for
instance, shrunk by 5.8 percent between 2002 and 2014, while the wages of laundry and dry cleaning workers dropped by 5.0
percent. Comparatively then, field and crop workers saw their wages grow roughly 13 to 14 percent faster than less-skilled workers
in those three occupations during the 2002–2014 time period. While field and crop workers represent the only occupation that
experienced real wage growth during the period we consider, the
divergence between wage patterns for the
field and crop sector and other industries becomes more pronounced beginning in 2008. This
indicates that as the economy has improved and employment has increased, employers in non-
agricultural industries have been able to find enough workers to fill job vacancies without up-
ward pressure on wages. Farmers, on the other hand, faced a hard time finding sufficient
numbers of laborers and have had to bid up wages to attract and retain workers. One sign of
how acute the situation has been in recent years for growers is that farmers have raised the
wages of field and crop workers despite a variety of outside pressures that have made it difficult
for them do so. Between the 1998 and 2012, the amount of fresh fruits and vegetables imported into the United States grew
by 94.6 percent. The amount of fresh fruits grew by 58.1 percent.29 That surge in imports—and the downward pressure they placed
on prices—hindered the ability of farmers to raise the cost of their goods. From 1998 to 2012, for instance, the price of fresh fruits in
the country grew by 39.0 percent— almost 2 percentage points slower than inflation.30 The price of fresh vegetables grew by 41.5
percent.31 Had prices grown more rapidly, it would have been easier for farmers to raise wages for their workers; as it is, they had
to do so despite it being potentially harmful to the bottom line. While fruits and vegetables are still largely harvested by hand,
machines, of course, improve each year, and farmers gain access to tools that can at least somewhat lessen their reliance on labor.
This was certainly true in the 2002 to 2012 period considered here,32 a time when some crops, such as baby leaf lettuce, became
more widely machine harvested.33 However, wage and employment data indicates that the available supply of field and
crop workers has declined even more than any decline in demand for labor that has occurred
since 2002 due to mechanization. Figure 3 shows that the employment of field and crop workers has declined more
rapidly than the employment of other less-skilled workers since 2002.34 A decline in the demand for field and crop
workers due to mechanization would reduce both their employment and relative wages. In
contrast, a reduction in the available supply of needed field and crop workers would reduce their employment but increase their
relative wages substantially. Looking at Tables 3 and 4 together, it is clear that is what has happened, indicating that a real shortage
occurred. It is also worth noting that we observe both a 19 percent decline in employment and a 14.5 percent increase in relative
wages over the period 2002 to 2014 for field and crop workers outside the Midwest.35 If the demand for field and crop workers
remained stable over this period, the correlation described above is consistent with a labor demand “elasticity,” or relationship
between wages and employment, of 1.3 percent. Put simply, this
elasticity means that each 1.3 percent drop in
the available supply of labor results in a one percent increase in the wages paid to field and crop
workers. These co-movements in field and crop worker wages and employment are consistent with economic theory and existing
studies of the demand for farm labor.36 The co-movements in wages and employment of field and crop workers that we observe are
well within the range of elasticity estimates found in a large meta-study on farm labor shortages conducted by researchers at
Clemson University and Colorado State University in 2000.37
Falling immigration rates cause an agricultural workforce shortage.

Bronars ‘15
As this section demonstrates, the slowdown in the arrival of young, immigrant farmworkers in
the last decade has placed a major strain on American farms. The results in this section use data
from the National Agricultural Worker Survey (NAWS), a survey conducted by U.S. Department
of Labor that collects information about field and crop workers by surveying farmworkers at
their place of work. Because most farmworker jobs are seasonal, and many farmworkers are
migrant laborers, the NAWS conducts its survey at the farmworker’s place of work rather than
his or her household. Due to the relatively small sample size of the NAWS, we divide the sample
into three separate time periods, 1998–2002, 2003–2007, and 2008–2012. Figure 4 shows the
distribution of foreign-born field and crop workers by their foreign-born status and length of
time since first arriving in the United States for these three time periods. From 1998 to 2002,
more than 36 percent of field and crop workers were immigrants who had been in the United
States for less than five years. Five years later (from 2003 to 2007), the field and crop workers
who arrived in the United States within the past five years had dropped to 26.7 percent. The
decline in recent arrivals of immigrants and guest workers accelerated even further in the final
set of years we consider. By the 2008–2012 time period, only 11.5 percent of field and crop
workers had been in the United States for less than five years—an almost 25 percentage point
drop from the figures just one decade years earlier. The other notable trend in Figure 4 is the
increase in the share of field and crop workers who are foreign-born individuals who have lived
in the United States for long time periods. During the 1998–2002 period, only 6.5 percent of
field and crop workers were immigrants who had arrived in the United States at least 25 years
ago. By 2008–2012, more than 15.2 percent of field and crop workers fell into that category, or
almost one in six of them. The decline in recent immigrant field and crop workers was partially
offset by the increase in employment among foreign-born workers who had been in the United
States for at least 25 years. However, for each additional foreign-born field and crop worker in
the United States for at least 25 years there were 5.3 fewer workers who recently arrived from a
foreign country—showing that the decline in immigration was far greater than more
experienced workers could effectively compensate for. In Table 3 we bring together some of the
figures described above to produce hard estimates of how the field and crop worker population
has declined in recent years among immigrants in the United States for various time periods.
These figures show that almost all of the decline in field and crop workers in the United States
can be explained by the lack of recent immigrant arrivals. Specifically, from 2002 to 2014, the
number of foreign-born, full-time equivalent field and crop workers who have been in the
United States for less than five years has declined by roughly 170,000 to 190,000 people. At the
same time, the number of foreign-born field and crop workers who arrived in America between
five and 25 years ago declined modestly, while the number of foreign-born field and crop
workers in the United States for longer than 25 years increased by roughly 35,000 people,
slightly offsetting the decline in other immigrant categories. The slowdown in the number of
new, immigrant workers has had an impact on farms all across the country. Table 4 shows that
the trend towards fewer recent arrivals of foreign-born workers is apparent in all six of the
geographic regions included in the NAWS. (It is worth noting here that the NAWS divides the
country into only six regions, whereas the FLS we used earlier to estimate the size of the decline
by region divides the country into 18 areas, making their figures not directly comparable.)40
According to the NAWS, the largest relative declines in the share of recent arrivals occurred in
the Northwest and the Southeast regions. The largest relative increase in foreign-born workers
who arrived in the United States at least 25 years ago occurred in the Southeast and the East.
While the trend towards fewer recent immigrants might seem like a positive development for
U.S. farms, particularly if it meant that employers would have access to more experienced and
skilled workers, the change has actually translated into meaningful staffing challenges and
shortages, particularly for entry-level positions. The length of time that a foreign-born worker
has lived in the United States is highly correlated with the length of time the individual has been
working in U.S. agriculture. Inexperienced field and crop workers, a group largely comprised of
recent immigrants, tend to work on certain entry-level tasks. Table 5 shows that harvest work
is the most common task performed by foreign-born workers who have been in the United
States for less than five years, followed by pre-harvest tasks. Pre-harvest work includes hoeing,
thinning, and transplanting crops, while harvest tasks are typically the hand picking of crops.
With fewer new immigrants arriving, these are the positions farmers often have the most
trouble filling. More experienced workers, on the other hand, tend to work in semi-skilled tasks,
which include more technical jobs such as pruning and irrigating. Semi-skilled work is also more
likely to involve some farm equipment. The other type of work represented in Table 5 includes
post-harvest tasks, which can include the sorting and grading of crops, and even packing of the
crops if it occurs in the field. The recent trends in the agricultural workforce have also led to a
sharp decrease in the number of migrant farmers. Recent arrivals are more than twice as likely
as those who have been in the United States 25 years or more to work as migrant farmworkers,
or workers who “follow the crop” throughout the year. Figure 6 shows that almost half of recent
immigrant field and crop workers are migrant workers. The definition of a migrant farmworker
in the NAWS data is someone who works on a farm that is at least 75 miles from their residence.
Only about a quarter of foreign-born workers who have been in the United States for 25 years or
more work as migrant laborers. This is likely because foreign-born field and crop workers who
are long-term residents of the United States are older and more likely to be assimilated to their
communities. However, it does not match the reality of the U.S. farming sector, where many
jobs include short harvests in relatively remote parts of the country. Chalmers Carr, the owner
of Titan Farms, the East Coast’s largest peach growing operation, says that in recent years, he’s
seen the supply of migrant farmworkers moving north through his area start to dry up. “It used
to be that you’d see guys who’d finished the citrus season in Florida moving North as far as New
Hampshire and New York to pick apples and blueberries,” says Carr, whose farm is based in
Ridge Spring, South Carolina, “You can’t really count on that anymore.”41 Given that many
outside agriculture often argue that unemployed, U.S.-born workers should be filling American
farm jobs, it is worth examining this issue by presenting information about the role U.S.-born
workers played filling field and crop positions during the period examined in this study.
According to the NAWS data, in the 1998-2002 period, about 20 percent of field and crop
workers were born in the United States. By 2008-2012, that figure had risen to roughly 27
percent. As discussed in Section III, this occurred during a period when overall employment of
field and crop workers dropped by more than a fifth. Using the distribution of field and crop
workers by foreign-born status from the NAWS, we estimate that the increase in employment of
U.S.-born field and crop workers offset only 2.7 percent of the decline in field and crop workers
that occurred between 2002 and 2014. Our 50% findings echo what growers often say
anecdotally—that many native-born workers are unwilling or unable to do farm jobs. In
California, the state that saw the greatest decline in full-time equivalent field and crop workers,
U.S.-born farm laborers played a very different role. In the 1998–2002 period, U.S.-born
workers made up 3.26 percent of California’s field and crop workforce. By the 2008–2012
period, that figure had risen only marginally, growing to 3.67 percent. That growth in the share
of field and crop workers born in the United States, however, only occurred because of the
dramatic decline in the number of foreign-born workers coming into California in the 2002 to
2014 period. In reality, the total number of U.S.-born field and crop workers in California from
2002 to 2014 declined by 31.8 percent. That means that in the state where they were arguably
needed most, native-born workers played no role offsetting the labor decline—in fact, they
only exacerbated it. The U.S.-born farmworkers who have entered agriculture in recent years
are also not likely to have filled the labor-intensive field and crop jobs that are the focus of this
study. U.S.- born field and crop workers tend to gravitate towards the same types of semi-skilled
tasks that often attract the most experienced foreign-born workers.42 Native-born farmworkers
are also unlikely to fill migrant-farming jobs, seasonal jobs, and the “follow the crop” jobs that
have typically been filled by recent foreign-born arrivals. As Figure 6 demonstrates, just 12
percent of all the field and crop workers employed in migrant-farming jobs in 2008 to 2012 were
born in America. Another interesting consequence of the recent slowdown in the arrival of
immigrant farmworkers: The data shows that today’s field and crop workers are significantly
aging. Figure 5 shows that 38.2 percent of foreign-born workers in 1998–2002 were age 25 and
under, and only 14.2 percent were older than age 45. By 2008–2012 the fraction of foreign-born
field and crop workers age 25 and under had dropped to 20.7 percent and the fraction of
foreign-born workers age 45 and above had nearly doubled to 27.1 percent. The aging of the
workforce is a worry to many U.S. farm owners: Unlike other industries, where older workers
may be capable of producing more due to their increased experience, studies have consistently
found that farm workers pick and process less as they age, likely due to the physically strenuous
nature of the work.43 One study, for instance, found that the productivity of farm workers
overall peaks at around age 35 or 45, and declines steeply afterwards.44 The aging of field and
crop workers also poses the threat that in the coming years, retirement may worsen the labor
shortage described in this report still further
Increasing labor shortages cost the U.S. economy 3.1 billion annually and
affects other sectors
NAE 2015, New American Economy brings together mayors and business leaders who support
immigration reforms that will help create jobs for Americans today, August 13, 2015, “Ten-Year
Decline in U.S. Farm Labor Has Cost U.S. Economy $3.1B Annually in Crop Production, Report
Shows”, https://www.newamericaneconomy.org/news/ten-year-decline-u-s-farm-labor-cost-u-
s-economy-3-1b-annually-crop-production-report-shows/
New York—At a time when more Americans are trying to eat fresh and locally grown produce,
farmers in the United States do not have the labor they need to expand their operations and keep
pace with rising demand. According to a new study released by the New American Economy, the number of field
and crop laborers available to farms has been rapidly declining over the past decade, costing
fruit and vegetable production $3.1 billion per year. The report, “A Vanishing Breed: How the Decline in U.S.
Farm Laborers Over the Last Decade Has Hurt the U.S. Economy and Slowed Production on American Farms,” shows that between
2002 and 2012, the share of new field and crop workers immigrating to the United States fell by
roughly 75 percent, and U.S-born workers are not filling the labor gaps. Read the Wall Street Journal’s
“On U.S. Farms, Fewer Hands for the Harvest,” which cites the Partnership’s study. “Labor shortages on U.S. farms cost
the economy tens of thousands of jobs in related industries like trucking, marketing, and equipment
manufacturing,” says John Feinblatt, Chairman of New American Economy. “Congress should be deeply troubled by
the manpower challenges that our farmers face and should update our immigration policies to
address their needs.” The report utilizes data from the National Agriculture Workers Survey, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture’s Farm Labor Survey (FLS), and the Census of Agriculture to find: The supply of workers available to U.S.
farmers has been rapidly declining. Between 2002 and 2014, the number of full-time equivalent
field and crop workers had dropped by at least 146,000 people, or by more than 20 percent.
Wage patterns indicate that this caused a major labor shortage on U.S. farms. The labor
shortage has hurt our country’s ability to produce labor-intensive fruits, vegetables, and tree
nuts. Had labor shortages not been an issue, production of these crops could have been higher
by about $3.1 billion a year. Given that farm revenues often trickle down to other industries in
our economy, that $3.1 billion in additional farm production would have led to almost $2.8
billion in added spending on non-farm services like transportation, manufacturing, and irrigation
each year. That spending would have created more than 41,000 additional non-farm jobs in our
economy annually. The number of potential farm workers immigrating to the United States has
greatly slowed over the last decade. Between 2002 and 2012, the number of new field and crop
workers immigrating to the United States fell by roughly 75 percent. This led to a drop in the
number of entry-level workers available for difficult jobs like hoeing, planting, and harvesting.
Today’s field and crop workers are rapidly aging, signaling even greater potential future
challenges when the current generation of workers retires. New immigrant farmworkers tend to
be young, but a drop in immigrant labor has caused the workforce to age dramatically. Between
1998 and 2002, 36.1 percent of field and crop workers had arrived to the United States within
the previous five years, but between 2008 and 2012, just 11.5 percent had arrived within that time
period. While 14.2 percent of farmworkers were 45 years or older in the 1998–2002 period, by
2008–2012, this figure had more than doubled, reaching 27.1 percent. U.S.-born workers are
not filling labor gaps on American farms. From 2002 to 2014, the increase in U.S.-born workers
offset less than 3 percent of the dramatic decline in field and crop workers caused by dwindling
numbers of foreign-born workers. Some parts of the country were particularly hard-hit by the
recent labor decline. The number of full-time equivalent field and crop workers in California
declined by about 85,000 people between 2002 and 2014. The vast majority of this decline
happened before the drought started in 2011. The southeastern part of the United States was
also hard-hit. Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina lost about 8,500 workers in total, or more
than one in four of the crop workers employed in 2002. Colorado, Nevada, and Utah lost 36.7
percent of their full-time equivalent field workforce, or 7,029 people.
Continued labor shortages in agriculture negatively impacts the GDP

AFBF 2012, the American Farm Bureau Federation members unite to speak out on issues of
concern for the nation’s farmers and ranchers, rural Americans and consumers who care about
maintaining our nation’s food security, “Economic Impact of Immigration”,
https://www.fb.org/issues/immigration-reform/agriculture-labor-reform/economic-impact-of-
immigration/
Agriculture needs anywhere from 1.5 -2 million hired workers. Labor costs account for 48 percent of
the variable production costs for fresh fruits and 35 percent of variable costs for fresh vegetables. The
current labor situation is most acute for delicate berries and easily bruised produce. Harvesting costs
for strawberries, blackberries and cherries account for about 60% to 66% of total production costs, making labor the primary harvest
expense. People are needed to judge which fruit are ready to be picked and which need to be left to ripen. Many migrants
who begin their careers as farm laborers move onto other sectors of the economy or less
demanding positions after several years. This progression leads to farmers often being the first
to bear the negative economic impacts of decreased border crossings and migrant labor
shortages. At least 50-70 percent of farm laborers in the country today are unauthorized. Few
U.S. workers are willing to fill available farm labor jobs. Challenges of the H-2A Program 72
percent of growers reported that workers arrived on average of 22 days after the “date of
need.” The program provides less than 4 percent of the hired workers needed in agriculture.
Entering into the H-2A program has been found to increase the obstacles that farmers face in
order to hire and maintain employees. Only 8 percent of employers report that they were audited before they
participated in the H-2A program, but 35 percent report being audited since entering the program. An NCAE survey found that 47
percent of employers were “not at all satisfied” or only “slightly satisfied” with the H-2A program.
Farmers and even professional H-2A agents are routinely forced to hire lawyers to help them get
through the process successfully. Labor Impacts on Imports A PNAE study found that when comparing the two
year periods between 1998-2000 and 2010-2012, the share of fresh produce consumed in
America that was imported rose by 73.9 percent. Without an adequate supply of labor American
farmer are at a competitive disadvantage. Americans ate 6.6 billion more pounds of imported
fresh fruits and vegetables in 2010-2012 than they ate from 1998-2000. The farm labor shortage
explains as much as $3.3 billion in missed GDP growth in 2012. It also accounts for $1.3 billion in
farm income that wasn’t realized that year. Had U.S. growers not faced labor challenges—and
been able to maintain the share of fresh produce they provided to the domestic market from 1998-2000—
America would have boasted more than 89,000 more jobs in 2012. American GDP would have
grown by almost $12.4 billion in 2012 and produced almost $4.9 billion more in annual farm
revenues. Almost 75 percent of that $12.4 billion in GDP growth would have been due to
increased economic activity in the non-farm parts of the economy that year. Effects of Enforcement
Only Immigration Reform The impacts of an enforcement only approach to immigration would be
detrimental to the agricultural industry. If agriculture were to lose access to all undocumented
workers, agricultural output would fall by $30 to $60 billion. The enforcement only option would
increase food prices by 5-6 percent, with domestic fruit production off by 30-61 percent and
vegetable production down 15-31percent. The livestock sector would also suffer lost production
in the 13-27 percent range. The ideal approach would be enforcement with an adjustment of
status and a redesigned guest worker program. This approach would result in no increase in
food prices. There would be minimal decreases in fruit, vegetable, grain, and livestock
production.
Domestic Can’t Fill
Immigrant labor pool is shrinking and US natives don’t want to do the work
Cindy Carcamo 1/4/2018, cover immigration for the Los Angeles Times. Previously, she was
Arizona bureau chief and national correspondent for The Times, “Farms face shrinking
immigrant labor pool; U.S.-born workers remain a rarity despite increasing pay”, https://search-
proquest-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/1984012448?pq-origsite=summon
For generations, rural Mexico has been the primary source of hired farm labor in the U.S.
According to a federal survey, nine out of 10 agricultural workers in places like California are
foreign-born, and more than half are in the U.S. illegally. But farm labor from Mexico has been on
the decline in California. And under the Trump administration, many in the agricultural industry
worry that deportations -- and the fear of them -- could further cut the supply of workers. But
try as they have to entice workers with better salaries and benefits, companies have found it
impossible to attract enough U.S.-born workers to make up for a shortage from south of the
border. Del Bosque said he'll hire anyone who shows up ready to work. But that rarely means
someone born in the U.S. "Americans will say, 'You can't pay me enough to do this kind of
work,'" Del Bosque said. "They won't do it. They'll look for something easier." For some immigrants
working the fields, people like Flores are a puzzle -- their sweating next to them represents a kind of squandering of an American
birthright. "It'shard to be here under the sun. It's a waste of time and their talents in the fields," said
Norma Felix, 58, a Mexican picker for almost three decades. "They don't take advantage of their privilege and
benefit of being born here. They could easily work in an office." Most don't last long, she said.
"There is always one or two who show up every season," Felix said. "They show up for three or
four days and turn around and leave." Agriculture's reliance on immigrant labor, especially in the American West, goes
back to the late 1800s, after the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad, said J. Edward Taylor, a UC Davis rural economist.
"The domestic farm workforce was simply not big enough to support the growth of labor-
intensive fruit and vegetable crops," he said. With the notable exception of the Dust Bowl years in the 1930s --
when American migrant workers from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas moved out west after a severe drought devastated their
livelihoods -- there
was never a time when California crops were picked primarily by U.S.-born
farmworkers, Taylor said. Those workers eventually moved on to nonfarm jobs. Now, Mexico is
undergoing some of the same changes the U.S. did around the middle of the 20th century,
Taylor said, with "employment shifting from farms to industry and services." According to
Taylor's research, the number of farmworkers coming out of rural Mexico is decreasing by an
estimated 150,000 a year. That means U.S. and Mexican farmers will have to increasingly
compete for a dwindling pool of labor.
Higher tariffs mean we need more foreign farmworkers now to prevent

economic losses
Bret Thorn 2017, is the senior food and beverage editor at Nation’s Restaurant News, “Lack of
skilled immigrant labor could cause higher food prices”, March 23, 2017, https://search-
proquest-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/1879888938?pq-
origsite=summon&accountid=14667
American agriculture has long depended on immigrant labor - particularly labor by undocumented
workers. A 2014 study commissioned by the American Farm Bureau Federation put the
percentage of undocumented farm laborers at between 50 percent and 70 percent of the total
workforce. Illustration: NRN/Anna Kang President Donald Trump has vowed to crack down on illegal immigration. Shortly after
his election in November, he told CBS's "60 Minutes" that he planned to deport millions of undocumented immigrants immediately.
"What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of
these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate,"
Trump said. He then said that once that initial group was eliminated and "the border is secure," immigration officers would make a
"determination" about the remaining undocumented workers. The current admiration's rhetoric on illegal immigration and reports
on crackdowns on undocumented workers have brought jitters not only to immigrant workers, but to their employers. It's
unclear exactly what a crackdown on labor would do to produce pricing, particularly considering
other trade-related and taxation issues that are up in the air. Those potential initiatives include
mentions by the Trump administration of a tax of up to 20 percent on imports from Mexico to
pay for the proposed border wall, and a new corporate tax structure proposed by Congress that
would give tax breaks to exporters and remove tax exemptions from importers. The border
adjustment tax would basically change how goods are taxed, taxing them where they're
consumed rather than where they're produced. Several companies have come out in support of a border
adjustment tax of some kind, according to the American Made Coalition. The group lists MillerCoors and Blue, Diamond Growers
among the list of supporters. "While
our global competitors continue to improve their tax codes by
cutting rates and encouraging investment and job creation, our tax code remains frozen in
place. The result is lost investment, fewer jobs, and lower wages," the American Made Coalition states in its
press materials. Although the idea behind the tax is to encourage domestic production, the National Retail Federation opposes it,
saying in a statement on Feb. 28 that the costs on "everyday necessities like food, gas, clothing and prescription medicine" for the
average American household would go up by $1,700 in the first year. American Farm Bureau Federation president Zippy Duvall also
expressed concerns about the tax. "We're still studying that tax reform, and we're hoping some common sense comes to that area.
We want to make sure it doesn't roll over into a trade situation and cause a trade war that would not be good for anyone in
agriculture," Duvall told agriculture publication AgFax. How exactly such shifts in import and corporate taxes would affect
restaurants depends, of course, on what kind of food they serve, according to Wade Winters, vice president for supply chain at
Consolidated Concepts, a cost reduction firm based in Waltham, Mass. "Any restaurants that use large quantities of avocados will be
greatly affected by the border tax since the U.S. gets a large percentage of their avocados from Mexico," Winters said in an email.
"Restaurants may choose to implement a change to the pricing on their menus to adjust for the higher costs, but this is always a
difficult decision. Competition is already tight so nobody wants to increase prices and lose market share. So the reality is that most
restaurants will absorb these cost increases, and find other ways to offset the higher costs." DeWayne Dove, vice president of
purchasing for purchasing cooperative SpenDifference, said other items that would be affected by a tax on imports from Mexico
would include Brussels sprouts, strawberries, tomatoes, "wet vegetables" such as broccoli and cilantro, peppers and squash. "The
earliest experts say [such a tax] could occur, based on the need to work itself through the legislature and then be executed, is the
end of 2017," Dove said. With the more than $115 billion in agricultural imports, according to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, possibly being squeezed (of which $9.5 billion are fresh fruit and
vegetables from Mexico), laborers in the United States become even more important, and past
crackdowns on undocumented workers have not gone well. After Georgia passed HB 87 in 2011,
economists and marketing professors at the University of Georgia surveyed farmers and
calculated that the state's farming sector lost $140 million due to labor shortages that meant
crops weren't harvested. Add to that other segments affected, such as distributors and retailers,
and the figure was estimated to be as high as $400 million. "The potential impacts to the supply chain of
zealous enforcement are real," said Joe Kefauver, managing partner of public affairs firm Align Public Strategies. "The White
House may want to look at what happened in Georgia and other southern agricultural states. [A]
significant portion of their crops went un-harvested and literally died in the fields, greatly
impacting both price and availability of products," Kefauver said. "Those jobs were not back-
filled by non-immigrants as anticipated by state lawmakers, and, in fact, were not filled at all."
Those jobs couldn't have been back-filled, according to Kathy Means, vice president of industry relations at the
Produce Marketing Association, noting that farm workers are skilled laborers performing jobs that
native-born Americans don't want. In a speech on Feb. 28, Trump advocated implementing a
merit-based immigration system focused on skilled workers. Experts say farm workers would fit
into that category. "It does take a special person to get out and work in the fields in the hot sun, stooping, lifting. It's just hard
work," said Charles Hall, executive director of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association. He added that you have to know
what you're doing to harvest properly. "You have to know when that peach or tomato or pepper is ripe. Someone who is not skilled
with that sense of touch, they're going to be picking product that's not ripe, and consumers will not appreciate it." Since
farm
workers are paid by the amount that they pick, he said, it's not uncommon for skilled workers to
earn $15 to $18 per hour. Unskilled workers would earn less, he said, making the job
undesirable to locals. Produce isn't the only food likely to be affected by a labor shortage. The
National Milk Producers Federation said half of the workers on U.S. dairy farms are immigrants,
and, according to a report released in September 2015, losing them would increase retail milk
prices by 90 percent and cost the U.S. economy $32.1 billion in economic output. However, it
should be noted the survey does not distinguish between undocumented and documented
immigrant workers.
Immigrant workers solve worker shortages

Luo and Escalante 4/28/17; Tianyuan Luo :Research Assistant at University of Georgia; Cesar
Escalante: Ph.D. Agricultural Economics - University of Illinois, 2001, MS Agricultural Economics, University of
Guelph , Exchange Scholar - International Christian University (Tokyo, Japan), 1984, BA Economic,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/90014639?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents, Sustaining a healthy farm labor force: issues for policy
consideration
The success and viability of farm businesses depend to a certain extent on the quality and
quantity of the labor force. Promoting a healthy workforce is a priority for U.S. agriculture because hired labor is an
essential production input, accounting for the third largest production expense (Kandel, 2008).
Recruiting and retaining farm workers, however, has usually presented a difficult challenge for
farm businesses given high physical demands, heavy workloads, and relatively lower wages in
the agricultural sector (Luo and Escalante, 2017a). These employment challenges are further aggravated
by health risks: farm employees work under volatile weather conditions and risk contamination
from chemicals in the production and processing environments (Grzywacz, Quandt, and Arcury, 2008).
Maintaining a healthy farm labor force is further complicated by the reality that a majority of
workers on U.S. farms are immigrants, some of whom may not even have legal authorization to
work or be in the United States (Kandel, 2008; Martin and Jackson-Smith, 2013). Martin (2016), for instance, claims
that between 2007 and 2009 only 30% of U.S. crop workers were born in the United States,
while the remaining 70% were foreign-born. Within this category, about 55% were unlawfully residing
in the United States and did not have legal employment authorization. Notably, jobs in the
agricultural sector are 3.5% more likely to be performed by an undocumented worker than by a
local, documented worker (Bump, 2015). Recent stricter implementation of immigrant control
policies has resulted in the deportation of some undocumented immigrants (Escalante, Yu, and Li, 2016).
At the same time, employment verification systems and monitored hiring procedures have been
established and enforced, as have harsher sanctions (involving higher civil fines and criminal penalties) for
employers who violate the law (Smith and Sugimori, 2015). However, even with the intensified immigration control
enforcement efforts, the share of undocumented workers dropped in only a few industries, such
as construction (Passel, 2015). Given the legal/illegal status profile of the farm sector labor force,
understanding the patterns of workers’ health care decisions could illuminate critical health care
needs for farm workers. Nurturing a productive farm labor force requires immigrant farm
workers’ health care needs and access to be given attention and consideration to a similar
extent afforded farm workers who are U.S. citizens (Mohanty, 2006; Mohanty et al., 2005; Laroche, 2000). What
health care decisions do farm workers make? Do these decisions vary by legal status? Having this information can provide accurate
and specific suggestions for farm operators in their efforts to maintain acceptable health standards among their workers. As the
country’s new leaders contemplate introducing significant changes to the previous administration’s health care policies, the social
imperative requires policy-makers to optimally allocate medical resources and promote the health welfare of all agricultural
workers.
To answer these questions, we first compare the health care utilization patterns of green
card and undocumented farm workers with those of citizen farm workers who may be less
constrained in accessing health services and benefits. The increasing immigrant population in the United States
has created strong public sentiment due to the adverse effect on the adequacy and cost of social welfare programs (Borjas 1999).
Given the implementation of public health reforms (e.g., the Personal Responsibility and Work 2 CHOICES 1st Quarter 2017 • 32(1)
Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996) and stringent immigration enforcement (e.g., E-verify mandates), do immigrants enjoy
access to health care services and rates comparable to those enjoyed by U.S. citizens? We answer this question by investigating farm
workers’ choices among health care provider alternatives and the payment methods they use to settle health care bills. Based on
legal status and demographic characteristics, farm workers may have diverse preferences for health care providers and methods of
payment.
Ag Key to Econ
Their evidence focuses on the wrong data -ours proves the massive economic
impact of the loss.
Bronars ‘15
To get a full picture of the current labor issues facing U.S. farms, our analysis relies on several federal data
sources. We use data from the United States Department of Agriculture’s Farm Labor Survey (FLS) and the U.S. Census of
Agriculture to determine how the number of full-time equivalent field and crop workers has
dropped in recent years, both nationally and in individual regions. Using data from the National Agricultural
Workers Survey, a survey administered by the U.S. Department of Labor, we are able to show that much of this
recent decline is due to fewer new immigrants joining the workforce. We also rely on a recent
study from the USDA to project the impact that the farm labor situation has had on our broader
economy in the last decade. Our work produces troubling results that have implications not just for
our country’s $400 billion agriculture industry, but the U.S. economy overall.11 Considering that experts
estimate every farm job supports three additional jobs in related, often higher-paying fields like
trucking, irrigation, and marketing, it is little surprise that the precipitous drop in the supply of laborers has had much
broader repercussions.12 We estimate that the dire labor situation affecting U.S. farms has cost our economy
almost $3 billion in spending outside of the farming sector each year, and as many as 41,000
non-farm jobs annually. Talbott says that in his pocket of Western Colorado he has seen the labor situation temper farmers’
expansion plans and push many out of the business. While there were about 250 growers in his region when he started 30 years ago,
today there are just roughly 60. “Labor played a big role in that,” he says. For now, however, he says he will continue trying to find
ways to eke out another harvest this year, and hope that Congress overcomes its gridlock and creates a feasible guest worker
program that will allow our farmers adequate labor to meet the country’s food production needs. “You can’t be in agriculture unless
you’re an optimist,” he says, “but the longer things stay unchanged in Washington, it gets harder and harder to be an optimist each
year.” The
goal of this report is to document how dramatically the number of laborers available to
U.S. farmers has declined in recent years—particularly the workers needed to harvest the most
labor-intensive crops. Before discussing these trends, however, it is necessary to understand some background on the
nature of agricultural production. For many fresh fruits and vegetables, mechanized harvesting is not feasible, meaning growers are
dependent upon less-skilled and semi-skilled workers to pick produce by hand.13 This is far different from commodity crops like
corn, soybeans, and wheat that can often be harvested by as few as one or two employees using machines. For this reason, fresh
produce growers are often among the first to feel any contraction in labor supply—and they feel
it most acutely. We focus on these growers in this report. In many parts of our analysis, we also discuss the labor
declines that have occurred nationally for the farm sector, and specifically for the areas of the
country where most of the fresh produce and tree nuts are grown. To produce the latter figures, we
exclude some Midwestern states such as Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Nebraska, where commodity crops make
up a large share of crop production.14 In Iowa, for instance, less than .08 percent of the agricultural products sold in 2012 were
fresh fruits, tree nuts, vegetables, or melons.15 The state, however, led the country in terms of its corn production.16 Such
states have far different labor needs than areas such as the southeastern United States or California, which are heavily
populated by fresh produce growers. Moreover, any decreases in the agricultural labor force in states that
specialize in mechanized crops are likely to reflect other trends, such as increased
mechanization or more efficient machines. On farms, workers can take on a variety of job
functions, serving as field or crop workers, livestock workers, graders and sorters, equipment operators, inspectors, or manag-
ers. In
this report, however, we often focus specifically on field and crop workers. This is largely
because this position is the most common one on U.S. farms and is also particularly important
to fresh produce or nut growers that are dependent upon hand harvesting. It is also the position
most likely to be impacted by any slowdowns in arrivals of young, foreign-born workers in our
economy or at the border. From 1998 to 2000, for instance—a period largely before the major shortage farmers are
experiencing now—about 80 percent of all field and crop workers in the country were foreign-born, and more than 60 percent of
those workers were recent immigrants who had been in the country for fewer than 10 years.17 This compares to the just over half
of all agriculture workers who are generally immigrants.18
Other industries rely on agriculture, making it critical to the economy

immigration reforms that will help create jobs for Americans today, “Agriculture”,
https://www.newamericaneconomy.org/issues/agriculture/
Agriculture, by any measure, is critically important to the U.S economy. In 2014, the agriculture,
fishing, and forestry industries contributed more than $215 billion to U.S. gross domestic product. The
broader industry also provided jobs to almost 2 million workers. The health of our agriculture
industry, however, is tied directly to immigration. Farmers frequently say that few, if any,
American workers are willing to take on the most difficult low-level farm jobs—particularly the
hand harvesting roles required to produce fresh fruits and vegetables. Yet the H-2A visa, the
only agricultural visa currently available to U.S. farms, is too expensive and cumbersome to work
for many U.S. growers. We explore this issue—and the way it costs our economy—below.
Immigrants in the Workforce In 2014, more than half of all hired farmworkers in the United States were
immigrants, or roughly half a million workers. In many states known for their fresh produce,
immigrant farm laborers make up large shares of miscellaneous agriculture workers—the
occupation that includes those hand picking crops in the field. Florida 77.4% 22.6% Washington 73.5% 26.5%
Arizona 80.4% 19.6% California 69.2% 30.8% Oregon 72.6% 27.4% Idaho 62.6% 37.4% SHARE IMMIGRANTS IN THE WORKFORCE
Labor Shortages In recent years, the number of new immigrants arriving in the country to work in
agriculture has fallen by 75 percent. Rising wages indicate this has led to a major labor shortage
on U.S. farms—making it difficult for many growers to stay in business or expand their
operations. The workers left are also aging rapidly, meaning shortages will likely worsen as they
retire. Key Stats 146,000: Decline in the number of field and crop workers in America, 2002-2014 12
percent: Amount wages of field and crop workers rose during this period Decline in Key States California -87,219 -39.4% Colorado,
Nevada, and Utah -4,244 -36.7% Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina -6,956 -26.9% New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware -
5,716 -19.5% Florida -8,504 -18.5% Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin -4,434 -14.9% Arizona, New Mexico -1,853 -14.0% North
Carolina, Virginia -3,798 -13.4% The Aging of Foreign-Born Farm Workers 1998-2002 38.2% 47.6% 14.2% 2008-2012 20.7% 52.3%
27.1% SHARE LABOR SHORTAGES The Cost of Our Labor Shortage Because agriculture is intertwined with so
many other industries in our economy—such as transportation, packing, and irrigation—a
shortage of farm workers hurts the U.S. economy more broadly. We estimate U.S. growers
would have produced $3.1 billion more in fresh fruits and vegetables per year by 2014 had farm
labor not been an issue. The table in this section shows the costs to the U.S. economy for failing
to meet this target. Labor Shortage Costs to the U.S. Economy $3.1 billion in additional fresh produce sales
per year for growers. $2.8 billion in additional spending each year on related services like
transportation. 41,000 more American jobs in non-farm sectors. SHARE THE COST OF OUR LABOR
SHORTAGE Rising Imports In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of fresh
fruits and vegetables Americans eat that is imported. Although many factors play into this
phenomenon, we estimate labor shortages alone explain 27 percent of the market share decline
experienced by U.S. growers from 1998-2000 to 2010-2012. Had growers maintained their hold
on the domestic market, an estimated 89,300 additional U.S. jobs would have been created by
2012. Fresh Fruits 14.5% 25.8% Fresh Vegetables 17.1% 31.2% SHARE RISING IMPORTS Jobs Americans Won’t Do U.S. fresh
produce growers have long said that few, if any, American workers are willing to take on the most arduous
farm jobs. We studied this issue in North Carolina, examining how many American workers actually applied for heavily
advertised farming positions in 2011, a period when the country was still recovering from the recession. The table in this section
shows the results.
Agricultural productivity is key to economic growth

Muharram Macatta 2016, is a writer for The Guardian, “Importance of agricultural sector in a
country’s economic development”, December 2, 2016,
https://www.ippmedia.com/en/features/importance-agricultural-sector-country%E2%80%99s-
economic-development
It is seen that increased

agricultural output and productivity tend to contribute substantially to an
overall economic development of the country; it will be rational and appropriate to place
greater emphasis on further development of the agricultural sector. Agriculture makes its
contribution to economic development in following ways: By providing food and raw material to non-
agricultural sectors of the economy, by creating demand for goods produced in non-agricultural
sectors, by the rural people on the strength of the purchasing power, earned by them on selling
the marketable surplus, by providing investable surplus in the form of savings and taxes to be
invested in non-agricultural sector, earning valuable foreign exchange through the export of
agricultural products, and by providing employment to a vast army of uneducated, backward
and unskilled labour. As a matter of fact, if the process of economic development is to be initiated and
made self- sustaining, it must begin with agricultural sector. The agriculture sector is the
backbone of an economy which provides the basic ingredients to mankind and now raw
material for industrialisation. Lessons drawn from the economic history of many advanced countries tell us that agricultural prosperity
contributed considerably in fostering economic advancement. It is correctly observed that the leading industrialised countries of today were once
predominantly agricultural while the developing economies still have the dominance of agriculture and it largely contributes to the national income. For
example in India, “still 28 per cent of national income comes from this sector.” 1/4 Agriculture is the basic source of food
supply of all the countries of the world—whether underdeveloped, developing or even
developed. Due to heavy pressure of population in underdeveloped and developing countries and its rapid increase, the demand for food is
increasing at a fast rate. If agriculture fails to meet the rising demand of food products, it is found to
affect adversely the growth rate of the economy. Raising supply of food by agricultural sector
has, therefore, great importance for economic growth of our country. Agricultural advancement is necessary
for improving the supply of raw materials for the agro- based industries especially in our developing country. The shortage of
agricultural goods has its impact upon industrial production and a consequent increase in the
general price level. It will impede the growth of the country’s economy.
Ag Industry key to jobs and economy

Stabenow 2013, Feb 17, Debbie Stabenow, Senate agriculture Committee Chairwoman,
“American Agriculture Supports 16 Million
Jobs”, http://www.stabenow.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=251
WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., Chairwoman of the U.S. Senate Committee on
Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, said today that American agriculture is supporting 16 million jobs and
is one of few industries leading the economic recovery. Stabenow made the comments at the Committee's first
hearing of the 112th Congress, where Members and witnesses examined agriculture's effect on the U.S. economy. Keith Creagh,
Governor Rick Snyder's newly appointed Director of the Michigan Department of Agriculture & Rural
Development, testified at the hearing on the importance of agriculture, the state's second-largest
industry, to Michigan'seconomy. "Rarely have we seen a more positive outlook for the agricultural
economy as a whole," Stabenow said. "This should come as no surprise to any of us: American farmers and ranchers produce
the safest, most nutritious and most sustainable agricultural products in the world. In fact, one of the biggest success
stories in our nation's economy is the strength of our farm exports. For the second year in a row, agricultural
exports are projected to be over $100 billion ... Our agricultural exports will support over one million jobs this
year alone -- and these jobs are not just on the farm but in towns and cities all across the
country." Stabenow pointed to her state of Michigan, where agriculture is the second-largest industry, as an example of a state
poised to continue strengthening an already robust sector. "Agriculture represents more than $70 billion for our
economy each year, and represents one out of every four jobs in my state," she said.Keith Creagh, Director of
the Michigan Department of Agriculture & Rural Development, provided a snapshot the agriculture economy from a state
perspective, highlighting
agriculture's role as a jobs creator and also identifying new opportunities
for investment and growth."Michigan's agri-food industry is a robust and high tech industry that will
undoubtedly serve as one of Michigan's, and the nation's, foundations to our long term, sustainable
economic recovery,"Creagh said. "At a time when 850,000 jobs were lost in Michigan, our agricultural economy experienced
a decade of growth. It expanded at a rate of more than five times faster than the rate of the general economy between 2006 and
2007. Further, since 2007, we have seen a 27 percent increase, making agriculture a cornerstone in diversifying Michigan's economic
future. As a result of our diverse soils, crops, fresh water, and climate we are well-positioned to continue this growth and expansion
at all levels of production. Currently, we produce over 200 commodities on a commercial basis; and lead the nation in 18 of
these." Creagh also thanked Stabenow for her leadership in agriculture and her commitment to strengthening Michigan's economy
and workforce through continuing to work closely with state officials. Additional witnesses included Mr. Fred Yoder, a farmer from
Plain City, Ohio and former president of the National Corn Growers Association; Dr. Joe Outlaw, an economist with Texas A&M; and
Mr. Thomas M. Hoenig, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.Senator Stabenow added, "I want to thank all our
witnesses today, especially Director Keith Creagh from my home state. Director Creagh I look forward to working with you and
Governor Snyder to create Agriculture jobs in Michigan." 16 million jobs. That's an estimate of the total number
of Americans who have a job because of American agriculture.
Agriculture makes up 1/5 of the economy, 28 percent of American jobs, and a

total impact of $6.7 trillion
IDFA 2017, The International Dairy Foods Association, Washington, D.C., represents the
nation's dairy manufacturing and marketing industries and their suppliers with a membership of
nearly 525 companies within a $125-billion a year industry, “What’s Feeding the US Economy?
Food and Ag Production, Study Shows”, November 16, 2017, https://www.idfa.org/news-
views/headline-news/article/2017/11/16/what-s-feeding-the-us-economy-food-and-ag-
production-study-shows
More than one-fifth of the nation’s economy is linked, either directly or indirectly, to the food and
agriculture sectors, according to a nationwide economic impact study commissioned by IDFA
and 21 other trade associations. The study, released today, also shows that 28 percent of all American jobs
are linked to food and agriculture. This data includes the $628.27 billion overall economic
impact of dairy products produced and sold in the United States. The associations launched a new website,
www.FeedingTheEconomy.com, that features the economic impact of the overall food and ag industry and links to interactive tools
used by each of the associations. IDFA’s Dairy Delivers provides specific dairy industry data. “IDFA
was pleased to help
shape and drive the Feeding the Economy study, which clearly proves that food and agriculture
is the largest manufacturing sector in our nation,” said Michael Dykes, D.V.M., IDFA president and CEO. “With
officials threatening U.S. withdrawal from free-trade pacts, such as the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA), this study provides hard evidence that food and agriculture exports
are an important part of the health of the U.S. economy. U.S. food and agricultural exports
account for more than $146 billion in trade.” Results of the study are being shared with policymakers on Capitol Hill
and in statehouses across the country because jobs and economic development are relevant to discussions on both tax reform and
trade negotiations. In fact, the food and agricultural trade associations sent a letter to all 50 governors this week, urging them to
voice their support for modernization, not withdrawal, of NAFTA. Key
findings from the study: Total Jobs:
43,311,057 Total Wages: $1.9 trillion Total Taxes: $894.13 billion Exports: $146.32 billion Total
Food and Industry Economic Impact: $6.7 trillion The economic data was compiled by John Dunham & Associates
and is available at www.FeedingTheEconomy.com. The analysis illustrates the direct impact of food and
agriculture on jobs, wages, economic output, exports, and state and local business taxes. The
interactive website also breaks out the data at the national, state and congressional district levels. Dairy Delivers provides an
analysis of the economic stimulus of dairy food products.
Ag decline would decrease GDP, employment, and increase spending on food

assistance programs
USDA 2016, the United States Department of Agriculture provide leadership on food,
agriculture, natural resources, rural development, nutrition, and related issues based on public
policy, the best available science, and effective management, “Ag and Food Sectors and the
Economy”, https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-
essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy/
The U.S. agriculture sector extends beyond the farm business to include a range of farm-
related industries. The largest of these are food service and food manufacturing. Americans'
expenditures on food amount to 13 percent of household budgets on average. Among Federal
Government outlays on farm and food programs, nutrition assistance far outpaces other programs. What is agriculture's share of the
overall U.S. economy? What is agriculture's share of the overall U.S. economy? Agriculture,
food, and related
industries contributed $992 billion to U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2015, a 5.5-percent
share. The output of America’s farms contributed $136.7 billion of this sum—about 1 percent of
GDP. The overall contribution of the agriculture sector to GDP is larger than this because sectors
related to agriculture—forestry, fishing, and related activities; food, beverages, and tobacco
products; textiles, apparel, and leather products; food and beverage stores; and food service,
eating and drinking places—rely on agricultural inputs in order to contribute added value to the
economy. Agriculture and its related industries provide 11 percent of U.S. employment Agriculture and its related
industries provide 11 percent of U.S. employment In 2016, 21.4 million full- and part-time jobs
were related to the agricultural and food sectors—11.0 percent of total U.S. employment. Direct
on-farm employment accounted for about 2.6 million of these jobs, or 1.4 percent of U.S.
employment. Employment in agriculture- and food-related industries supported another 18.7
million jobs. Of this, food service, eating and drinking places accounted for the largest share—
12.2 million jobs—and food/beverage stores supported 3.2 million jobs. The remaining
agriculture-related industries together added another 3.3 million jobs. Food accounts for 12.6 percent of
American households’ expenditures Food accounts for 12.6 percent of American households’ expenditures With a 12.6-percent
share, food ranked third behind housing (33 percent) and transportation (15.8 percent) in a typical American household's 2016
expenditures. Expenditure shares for housing, food, personal insurance and pensions, healthcare, and savings rose slightly in 2016,
while transportation, entertainment and alcoholic beverage, and apparel expenditure shares fell from 2015 to 2016. Food
manufacturing accounts for 14 percent of all U.S. manufacturing employees Food
manufacturing accounts for 14
percent of all U.S. manufacturing employees In 2016, the U.S. food and beverage manufacturing
sector employed more than 1.5 million people, or just over 1 percent of all U.S. nonfarm
employment. In over 35,000 food and beverage manufacturing plants located throughout the
country, these employees were engaged in transforming raw agricultural materials into
products for intermediate or final consumption. Meat and poultry plants employed the largest
percentage of food and beverage manufacturing workers, followed by bakeries, and fruit and
vegetable processing plants. Food and nutrition assistance programs make up the largest share of USDA outlays Food
and nutrition assistance programs make up the largest share of USDA outlays USDA outlays
increased by 48 percent from fiscal 2006 to fiscal 2015 (fiscal years begin October 1 and end September 30),
with the largest increase coming from food and nutrition assistance programs, which grew especially fast since fiscal 2008, reflecting
higher recession-related participation and a temporary increase in per-person benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance
Program (SNAP). An improving economy and expiration of the larger SNAP benefits caused growth of food and nutrition assistance
program outlays to slow by fiscal 2012 and decrease in fiscal 2014. Outlays on Federal crop insurance also decreased in fiscal 2014 as
extreme weather events subsided and crop prices declined. Commodity program outlays declined in fiscal 2015 with the passing of
the new Farm Act in 2014. Food and nutrition assistance accounted for more than 73 percent of USDA
outlays in fiscal 2015.
Agricultural production is vital to economic growth

Oppedahl, 2018- Senior Business Economist [David B. Oppedahl, The Federal Reserve Bank of
Chicago, 2/7/18, The Chicago Fed, July 13, 2018, AY]
Over a number of decades, agricultural exports have become increasingly important to the
bottom line of farmers in the Midwest and other parts of the nation. Moreover, imports of food products
from around the world have helped increase business activity here and enhanced the lives of U.S. consumers. On November 28,
2017, theFederal Reserve Bank of Chicago held a conference to explore issues surrounding
agricultural trade, particularly those pertinent to the Midwest economy. David B. Oppedahl (Federal
Reserve Bank of Chicago) set the stage for the day’s discussions by highlighting the extensive media attention paid to agricultural
trade in 2017. New foreign sources of demand (China in particular)
for agricultural products helped sustain a
rise in U.S. farm exports since around 2000, he stated. Furthermore, the World Bank projected global
economic growth to have improved to 2.7% in 2017 from 2.4% in 2016, and forecasted annual
growth of around 3% in 2018 and 2019.2 According to Oppedahl, stronger world growth should boost
trade—and midwestern agricultural exports. He emphasized that being able to better project farm
exports’ impact on farm income in the next generation would help rural communities decide which new
facilities and public infrastructure projects to invest in. Farm exports and imports generate jobs and spur growth,
so sound trade policies are vital to the future of agriculture and the rural Midwest, said Oppedahl. Increased agricultural trade has
connected more food producers with more consumers across the globe, with benefits accruing to both. As the world’s population
continues to grow, incomes move higher, and urbanization expands, farm exports are expected to rise further. The Midwest’s share
of U.S. agricultural exports has been relatively large, especially for products such as corn and soybeans, and has helped boost the
incomes of farmers in the region. Farm
trade has also generated food sector jobs and Main Street business
activity, which contribute to the prosperity of rural communities and cities of the Midwest.
Regardless of the risks posed by renegotiated trade agreements and depreciating infrastructure,
agricultural trade will remain vital to the Midwest economy.
California Econ
Agriculture is key to California Economy
Sumner 92 (Daniel, an American economist, currently the Frank H. Buck, Jr. Distinguished
Professor and Director of the University of California, Agricultural Issues Center at University of
California, Davis, and a publisher author, “The Measure of California Agriculture: Its Impact on
the State Economy” 1992. Book)//RB
California farms have a significant direct effect on the state’s economy. According to the U.S.
Bureau of Economic Analysis, California’s gross state product (GSP), the value added by all
industries in the state, was $1,438 billion in 2003. At $21 billion (Table 5.1), agriculture
(farming), forestry, fishing, hunting, and support services accounted for 1.45 percent of the
California GSP. Determining the share and role of agriculture in California’s economy depends in part on how agriculture is
defined. Many industries are related to farm production in general, but the degree of linkage varies. From a
very broad perspective, about 90,000 commercial establishments (in addition to farms) in California
are related to agricultural production (Table 5.2). Within this group, some industries such as food and
beverage manufacturing, are closely linked to local farming, but others, such as restaurants, may
be only weakly related to local farm production. While food retailing depends on food production, it does not
usually depend much on local production. Food produced in California is sold worldwide and food retailing
occurs even in places where local food production is minor. With more than $61 billion in sales, the
California food, beverage and tobacco manufacturing industry employs nearly 200,000 workers.
There are 4,661 establishments in the state that process farm products to produce foods, beverages and tobacco. The bakery and
tortilla manufacturing group has the largest number of establishments (39%) and employees (22%), but the beverage industry is the
largest in sales (24%) (Table 5.3). Wineries account for most of the beverage sales value (fluid milk processing is included with dairy
products). California food, beverage and tobacco manufacturing establishments account for 15 percent of these U.S. establishments
and 11 percent of U.S. sales (Table 5.4). California’s shares
of U.S. sales in the fruit and vegetable
preserving, dairy products, bakeries and tortilla, and beverage production subsectors are all
larger than the state’s share of the agricultural and beverage processing sector as a whole.
Agriculture creates significant ripple effects (i.e. multipliers) throughout California’s economy. Each
dollar earned within agriculture fuels a more vigorous economy by stimulating additional activity
in the form of jobs, labor income and value added. The Agricultural Issues Center utilized IMPLAN Pro® version
2.0 software and accompanying 2002 dataset to determine multiplier effects. IMPLAN utilizes a model developed by the USDA
Forest Service1 designed to model the interrelationships between the economic sectors in the state and regional economies. The
model employs input-output tables to show transactions among sectors. For any given industry, the model enables quantification of
outputs (value of production), jobs, labor income and value added both before and after taking into account the ripple effects on the
entire economy. These ripple effects are expressed as a dollar value and as an industry multiplier. Industry multipliers are typically a
ratio close to 2. For the agricultural production and processing industry there is a value added multiplier of 2.27. Thus for every
dollar of value added in that sector, there is an additional $1.27 added to the state economy.
Ripple effects may also be measured in terms of jobs added to the economy.
Strong Californian economy bolsters country-wide military-industrial

innovation --- decline is reverse causal
Gvosdev 03 Nikolas K. Gvosdev is editor of In the National Interest. “Recall Madness-- and
Much Ado about Missiles” (http://nationalinterest.org/article/recall-madness-and-much-ado-
about-missiles-2406)//MM
But the real issue is this: people "inside the Beltway" sometimes seem to forget that there is no "United States" apart from the fifty
states (and associated territories and commonwealths). A fiscal and economic crisis in California has a direct
impact on the power of the United States, since some 13
percent of the total U.S. output is producedby California. California on its own is the sixth
largest economy in the world, worth some $1.309 trillion--yet this represents a decline of approximately 2.3
percent from 2000, when California's economy outperformed that of France. California represents a
significant share of the country's technological base and of its human capital. The high-tech
weaponry which led to a swift initial military victory in Iraq is in part a product of the technology
and defense sectors of the California economy. A state budget
crisis that significantly cuts back on everything from education (including higher education, where
so many innovative breakthroughs have taken place)to health care has ramifications for how the
United States projects its influence throughout the world. In previous issues of In the National Interest,
other authors have pointed out the dangerous implications of continued deficit spending by the federal government to support
overseas operations, and this problem can only increase if a continuing crisis in the principal engine of America's economy
continues. And, of course, California is the bellweather for the nation as a whole. Twenty-nine states have either
passed or are considering tax hikes to close budget deficits. Several states--including Hawaii, Georgia and North Carolina--will call
special fall sessions of their legislatures to deal with the fact that collected taxes have fallen short of budget projections. Yet the
attitude is that the recall in California is amusing political comedy, nothing more. There seems to be almost no recognition of the
fact that whoever sits in the governor's chair after October 7 --whether Grey Davis survives or is "terminated" --must work quickly to
solve the problems that have led California into its current quagmire. Few other countries in the world would be so
blasé if political turmoil and economic collapse threatened the welfare of a key component of its
national power. The California crisis reminds us that there is no neat line dividing "domestic" and "foreign" policy. Ensuring
that California survivesits current crisis is no less a priority than stabilizing Iraq or containing
North Korea.
Growth Good
U.S. economic decline ensures mass instability
Posen 18 - President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics
Adam S, "The Post-American World Economy," Foreign Affairs, March/April 2018
The United States’ motivation for building the postwar economic system was as much preventing
conflict as promoting growth. In setting out the rules by which all members would conduct
business, the architects of the system hoped to separate economic from military competition.
U.S. withdrawal need not result in economic or physical wars, but it will raise the risk of
stumbling into conflict by accident. Without agreed-on rules, even minor economic disputes have the
potential to set off escalating counterattacks. If the norm of separation between economic and
military confrontations breaks down, economic frictions, such as Chinese theft of intellectual
property or restrictions on trade with a nuclear Iran or North Korea, could turn into outright conflict. It is
plausible that as the United States retreats and thereby weakens its economy, the Trump administration will blame
the economic damage not on its own actions but on foreign governments, creating a self-
perpetuating cycle of anger. When other major countries step forward to preserve the open
economic order, or defend themselves against U.S. economic aggression, Washington may
interpret that as an attack on U.S. primacy. The Trump administration might even misinterpret
the current forbearance by China or the EU as a sign of weakness and an invitation to escalate
confrontations. Today, a smaller share of the world’s population than ever lives in poverty, and a larger share than ever lives a
middle-class existence. This is not solely the result of China’s astonishing rise. In Chile, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, South Korea,
Vietnam, and the countries of the former Soviet Union,
economic growth has brought hundreds of millions of
people out of what amounted to subsistence or little better. This miracle took place without
conquest or even much conflict, and with greater protections for private property and human rights than ever before.
The liberal order constructed and led by the United States made such progress possible by giving
countries, businesses, and individuals the opportunity to build their economic lives without fear of a
foreign power taking away what they had made. That U.S. leadership has not, as some have charged, hurt the United States. The
country’s rampant inequality and wage stagnation are largely the result of domestic political choices and failures. A
world in
which the United States ceases to lead—or, worse still, attacks—the system it built will be poorer,
nastier, less fair, and more dangerous for everyone.
Decline leads to Trump lash-out

Foster 16 [Dennis Foster, professor of international studies and political science at the Virginia
Military Institute, “Would President Trump go to war to divert attention from problems at
home?”, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2016/12/19/yes-trump-might-well-go-to-war-to-divert-attention-from-problems-at-
home/?utm_term=.43745ac4c66c]
If the U.S. economy tanks, should we expect Donald Trump to engage in a diversionary war? Since
the age of Machiavelli, analysts have expected world leaders to launch international conflicts to
deflect popular attention away from problems at home. By stirring up feelings of patriotism, leaders might
escape the political costs of scandal, unpopularity — or a poorly performing economy. One
often-cited example of diversionary war in modern times is Argentina’s 1982 invasion of the
Falklands, which several (though not all) political scientists attribute to the junta’s desire to divert the people’s attention from a
disastrous economy. In a 2014 article, Jonathan Keller and I argued that whether U.S. presidents
engage in diversionary conflicts depends in part on their psychological traits — how they frame the world,
process information and develop plans of action. Certain traits predispose leaders to more belligerent
behavior. Do words translate into foreign policy action? One way to identify these traits is content analyses
of leaders’ rhetoric. The more leaders use certain types of verbal constructs, the more likely they
are to possess traits that lead them to use military force. For one, conceptually simplistic leaders view the world
in “black and white” terms; they develop unsophisticated solutions to problems and are largely insensitive to risks. Similarly,
distrustful leaders tend to exaggerate threats and rely on aggression to deal with threats. Distrustful leaders typically favor military
action and are confident in their ability to wield it effectively. Thus, when faced with
politically damaging problems
that are hard to solve — such as a faltering economy — leaders who are both distrustful and
simplistic are less likely to put together complex, direct responses. Instead, they develop simplistic
but risky “solutions” that divert popular attention from the problem, utilizing the tools with which they are
most comfortable and confident (military force). Based on our analysis of the rhetoric of previous U.S. presidents, we found that
presidents whose language appeared more simplistic and distrustful, such as Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and George W.
Bush, were more likely to use force abroad in times of rising inflation and unemployment. By contrast, John F. Kennedy and Bill
Clinton, whose rhetoric pegged them as more complex and trusting, were less likely to do so. What about Donald Trump? Since
Donald Trump’s election, many commentators have expressed concern about how he will react to new challenges and whether he
might make quick recourse to military action. For example, the Guardian’s George Monbiot has argued that political realities will
stymie Trump’s agenda, especially his promises regarding the economy. Then, rather than risk disappointing his base, Trump might
try to rally public opinion to his side via military action. I sampled Trump’s campaign rhetoric, analyzing 71,446 words across 24
events from January 2015 to December 2016. Using a program for measuring leadership traits in rhetoric, I estimated what Trump’s
words may tell us about his level of distrust and conceptual complexity. The graph below shows Trump’s level of distrust compared
to previous presidents. These results are startling. Nearly 35 percent of Trump’s references to outside groups paint them as harmful
to himself, his allies and friends, and causes that are important to him — a percentage almost twice the previous high. The data
suggest that Americans have elected a leader who, if his campaign rhetoric is any indication, will be historically unparalleled among
modern presidents in his active suspicion of those unlike himself and his inner circle, and those who disagree with his goals. As a
candidate, Trump also scored second-lowest among presidents in conceptual complexity. Compared to
earlier presidents, he used more words and phrases that indicate less willingness to see multiple dimensions or ambiguities in the
decision-making environment. These include words and phrases like “absolutely,” “greatest” and “without a doubt.” A possible
implication for military action I
took these data on Trump and plugged them into the statistical model that
we developed to predict major uses of force by the United States from 1953 to 2000. For a president of
average distrust and conceptual complexity, an economic downturn only weakly predicts an increase in the use of force. But the
model would predict that a president with Trump’s numbers would respond to even a minor
economic downturn with an increase in the use of force. For example, were the misery index
(aggregate inflation and unemployment) equal to 12 — about where it stood in October 2011 — the model
predicts a president with Trump’s psychological traits would initiate more than one major
conflict per quarter.
Economic-induced decline leads causes nuclear war

Mann ’14 (Eric Mann is a special agent with a United States federal agency, with significant
domestic and international counterintelligence and counter-terrorism experience. Worked as a
special assistant for a U.S. Senator and served as a presidential appointee for the U.S. Congress.
He is currently responsible for an internal security and vulnerability assessment program.
Bachelors @ University of South Carolina, Graduate degree in Homeland Security @
Georgetown. “AUSTERITY, ECONOMIC DECLINE, AND FINANCIAL WEAPONS OF WAR: A NEW
PARADIGM FOR GLOBAL SECURITY,” May 2014,
https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/37262/MANN-THESIS-2014.pdf)
The conclusions reached in this thesis demonstrate how economic

considerations within states can figure
prominently into the calculus for future conflicts. The findings also suggest that security issues with
economic or financial underpinnings will transcend classical determinants of war and conflict,
and change the manner by which rival states engage in hostile acts toward one another. The
research shows that security concerns emanating from economic uncertainty and the inherent
vulnerabilities within global financial markets will present new challenges for national security,
and provide developing states new asymmetric options for balancing against stronger states.¶
The security areas, identified in the proceeding chapters, are likely to mature into global security threats in
the immediate future. As the case study on South Korea suggest, the overlapping security issues associated
with economic decline and reduced military spending by the United States will affect allied
confidence in America’s security guarantees. The study shows that this outcome could cause regional
instability or realignments of strategic partnerships in the Asia-pacific region with ramifications
for U.S. national security. Rival states and non-state groups may also become emboldened to
challenge America’s status in the unipolar international system.¶ The potential risks associated with stolen
or loose WMD, resulting from poor security, can also pose a threat to U.S. national security. The
case study on Pakistan, Syria and North Korea show how financial constraints affect weapons security making
weapons vulnerable to theft, and how financial factors can influence WMD proliferation by
contributing to the motivating factors behind a trusted insider’s decision to sell weapons technology. The inherent
vulnerabilities within the global financial markets will provide terrorists’ organizations and other
non-state groups, who object to the current international system or distribution of power, with opportunities to
disrupt global finance and perhaps weaken America’s status. A more ominous threat originates from states
intent on increasing diversification of foreign currency holdings, establishing alternatives to the dollar for international trade, or
engaging financial warfare against the United States.
Slow growth leads to nuclear war

Tønnesson 15 — Stein, Research Professor of International Relations at the Peace Research
Institute Oslo (“Deterrence, interdependence and Sino–US peace,” International Area Studies
Review, 18.3)
Several recent works on China and Sino–US relations have made substantial contributions to the current
understanding of how and under what circumstances a combination of nuclear deterrence and
economic interdependence may reduce the risk of war between major powers. At least four
conclusions can be drawn from the review above: first, those who say that interdependence may both inhibit and
drive conflict are right. Interdependence raises the cost of conflict for all sides but asymmetrical or
unbalanced dependencies and negative trade expectations may generate tensions leading to
trade wars among inter-dependent states that in turn increase the risk of military conflict (Copeland,
2015: 1, 14, 437; Roach, 2014). The risk may increase if one of the interdependent countries is governed by an inward-looking socio-
economic coalition (Solingen, 2015); second, the risk of war between China and the US should not just be analysed bilaterally but
include their allies and partners. Third party countries could drag China or the US into confrontation; third, in this context it is of
some comfort that the three main economic powers in Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) are all deeply integrated
economically through production networks within a global system of trade and finance (Ravenhill, 2014; Yoshimatsu, 2014: 576);
and fourth, decisions for war and peace are taken by very few people, who act on the basis of their
future expectations. International relations theory must be supplemented by foreign policy analysis in order to assess the
value attributed by national decision-makers to economic development and their assessments of risks and opportunities. If
leaders on either side of the Atlantic begin to seriously fear or anticipate their own nation’s decline then
they may blame this on external dependence, appeal to anti-foreign sentiments, contemplate the
use of force to gain respect or credibility, adopt protectionist policies, and ultimately refuse to be
deterred by either nuclear arms or prospects of socioeconomic calamities. Such a dangerous shift
could happen abruptly, i.e. under the instigation of actions by a third party – or against a third party.
Strong US growth key to solve global conflicts
Haass 13 – President of the Council on Foreign Relations (Richard, “The World Without
America,” http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/repairing-the-roots-of-american-
power-by-richard-n--haass)
Let me posit a radical idea: The most critical threat facing the United States now and for the foreseeable future is not a risingChina, a reckless North
Korea, a nuclear Iran, modern terrorism, or climate change. Although all of these constitute potential or actual threats, the biggest
challenges facing the US are its burgeoning debt, crumbling infrastructure, second-rate primary and secondary schools, outdated
immigration system, and slow economic growth – in short, the domestic foundations of American power.
Readers in other countries may be tempted to react to this judgment with a dose of schadenfreude, finding more than a little satisfaction in America’s
difficulties. Such a response should not be surprising. The US and those representing it have been guilty of hubris (the US may often be the
indispensable nation, but it would be better if others pointed this out), and examples of inconsistency between America’s prac tices and its principles
understandably provoke charges of hypocrisy. When America does not adhere to the principles that it preaches to others, it breeds resentment. But,
like most temptations, the urge to gloat at America’s imperfections and struggles ought to be resisted. People around the globe should be careful what
they wish for. America’s failure to deal with its internal challenges would come at a steep price. Indeed,
the rest of the world’s stake in American success is nearly as large as that of the US itself. Part of the
reason is economic. The US economy still accounts for about one-quarter of global output. If US growth
accelerates, America’s capacity to consume other countries’ goods and services will increase,
thereby boosting growth around the world. At a time when Europe is drifting and Asia is slowing,
only the US (or, more broadly, North America) has the potential to drive global economic recovery. The US
remains a unique source of innovation. Most of the world’s citizens communicate with mobile devices based on technology
developed in Silicon Valley; likewise, the Internet was made in America. More recently, new technologies developed in the US greatly increase the
ability to extract oil and natural gas from underground formations. This technology is now making its way around the globe, allowing other societies to
increase their energy production and decrease both their reliance on costly imports and their carbon emissions. The US is also an invaluable source of
ideas. Its world-class universities educate a significant percentage of future world leaders. More fundamentally, the US has long been a leading example
of what market economies anddemocratic politics can accomplish. People and governments around the world are far
more likely to become more open if the American model is perceived to be succeeding. Finally, the
world faces many serious challenges, ranging from the need to halt the spread of weapons of
mass destruction, fight climate change, and maintain a functioning world economic order that
promotes trade and investment to regulating practices incyberspace, improving global health,
and preventing armed conflicts. These problems will not simply go away or sort themselves out.
While Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” may ensure the success of free markets, it ispowerless in the world of geopolitics. Order requires the
visible hand of leadership to formulate and realize global responses to global challenges. Don’t get
me wrong: None of this is meant to suggest that the US can deal effectively with the world’s problems on its own. Unilateralism rarely works. It is not
just that the US lacks the means; the very nature of contemporary global problems suggests that only collective responses stand a good chance of
succeeding. But multilateralism is much easier to advocate than to design and implement. Right now
there is only one candidate for this role: the US. No other country has the necessary
combination of capability and outlook. This brings me back to the argument that the US must put its house in
order – economically, physically, socially, and politically – if it is to have the resources needed to promote
order in the world. Everyone should hope that it does: The alternative to a world led by the US is not a world led by
China, Europe, Russia, Japan, India, or any other country, but rather a world that is not led at all. Such a world would
almost certainly be characterized by chronic crisis and conflict. That would be bad not just for Americans,
but for the vast majority of the planet’s inhabitants.
***Wages Bad
Wages Bad – No Impact
No impact to wage hikes for farmers
McMillan 16 (Tracie McMillan is an independent journalist covering food and equity. She is
the author of the New York Times bestseller, The American Way of Eating, and is a senior fellow
at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. She splits her time
between Brooklyn and Detroit, and can be followed at @TMMcMillan., “Can We Afford to Pay
U.S. Farmworkers More?”, Published March 31, 2016, Online, National Geographic)//SMSUSVA
GIVING THE 3.5 million workers picking produce on American farms a raise to match the $15 an hour many fast food workers are
fighting for sounds unaffordable, right? Not really. According
to University of California-Davis agricultural
labor economist Philip Martin, the likely additional cost to American shoppers of that wage hike
would be about $20 a year. “Farmers don’t get much of the retail dollar, and then of course farmers don’t give everything
they get to workers,” Martin says. “So it’s fractions times fractions, and you get down to a relatively small share for farmworker
wages in retail food cost.” And Martin says that means that raising the wages for farmworkers wouldn’t cost most Americans very
much money at all. Here’s how it breaks down —the folks picking and sorting everything from grapes to peaches to tomatoes—an
average wage of $10.19 an hour in 2010. Because harvest work is seasonal, many farmworkers only find employment for
part of the year; it’s not uncommon for farm laborers to report working about 1,000 hours a year, the equivalent of six months of
full time work. And that brings their annual salary to just $10,200—notably less than the federal poverty line of $11,670 for one
person in 2014. Get more of the inspiring photos and stories we're known for, plus special offers. Enter your email By signing up for
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our Privacy Policy. Easy unsubscribe links are provided in every email. Farm Worker Labor Is a Small Percentage of Produce Cost
Those salaries represent a fraction grocery bills. The
average American household spent $515 on fresh fruits
and vegetables in 2014, and about 28 percent of that—around $137—went to produce farmers.
The farmers paid about a third of that to workers, while the rest went to farm maintenance and
other costs. At current wages, farmworkers’ annual share of each family’s grocery bill at $45—
less than 10 percent. A Higher Wage Would Still Be a Small Part of the Price Raising farm worker wages in the U.S. to $15 an
hour—and annual earnings to $15,000—would represent a 47 percent wage increase. That might seem huge, but Martin says
Americans spend so little on produce that it wouldn’t mean much for families’ grocery bills.
Remember that farmworkers’ share of each U.S. household’s annual grocery bill is $45. If farm worker wages go up by
47 percent, grocery bills would go up just $21.15 a year, or $1.76 a month. Seriously? It’s true that few
cost increases are resolved this simply. Often, when wages go up, farmers will turn to other innovations, like mechanization, to keep
costs down. Or retailers may begin importing food that is cheaper than what’s domestically produced. And, sometimes, retailers
simply resolve to get by with a little less profit. In 2014, Whole Foods Market began selling tomatoes from the Fair Food Program, a
label backed by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a human rights group. Under CIW agreements, Florida tomato farmers agreed
to boost rates paid to farmworkers by nearly 80 percent. And what did that cost consumers? “Ultimately, the cost [to Whole Foods]
is nominal,” Matt
Rogers, global produce coordinator for Whole Foods, told me in the fall of 2015.
“It’s not enough to influence retail price at this point.” Prices in store, said Rogers, hadn’t gone up at all.
Wages Bad – Food Prices
Current immigration policy diminishes agricultural workforce – food prices go
up
Haspel 17 (Tamar Haspel is an American food columnist for the Washington Post ; :Illegal
immigrants help fueld U.S. Farms. Does affordable produce depend on them?” ; 3/17/17 ;
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/in-an-immigration-crackdown-who-will-pick-
our-produce/2017/03/17/cc1c6df4-0a5d-11e7-93dc-
00f9bdd74ed1_story.html?utm_term=.9dd461b04ecb )
The threatening scenario is a restriction of the labor force driven by immigration enforcement.
According to both Guenther and Jacquez, that force is already shrinking, in part because of enforcement under the
Obama administration, but also because better conditions in Mexico reduce the incentive to come here, and the aging workforce
isn’t being adequately replaced. This
has put pressure on the sector, which has boosted competition for
laborers and raised wages in some places. Stepped-up efforts to close the border, combined
with the ongoing aggressive effort to deport people who are here illegally, would increase
that pressure. The supportive scenario looks very different. Many U.S. produce buyers (including me) would like
to see the people who bring our fruits and vegetables out of the fields work in decent conditions
and earn family-sustaining wages, a situation that could be brought about by legislation (including minimum wage and
immigration reforms), collective bargaining, or both. Either scenario (and, in this political climate, we can hazard a guess as to which
is more likely) would raise prices. So it makes sense to ask: What happens when labor prices increase? What if we raise pay from the
current rates — about $12 an hour — to, say, the minimum wage that many are advocating, $15 an hour? I checked in with a few
agricultural economists — Jayson Lusk at Oklahoma State University, Philip Martin at the University of California at Davis, and a
USDA economist who spoke on the condition of anonymity because public statements would require agency authorization — to
understand how that change would reverberate through the food supply. A wage increase will mostly affect fruits and vegetables,
because commodity crops — corn, soy, wheat, cotton, and others — are highly mechanized, so most of the work is done by
machines. With produce, about a quarter of every dollar we spend at the supermarket goes to the farmer. A third of that quarter —
about 8 cents of your produce dollar — goes to the farmworker. If wages increased 25 percent (from $12 to
$15), and that cost were passed on to us, produce prices would rise 2 to 3 percent. The yearly
impact would be in the range of $30 per household, certainly affordable for many but not for
all. But would the costs get passed on to us? It’s a critical question, and it’s hard to answer. Small increases might, but the supply
chain might also respond in other ways. Martin told me in an email that “historically, rising ag wages led to labor-saving
mechanization or imports, and food cost as a share of household spending has been falling.”
If that’s what happens, you
won’t see that increase in the grocery store because either farmers invest in machinery to
reduce labor costs or the supply chain turns to imports. That means smaller farmers, without the
economies of scale to support mechanization, are going to have the hardest time. The larger the
increase, the greater the likelihood that the supply chain looks elsewhere, the larger the threat to farms and farmworkers. Everyone
I’ve spoken to on this issue wants to see a system that allows for workers to come here to make sure our crops make it out of the
field and into the stores. If we don’t have these workers, we risk food rotting in fields and farmers on the margins going out of
business. Nobody wants to see an immigration crackdown that leads to that. There is more than one way for it to happen, but
increasing the cost of harvesting produce would result in higher prices for consumers. (Rebecca
Cook/Reuters) But what about the supportive scenario, an across-the-board increase in farmworker wages? If that cost gets passed
along, it would increase produce prices commensurately, and making the most healthful foods in our diet even a little more
expensive is tough on the consumers least able to afford them. (Although Salvador points out that, if those consumers also earned
$15 an hour, we might not have that problem.) If it makes the supply chain look elsewhere for green beans, it could jeopardize the
livelihood of farmers and farmworkers alike. I’m fortunate enough to be able to afford fresh vegetables, and I’m willing to pay more
to make sure everyone along the way lives decently. But I also want to safeguard the spinach for our most vulnerable. There’s no
easy answer. In order for farmworkers to be paid wages that make it viable to support a family, American produce buyers have to
ask what they’re willing to pay. While many lower-income consumers have trouble affording fresh produce even at the current
levels, higher-income buyers may be willing to pay slightly more. Americans are paying more attention to our food’s provenance,
and pressure for more attention to animal welfare and environmental responsibility is forcing change throughout the food chain. If
we want farmworkers to live decently, it is us, the eaters, who need to pay.
Mechanization leads to food insecurity

Regelbrugge, ’12: (Craig J. Regelbrugge; September 26, 2012; The Farm Labor Crisis:
Imagined, or Real?; Craig J. Regelbrugge is a co-chair of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration
Reform, and serves on the steering committee of the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition,
the leading coalitions seeking legislative reform of America’s antiquated immigration system. He
was recently elected vice chairman of the board of the National Immigration Forum;
http://www.cnbc.com/id/49182232/Regelbrugge_The_Farm_Labor_Crisis_Imagined_or_Real)
Why shouldn’t all American farmers just grow corn, wheat and soybeans — the machine-harvested
crops? First, we would find ourselves in a new and unsettling “food-insecure” age where we
turn to countries such as Chile and China to fill our produce aisles and the dairy case. A
diplomatic crisis, or worse, and we start going hungry. (Read More:USDA Plans Regional Meetings to Address
Drought)
That forces farms to invest in machinery

Baertlein and Huffstutter 17 (Lisa Baertlein, Logistics and Delivery Reporter ; PJ Huffstutter, Agricultural
Journalist ; Reuters News ; As Trump targets immigrants, U.S. farm sector looks to automate, November 10th, 2017 ;
https://www.reuters.com/article/trump-effect-agriculture-automation/as-trump-targets-immigrants-u-s-farm-sector-
looks-to-automate-idINKBN1DA0IU )
Convincing big U.S. dairy owners to buy robots to milk their cows - and reduce the farmhands they employ - used to be a tough sell
for Steve Fried. Recently, his job has gotten easier, he says, in part because of President Donald Trump. “I get calls on a daily basis
and it typically starts with, ‘I don’t want to deal with this labor headache any more’,” said Fried, sales manager for Lely North
America, which makes robotic dairy milking and feeding systems. Trump’s
crackdown on illegal immigration
through stepped-up arrests and border enforcement has shaken the U.S. agricultural sector,
where as many as 7 in 10 farm workers are undocumented, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. In addition,
Republican lawmakers in Congress have introduced legislation that would require all employers to check social security numbers
against federal databases to ensure their workers are in the country legally, something that is now voluntary in all but a handful of
states. The get-tough approach “has created a great deal of anxiety,” said Tom Vilsack, chief executive of the U.S. Dairy Export
Council, who was U.S. Agriculture Secretary for eight years under President Barack Obama. The shift comes as
the industry
was already struggling to cope with a shrinking, aging workforce. That is ratcheting up pressure
on the sector to embrace new technology. Farmers and food companies increasingly are moving
to automate dairy operations, chicken processing, crop production and harvesting. Even delicate
crops such as strawberries and peaches are being considered for mechanization. “You’d be a fool to not have a
plan that moves you that way,” said Duff Bevill, who owns a vineyard management company in Sonoma County, California. Pilgrim’s
Pride Corp, the
second largest U.S. chicken producer, this year cited a tightening migrant labor
market as key to its decision to invest in robots and X-ray technology for its slaughterhouses. The goal:
to swap human hands for machines that can debone the front half of chickens and perform other chores. “We’re
investing heavily in automating our processes, taking labor out and making jobs easier,” Pilgrim’s CEO William Lovette said in an
earnings call. He said the company also decided to increases wages. In Gilroy, California, Christopher Ranch is likewise embracing
new machinery. The largest North American producer of fresh garlic, Christopher Ranch will spend about $1 million this year for a
new Spanish-made robot in its packing plant that inserts garlic heads into sleeves, according to Ken Christopher, vice president of
the family-owned business. A 2014 report by WinterGreen Research forecast significant growth in the use of robotics in “every
aspect of farming, milking, food production” and other agricultural enterprises. The report put the market for agricultural robots at
$817 million in 2013 and projected that it would reach $16.3 billion by 2020. Sensing opportunity, investors are stepping up to
address agriculture’s labor squeeze with new automation, helped by falling electronics costs and advancements in software, robotics
and artificial intelligence. Google Ventures, the venture capital arm of Alphabet Inc, this year spearheaded a $10 million investment
in Abundant Robotics, which is working on an apple-picking robot. It also participated in a $20 million funding round for Bowery
Farming, which uses robotics to grow leafy greens indoors. Elsewhere, farm machinery maker Deere & Co announced that it spent
$305 million to buy precision weed-killing robot maker Blue River Technology. INCENTIVES TO AUTOMATE While little official data
exists to illustrate the impact of Trump’s immigration policies on farm laborers, there is no question that illegal migration is down
sharply since he took office in late January. The number of people caught trying to enter the United States illegally from Mexico
dropped almost 60 percent between February and May compared the same period last year, according to government figures.
Between late January to early September, the number of individuals arrested in the interior of the country by U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) rose almost 43 percent over the same period in 2016. Gary
Wishnatzki, a third-generation
strawberry farmer in Florida, says scarce labor convinced him to raise $5 million so far to build a
robotic strawberry picker that he hopes someday will reduce his industry’s need for field hands.
Bruce Taylor, CEO of Taylor Farms, a Salinas, California producer of salads and chopped vegetables for stores and
restaurants, says his company has automated 20 percent of its packing plant. The company has also teamed
with an equipment maker to build a mechanized romaine harvester that is currently in use, and it is exploring automation for iceberg
lettuce, broccoli and other field crops, Taylor said.
Wages Bad – Small Farms
Destroys small farms
Bronars ‘15
In this report, we explore data on the labor challenges that have made the last decade so difficult for fresh fruit and vegetable
growers like Talbott. Consistent with Talbott’s recent experience, we find that in the last decade there has been a huge drop in the
number of new young farm laborers joining the U.S. workforce. In fact, in the parts of the country where the most labor-intensive
fresh fruits and vegetables are grown, the size of the full-time equivalent workforce has shrunk by almost a
fifth. This has created fierce competition among U.S. farmers for the dwindling number of field
laborers that are left—driving up farm wages, leaving huge holes in the workforce, and pushing
smaller farms out of business altogether. It has also changed the face of today’s farmworkers: Currently, more than
one out of every four field laborers is older than age 45, leaving many farmers worryng the situation may only worsen in
the coming years as more workers find less physically demanding jobs or retire.
Wages Bad – Automation
An increase in wages causes automation
Karsten and West 15 (Jack Karsten, works as a Research Analyst at the Center for
Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. He holds a M.A. in International Science and
Technology Policy from George Washington University and a B.A. in Economics from Boston
College. Darrell West, Vice President and Director - Governance Studies. Founding Director -
Center for Technology Innovation, “Rising minimum wages make automation more cost-
effective” September 30, 2015. The Brookings Institution, Online)//RB
The movement pushing for a $15 per hour minimum wage has succeeded in several large cities like New York, Los Angeles, San
Francisco, and Seattle. These minimum wage increases coincide with falling prices for computers that can replace human labor in
some low-skill jobs. A
higher minimum wage changes cost considerations for businesses seeking to
automate more of their operations. Increasingly, low-skill workers will not only have to compete
with each other for jobs at higher wages, but also with computers. Staying competitive in a
changing job market will require workers to specialize in tasks that computers cannot easily
perform. TWO TRENDS CONVERGE The federal minimum wage, currently set at $7.25 per hour, is not tied to inflation, so
Congress must periodically raise it to maintain its value. At the state level, only 10 states have minimum wages that increase
annually with the cost of living; a further five states and the District of Columbia will introduce annual increases in the future.
These annual increases forgo the need for large adjustments to the minimum wage at irregular
intervals. In addition to benefiting workers, it would allow employers to slowly adjust to wage
increases. If the price of labor rises too quickly, businesses have a bigger incentive to replace
human labor with automation technology. Automation involves the substitution of machines for
human labor. Historically, automation has reduced or eliminated some job categories while
simultaneously creating new ones. During the Industrial Revolution, new farming machines
reduced the need for agricultural labor just as factory jobs were opening up in cities. Likewise,
the spread of personal computers, the Internet, and smartphones have greatly expanded the
number of jobs available in the service sector. As computer functionality improves and
computer prices fall, the labor market is bound to undergo further changes. The food service
industry in particular is at the center of both the fight for a higher minimum wage and the
introduction of automation technologies. For example, employee scheduling software can match staffing levels with
high and low customer demand. Tablet computers placed at tables allow customers to order meals and pay for them without the
intervention of a waiter. In the same way, self-service kiosks can replace cashiers at fast food restaurants, and smartphone apps
enable customers to order and pay before arriving. Computers are changing food service just as they have for many other industries.
UPGRADING WORKFORCE SKILLS As computers replace humans for some minimum wage jobs, it will
force displaced workers to upgrade their skills in order to stay competitive. Knowing how to
manipulate computers in a work environment will become an increasingly important skill for
most workers. In addition, workers will need to specialize in areas where humans excel relative
to computers, such as interpersonal skills. To acquire new these new skills, minimum-wage workers will need access
to more education and training programs. These second-order effects of automation and skills demand
must be taken into account by lawmakers considering a minimum wage hike. Rising wages make
computers cost-effective for an increasing number of low-skill tasks. Displaced workers will have
to learn additional skills that reflect a work environment that relies on more computers.
Enacting automatic increases to the minimum wage would gradually change the cost of labor
relative to computers, giving both workers and employers more time to adjust. Additionally,
lawmakers should pair minimum wage increases with training programs that upgrade the skills
of workers whose jobs are at risk of automation. The compounding effects of automation and
the minimum wage will require a combination of solutions.
Higher wages cause automation of low-skilled jobs

Ferenstein 17 (Gregory, Writes about technology, politics, and personal health, “New Study
Suggests Minimum Wage Leads To Automation Of Low-Skill Workers” August 27, 2017. Forbes,
Online)//RB
A new study finds that the fight for a $15 minimum wage could hurt the very workers it is
intended to help. Economists Grace Lordan and David Neumark find that "increasing the minimum wage
decreases significantly the share of automatable employment held by low-skilled workers, and
increases the likelihood that low-skilled workers in automatable jobs become unemployed." Their
findings seem to confirm speculation that the fast food industry, a key industry targeted by minimum wage activists, is responding to
wage hikes around the country by replacing cashiers with self-service kiosks and other kinds of robots. Wendy's, for instance, plans
on placing these touch screen ordering devices in a 1,000 of its restaurants. "The
findings imply that groups often
ignored in the minimum wage literature are in fact quite vulnerable to employment changes and
job loss because of automation following a minimum wage increase," conclude the researchers. The study
doesn't necessarily imply that minimum wage hikes make most workers worse off. Indeed, Lordan and Neumark find single-digit
impacts from automation on many low-skilled workers. Proponents of
wage hikes could argue that the small
number of jobs automated is a worthwhile price to pay for helping the majority of workers.
Specifically, Californian companies are reacting to wage increases with

automation
Walters 18 (Dan, been a journalist for nearly 57 years, spending all but a few of those years
working for California newspapers, “The downside of California’s $15 minimum wage may be
more automated jobs” January 8, 2018. The Sacramento Bee, Online)//RB
Faced with rising labor costs, thanks in part to a big boost in California’s minimum wage, and
shortages of workers, employers throughout the state are trying to replace human labor with
machines. Amazon’s highly automated warehouses that have seemingly sprung up overnight throughout the state are
testaments to that desire, as are intensified efforts in large-scale, labor-intensive agriculture to develop machinery that can handle
even the most delicate crops such as strawberries. Whileworkers with high technical skills and/or high levels
of education will still command high pay and have no shortage of opportunities in California,
there’s a lot of turbulence in the lower realms of the state’s job market, such as fast food and
agriculture. Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders boast that they’ve been helping California’s low-skill workers by raising
minimum wages, writing more generous family leave policies and, in the case of farm workers, mandating an eight-hour work day.
But there’s a raging debate among economists over whether such mandates actually help low-
income, low-skill workers, or hurt them by eliminating jobs and/or curtailing working hours. The
minimum wage increase is the mostly hotly debated policy. Brown and legislators are raising California’s minimum wage from $10 an
hour in 2016 to $15 by 2022 and indexing it to inflation thereafter, even though Brown, as he signed the bill, commented,
“Economically, minimum wages may not make sense.” Some cities have gone even further. Critics are pointing to a University of
Washington study, released last June, about what happened after Seattle embarked on a similar course, comparing it to other larger
cities in Washington. The UW researchers concluded that “employment
losses associated with Seattle’s
mandated wage increases are in fact large enough to have resulted in net reductions in payroll
expenses – and total employee earnings – in the city’s low-wage job market.”
Wage increases cause automation
Woodman 14 (Andrew, a lawyer in New York City. He holds a JD from Albany Law School and
an Economics degree from New York University. Prior to law school, Andrew worked in finance
in NYC. Andrew's blogs focus on issues of economics, law and public policy, “Automation is the
Elephant in the Room of the Minimum Wage Debate” March 2, 2014. The Huffington post,
Online)//RB
The Economist today ran an excellent article about the increase in “robots” in the workplace and how it will revolutionize labor.
They very aptly compared robots taking over the service industry to automated farming
equipment displacing much of the agrarian laborers in the 20th century. This is certainly the way
things are going as the geometric expansion of technology puts what once seemed like a distant
future into our present. All you have to do is look at how Boston Dynamics is basically creating terminators and you can tell
the future is now. With this expansion of technology, and significantly more firms competing, comes a drop in the cost. Drones were
once reserved for dropping Hellfire missiles on American citizens without due process, now they could start delivering packages if
the pesky FAA would get out of the way of progress. Certainly automating service type industries like fast food restaurants, bars, and
your local Starbucks will reduce costs through better quality control and maximization of input goods. McDonald’s saved nearly $300
million by taking one slice of cheese out of the double cheeseburger, imagine how much they can save when not a single fry drops
on the ground and every package has exactly 42 fries. So
what does this have to do with minimum wage?
Everything. Businesses exist for one reason: to make money. Shareholders will put their rubber
stamp on initiatives like solar panels and flags for orphans as long as they’re making money. One
of the largest costs drivers for service industries is labor. It makes sense. There were at least ten people behind
the counter when I absolutely didn’t buy the new Taco Bell breakfast if my wife asks. And they’re a very necessary cog because I
wasn’t going to put the sausage and egg into a waffle taco myself. But now under President Obama’s proposal, they’re getting more
expensive by about 50 percent, give or take a few metal Thomas Jeffersons. This
is all happening at the exact same
time that automation technology is getting much cheaper and more widely available. Even dry
cleaners are using drones! While the possibility of a wage increase is something no person on
earth would ever sneeze at, it could ultimately be the undoing of low-income service-industry
jobs in the United States. Service industry jobs cannot be outsourced. I’m sure someone has tried. Legal
work is outsourced, that’s how much companies love outsourcing. If the service industry can’t be outsourced, it
certainly can be replaced. Think about the automotive industry and the change it went through
when shipping got very inexpensive and robots started taking over the factories. No one is
clamoring for the policies that made Detroit what it is today. However, that might be where
we’re heading. As labor gets more expensive and automation technology gets cheaper, owners
will start to favor robots. Robots obviously have enormous upside in terms of efficiency,
productivity, reliability, and long term cost savings. But as Vince Vaughn and Luke Wilson
pointed out, people have a deep distrust for machines, the same way Americans put a premium
on American made cars — until the costs of labor increased, and all of a sudden, Americans
cared more about saving $10,000 than where their Jeep was made. Though at this point, they’re
probably just hoping for a functioning ignition.
Wage increases cause ag automation

Schiller 16 (Ben, a New York staff writer for Fast Company. Previously, he edited a European
management magazine and was a reporter in San Francisco, Prague, and Brussels. “Why
Agriculture Could Be Automated Before Other Industries” December 10, 2016. Fast Company,
Online)//RB
In 1870, agriculturewas a source of employment for about half the U.S. workforce; now just 2% of
the population produces food for a living, according to government figures. As large machines
have increasingly done the work of ploughing and harvesting crops and tending to livestock,
farms have become ever more human-free. And what of the future? They may provide barely
any jobs at all. The new age of farm machines include weeding robots, self-driving tractors, and crop-spraying drones. The
drivers: higher productivity, an aging human workforce (principal farmers are 58 years old on average), and the cost of employing
humans (California’s minimum wage increases could lead to an automation wave, according to
some reports). “If you take a very long view [of] the world of agriculture, you can see that
employment has come down as a total share of the world population, while the amount of food
produced has gone up. Productivity has dramatically increased and we see robots as the next
step in enabling that,” says Khasha Ghaffarzadeh, lead author of a new report about agricultural automation. Dairy milking
bots are by far the most common forms of ag-automation so far. And, according to projections in “Agricultural Robots and Drones
2016-2026: Technologies, Markets, and Players” from U.K. research firm IDTechEx, they will still make up a lion’s share of the market
in a decade’s time. Other technologies will increasingly come on stream, though, including “scouts” that check on the health of
plants, auto-steer tractors, and data-mapping drones. Ghaffarzadeh sees
drones and robots hastening a move
to precision farming, where crops are managed in small batches, or even individually, instead of
as whole fields. That, in turn, could reduce indiscriminate spraying with herbicides and
pesticides, and the waste of costly inputs, like artificial fertilizers. Within a decade, automated combine
harvesters could run pre-set routes, allowing farmers to get on with less repetitive activities (assuming these machines can be made
safe for any humans who might still be in the way). But some parts of the farm may be beyond the capacity even of computer vision
and algorithmic techniques. Soft fruits may still need human-plucking, for instance. “If you think about the canopy of a tree, there
are many fruits hidden away and the robot cannot see them. The process of taking an image, identifying the fruits, and planning the
path of the robotic arm then gently but quickly picking the fruit is slow, expensive, complicated and hard to repeat,” Ghaffarzadeh
says. He adds: “It
may be that machines are designed to aid the human and reduce some of their
time-wasting activities, like moving the [collection] bins and ladders around. That’s easier to
mechanize than the actual act of picking.” As with other industries, automation in agriculture is likely to
be a mixed bag socially-speaking. On the one hand, we may get more and cheaper food,
delivered more safely, with fewer nasty chemicals attached. On the other, farms might become
increasingly industrialized, mono-cultured, and devoid of humans and human values.
Automation is the only option – status quo shortages decimate farmers

Gillespie 17 (Patrick, Economics Writer for CNN Money, “Machines, not Americans, could
replace immigrant workers”, Published August 18, 2017, Online, CNN Money)//SMSUSVA
Jim Bogart sees a growing trend in his patch of America: Farmers are turning more and more to machines
because they can't find enough workers to harvest fruits and vegetables. It's an issue costing
California farmers millions of dollars and, they argue, it will eventually mean higher food prices
at supermarkets. "With the shortage of workers, we have to develop other means to help us grow, harvest and
process our crops -- robotics, mechanization, automation," says Bogart, who is president of the Grower-Shipper
Association of Central California. The farmers in Bogart's area aren't alone. Farmers across the state are investing
more in robots and other automated technologies as they struggle to fill job openings, according
to a Federal Reserve survey published in July. Related: Trump immigration plan to cost 4.6 million jobs, Ivy League
study finds That reality in California may be a wrinkle in an immigration plan backed by President Trump. The thinking behind the
policy is that it would provide more job opportunities and better wages for Americans by reducing legal immigration to the U.S. by
50% over the next decade. The bill, known as the RAISE Act, seeks to create a skills-based immigration system that would particularly
cut back on low-skilled, foreign-born workers. "This is a major promise to the American people to push for merit-based immigration
reform that protects U.S. workers," White House adviser Stephen Miller said August 2nd. But one prominent U.S. official says that
cutting immigration won't lead to more jobs. Instead, robots are more likely to swoop in. Related: Trump immigration policy poses
risk to job market "If the labor is not available, this is not going to lead to more employment of
people in the U.S. It's going to lead to more use of technology and machinery," San Francisco
Federal Reserve President John Williams told CNNMoney Tuesday. "We are definitely hearing a lot of these
stories." Worker shortages have been a long-term problem at farms across America. Bogart, the farming association
leader, estimates farmers in his region are missing 15% to 20% of the workers they need. The pay
isn't bad: California farm hands earn $12 to $14 an hour, according to the Economic Policy
Institute. That's above California's minimum wage of $10 an hour. Related: How America's immigrant
workforce is changing "American workers have been unable or unwilling to fill these positions," says
Bogart. Farmers' increasing investment in automation poses a challenge to Trump's immigration plan to carve out more jobs for
Americans. It also runs parallel to the trend in American manufacturing: Trump wants companies to produce more in the United
States and less in Mexico or China. agricultural drone Farms are using drones to monitor crops. But trade experts say Trump's
pressure on them will lead to more automation in the U.S., not more jobs. Trump's immigration plan doesn't get rave reviews from
academia, either.
The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School concluded in an analysis that the
proposed policy would cost 4.6 million U.S. jobs by the year 2040. White House officials say the Wharton
study has a methodology flaw. Related: Low-skilled immigration is petering out There were 27 million foreign-born workers in the
U.S. last year. As Baby Boomers retire, economists say America grows increasingly reliant on foreigners to keep the economy
growing. "If we were to cut back dramatically on immigration, that would pose a risk to long-term economic growth," says Luke
Tilley, chief economist at Wilmington Trust. As for farmers, the unpicked fruits and veggies mean one thing: lost profits. Farmers
in central coastal California lost $13 million last year in unharvested crops because of labor
shortages, according to the Grower-Shipper Association of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo
Counties. It's the fifth straight year farmers couldn't find enough workers. Unpicked crops will
also mean higher prices for Americans at the supermarket. "If there's less product or harvest, the price for
consumers will probably go up," says Bogart.
Automation is Coming Now
Farmers are investing into tech automation now – that causes mass debt crisis
which collapses small farms
Schmeiser 17 (Lisa Schmeiser has been reporting on and writing about tech, business and
culture since the dot-com days. “Technological Revolution Set to Hit Farmers – If They Can
Afford It”, Published July 28, 2017, Online, Observer)//SMSUSVA
We are seeing the gradual AI and robot augmentation of today’s industries, from manufacturing to radiology, legal research to
dermatology. So long as a job requires constant repetition and consistent quality, it can be easily automated. Anyone who has ever
weeded a flower bed or garden knows it takes constant repetition. And anyone who has ever looked at a few acres of farmland and
noticed the tidy rows of plants can see that farming
has begun replacing human labor with robots. There are
robotic cow milkers, robotic lettuce weeders, robotic tractors and robotic vine pruners. Farming is
full of examples where technology supplanted human labor, but it’s now at the point where U.S. manufacturing was a few decades
ago: The nature of the job is about to change and far fewer jobs will be available. So what?One of the most pressing
issues in U.S. agriculture today is a labor shortage. It is leading farmers to curtail the amount of
food they produce, which will, in turn, be reflected in consumers’ grocery bills. While the 2017
agricultural season won’t be saved by a wave of robots coming in to flawlessly harvest crops, technologies that reduce
human overhead—and eliminate some of the most physically brutal tasks—are projected to cost
as much or less than human labor by 2020. This tech won’t be cheap, which raises another issue for farmers. Right
now only large farms can afford drones for crop-spraying and livestock monitoring. Most farms
are caught in a cycle of loans and debt servicing with major ag companies—did you know that John
Deere is the fifth largest agricultural bank in the U.S.? And that its $2.2 billion in loans produce a third of overall revenue and boast
four times the profit margins that equipment sales get? Turns out the farm-loan business is incredibly lucrative. As for the farmers
on the other end of it? Total U.S. farm debt is expected to rise by 5.2 percent this year, while total
farm assets (i.e. the stuff farmers can sell for cash) is expected to drop by 1.8 percent. That ratio
imbalance suggests bad news for farmers. The robot revolution might be delayed if nobody can foot the bill. Who
cares? People in the agricultural industry. Farmers are facing two separate, somewhat related labor
dilemmas: Either there aren’t enough people willing to work for the wages farmers are willing
pay or there isn’t enough money to pay for what wages are supposed to be and still keep the
farm going. For example, last year California passed a law that phases in shorter working days and higher wages for farm
workers. By 2023, farmers will be mandated by law to pay a minimum wage of $15 per hour plus overtime once employees have
worked eight-hour days six days a week. Proponents of the bill point out that this means farm workers will finally have the same
legal protections as other hourly workers and may actually be able to feed their families on their earnings: Two out of every three
farmworkers in the Salinas Valley, AKA “America’s Salad Bowl,” are food insecure, meaning they lack consistent access to affordable
food. Critics charge that the rising labor costs will squeeze farmers to the point that they will either cut
back their production or hire more workers. An op-ed from the American Farm Bureau hypothesizes a solution to
this pending labor crisis: How does a farmer do more with less, or at least keep up? Technology is
providing the answer, as the heartbeat of agriculture gets drowned out by the eerie low hum of mechanization. Many hands
to make light work will no longer be needed due to automation. Crews of 20 to 30 workers are now being
replaced by one machine. Take for example the Splat 2.0 and the Mantis Thinning Rover, which
takes one person to swiftly hoe and thin a field of leafy greens, a task that once required dozens
of workers. In 2017, we romanticize a picturesque farm-to-fork process during which farmers lovingly handpick fresh produce.
While we sporadically appreciate and consistently expect the same quality, most people are unwilling to do the same work. It’s not
just a question of unwillingness to do the work; it’s a question of unwillingness to do the work for what the work currently pays.
That, in turn, points to a bedrock condition in agricultural markets: Our food prices are what they are right now thanks to low labor
costs. It is probably less of a challenge to find a way to keep production costs steady than it is to persuade Americans to pay more
for food. The jobs being replaced by machines are ones that are physically demanding and poorly compensated. Is it really worth
grieving over how people used to spend their lives stooped over weeds for a few dollars a day? It’s true that for farmers, adopting
new technologies has always carried an enormous risk—the phrase “to bet the farm on it” didn’t make it into the popular lexicon
because it implies little to no downside in staking your entire livelihood on something new. The 4-H’s very history points to an
ongoing dialogue between America’s farmers and agricultural researchers who want to change how people grow or raise foodstuffs.
Moving to a robot-augmented workforce would require a significant chunk of change, especially for smaller farms. If we’re going to
scrutinize how farmers manage their workforce, the least we can do is provide a way to mitigate the operational risks we’re asking
them to assume as we also ask them to fix the same labor issues we consumers helped impose upon them into in the first place.
High farm wages push automation and technological advances

Plaven 1/9 (George, staff writer for Capital Press, coverer of agricultural news, “As minimum
wage increases, farmers look to adapt”, Published, January 9, 2018, Online, Capital
Press)//SMSUSVA
Farmers are adapting to rising minimum wages around the Northwest through new technology
and more efficient cropping systems, according to industry groups and economists. Minimum wages
are on the rise in cities and states across the country, from California to Maine, as workers and businesses charge headlong into
2018. As of Jan. 1, the minimum wage in Washington state is $11.50 per hour, with planned increases to $13.50 per hour by 2020. In
California, the rate is now $11 per hour for companies with 26 or more employees, and $10.50 per hour for companies with 25 or
fewer employees. By 2023, all companies will pay at least $15 per hour. The minimum wage in Oregon is based on a three-tier
system established during the 2016 short legislative session. Wages won’t increase again until July 1, when the standard rate goes
up to $10.25 per hour, $11.25 in the Portland metro area and $10 in non-urban counties, which include most eastern and southern
Oregon. Farmers, meanwhile, are having to adapt quickly in the face of growing labor costs and
slumping markets. Jenny Dresler, state public policy director for the Oregon Farm Bureau, said
the issue is make-or-break for some operations. “These are tough decisions,” Dresler said. “The goal is to stay in
business, obviously.” Unlike other industries, Dresler said, farms and ranches are price takers as opposed to
price setters, meaning they are largely dependent on trade markets when it comes to return on
product. Without raising prices, Dresler said, farmers must look to cut costs elsewhere, automating where
they can or planting less labor-intensive crops. “It does make agriculture a special case,” she said.
Clark Seavert, a professor with Oregon State University in the Department of Applied Economics, said
the impact of higher minimum wage varies by commodity, but figures the increase in cash costs for cherry
orchards may amount to $700 per acre by 2022, when wage increases are fully implemented.
The labor costs for apple growers in Washington may also increase from $24.93 per bin to $35.54, Seavert
said. “The only thing you can do is try to make cropping systems more efficient, or (integrate) technology to reduce labor,” he said.
“It’s a fact of life. You know it’s coming.” For example, Seavert said farmers may turn to growing more hazelnuts, which have less
labor demand and more mechanized harvesting systems available in the field. Mike Doke, executive director of the Columbia Gorge
Fruit Growers in Hood River, said most farms already pay over minimum wage, but every time the state makes another increase they
are forced to raise everyone’s pay to avoid wage compression. “It’s another added cost of doing business,” Doke said. “I think the
biggest concern is the small growers.” Dresler, with the Oregon Farm Bureau, said the group pushed for a bill in 2017
that would have created tax credits to help with maintenance of worker housing. The proposal ultimately died in committee.
Agriculture is also facing legislative pressure from a proposed cap-and-trade energy policy looming this session, Dresler said,
potentially raising the cost of fuel. “This issue isn’t in a vacuum,” she said. Fruit growers in the Columbia Gorge remain concerned
about pesticide exclusion zones under the federal Worker Protection Standard, which Doke said may result in orchards having to pull
trees and cut deeper into their bottom line. Across the state in rural Malheur County, farms are competing across state lines for
business with neighboring Idaho. Shay Myers, general manager of Owyhee Produce, said the difference in minimum wage does have
an economic impact, though worker demand in nearby Boise has so far kept the disparity to a minimum. “At this point, operating in
both states, what we pay in Oregon versus Idaho is nominal in terms of employee wages,” Myers said. Owyhee Produce grows sweet
potatoes and asparagus in Idaho, and onions in Oregon. Former state representative and now Sen. Cliff Bentz, R-Ontario, pointed to
the development of a special economic development region in Malheur County which has resulted in a new onion rail reload facility
to support Oregon farms. “That was done in part because I explained if they were going to raise the minimum wage on this side of
the (Snake) River, the state needed to invest substantially in infrastructure,” Bentz said. The
future of farming, Dresler
said, will lie in continued innovation and technology to solve the industry’s labor woes. “Farmers
are innovative, and they’re always looking at the best technologies to maintain their operations
into the next generation,” she said.
Automation Bad – Small Farms
Small farms don’t have resources to switch to technology – can’t keep up with
large scale producers
Lawrence 12 (Marie Lawrence is a Contract Social Science Research Analysis at the New
America Foundation ; from Slate, New America & ASU ; “Big Bots in Little Agriculture” ;
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/06/automated_farm_equipment
_and_small_scale_farmers_.html )
There’s no doubt that big bots are the future of big ag. The question is whether autonomous
technologies will ever penetrate the rest of the market—smaller-scale, diversified, labor-
intensive operations popping up across the country. As of the USDA’s 2007 census of agriculture, the average
American grower is 57 years old. For every farmer under 35, there are nearly six who are 65 or older. The agriculture industry is
poised for sudden, widespread employee turnover from the last generation to the next. These
incoming growers, far
more than the outgoing ones, will decide the fate of robotic farming. And from what we know of
new farmers, two very different futures are possible. The first future is that of the hip, “back-to-
the-earth” young farmer glamorized by media reports. These new producers are in agriculture
not because their fathers implored them to take the reins of the family business, but because
they genuinely enjoy food and the task of making it, including the dirty work. Jeff Moyer, farm director
at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, says young people want to “produce something with their hands, form new kinds of
relationships with customers, and have a meaningful experience in nature every day. My son is a dairy farmer, and he actually likes
to touch his cows.” Young farmers may not be excited about the weeding, exactly, but they’d prefer it to toiling full-time in a
fluorescent-lit cubicle. Even
if they want to try a few autonomous technologies, these new farmers
can’t afford them. Young growers are best understood as startup CEOs with serious cash flow
problems. A survey by the National Young Farmers’ Coalition found that lack of access to capital,
credit, and land are the top obstacles for aspiring operators. Farm values have doubled since
2000—great for those with established properties, but not for those trying to break into the
industry. Young farmers find themselves denied for commercial loans and ineligible for
government funding. It seems unlikely they’ll use their precious seed money to spring for a
robot. They won’t benefit as much from high-tech help, either. On average, farms operated by people 35
and older are nearly 40 percent larger than farms operated by people under 35. These smaller plots require fewer man-hours
(indeed, young farmers spend 40 percent less on contract labor), so adding
a robotic worker might not result in
much payroll savings. Young farmers also fork out less for chemicals and fertilizer each year.
Machines that promise more efficient application won’t save them that much money. And though
data on crop diversity by farm is hard to come by, smaller, organic operations that sell directly to customers
tend to grow lots of different fruits and vegetables, each with its own production challenge. A
one-bot-fits-all solution is exciting but unlikely. We must also admit that, cute as they are, most ag bots
designed for small-scale operations simply don’t work that well yet, as demonstrated by YouTube videos of
weeding machines struggling to turn corners or metallic critters painstakingly planting a field seed by seed.
Farm Mechanization hurts small farms

Willard, ‘13 (Haley Willard, Writer July 01, 2013 Robots Begin to Replace Farmers in the
United States Picking and tending to crops are now in robotic hands
http://www.freshplaza.com/news_detail.asp?id=110827)
The march of the machines continues. Thinning a field of lettuce is a task normally requiring 20 people, but, in some places, this is
now being entrusted to computerised technology with vision sensors. A tractor called the lettuce thinner, developed by Frank
Maconachy, president and CEO of Ramsay Highlander, seems to do the task a well as the workers. This
is coming as a relief
to growers who are experiencing a shortage of labor thanks to border regulations. The tractor
uses a vision system to locate seedlings, then sends their location to the tractor’s computer,
which determines which seedlings to keep and which to get rid of. With a shot of fertilizer, it destroys the
unwanted seedlings. In just a few minutes, a whole row of lettuce is thinned, and it only takes one robot. Maconachy's company’s
latest design is a robotic picker that finds a head of lettuce and picks it. This robot relies on a similar vision system as that of the
lettuce thinner. The
cost of the lettuce thinner starts at $250,000, and some farm machines cost as
much as $600,000. There is a worry, however, that smaller farms, that cannot afford the
machines, could fall behind larger operations.
Automation Bad – Economy
Agricultural automation causes mass job loss and exacerbates inequality
Fraser and Charlebois 16 – (Evan Fraser and Sylvain Charlebois, 18 Feb 2016, Automated Farming: Good News for
Food Security, Bad News for Job Loss?, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/feb/18/automated-
farming-food-security-rural-jobs-unemployment-technology)
Many experts are looking forward to a future where the Internet of Things (where physical objects such as vehicles, buildings and
devices are connected to collect and exchange data) is applied to food and farming to create an Internet of Living Things. In this
future, advanced sensors embedded in fields, waterways, irrigation systems and tractors will
combine with machine-learning systems, genome-identifying devices and data dashboards to
give rise to a generation of smart farming technology that will have the capacity to sense and
respond to its environment in a way that maximises production while minimising negative
impact. However, there are problems. In many of the poorer parts of the world, sophisticated
agricultural technologies are much less important than education, healthcare, access to capital,
sound governance and basic infrastructure. For the HIV positive farmer supporting her family on just one hectare in
rural Malawi, satellite driven tractors and high productivity beef germplasm are about as useful as a moondust. Furthermore,
many of these technologies require very little human labour. For example, Japanese company Spread has
recently announced that robots will carry out all but one of the tasks required to grow tens of thousands of lettuces each day in its
indoor automated farm. For countries in the industrial world, this growing automation probably means the continued
decline of rural life. The issue of labour is even more important for the economies of the global south, where there are fewer
urban job opportunities. In those countries, technologies that take labour out of the fields may undermine
efforts to reduce poverty and enhance development. Similar to the fear that Uber and Google cars will make taxi
and lorry drivers obsolete, will the same thing happen to farmers? In the brave new world of satellite driven tractors and robotic
milking parlours, where will rural communities and cultures fit? And for countries still dependent on agricultural
labour, what will people do to survive? The answers to these questions are not simple but the outcome of them will
help define global society over the next hundred years.
Automation Bad - Leadership Turnover
Further automation of the workforce will cause leadership turnover
Spence 16 (Michael, Professor of Economics at the Stern School of Business, “Economic
decline is leading to political instability. What's the solution?," March 24, 2016. World Economic
Forum, Online)
Over the last 35 years, Western democracies have seen a rapid rise in political instability,
characterized by frequent shifts in governing parties and their programs and philosophies,
driven at least partly by economic transformation and hardship. The question now is how to improve economic
performance at a time when political instability is impeding effective policymaking. In a recent article, one of us (David Brady) shows the
correlation between rising political instability and declining economic performance, pointing out
that countries with below-average economic performance have experienced the most electoral
volatility. More specifically, such instability corresponds with a decline in the share of industrial
or manufacturing employment in advanced countries. Though the extent of the decline varies somewhat across
countries – it has been less sharp in Germany than in the United States, for example – the pattern is fairly ubiquitous. Over the last 15
years, in particular, increasingly powerful digital technologies enabled the automation and
disintermediation of “routine” white- and blue-collar jobs. With advances in robotics, materials, 3D
printing, and artificial intelligence, one can reasonably expect the scope of “routine” jobs that can be
automated to continue expanding. The rise of digital technologies also boosted companies’ ability to manage complex multi-source
global supply chains efficiently, and thus take advantage of global economic integration. As services became increasingly tradable, manufacturing
declined steadily as a share of employment, from 40% in 1960 to about 20% today. But, in
most advanced countries, the
tradable sector did not generate much employment, at least not enough to offset declines in
manufacturing. In the United States, for example, net employment generation in the third of the
economy that produces tradable goods and services was essentially zero over the last two
decades. Partly driven by these trends, the share of national income going to labor, which rose in
the early post-war period, began falling in the 1970s. While globalization and digital
technologies have produced broad-based benefits, in the form of lower costs for goods and an
expanded array of services, they have also fueled job and income polarization, with a declining
share of middle-income jobs and a rising share of lower- and higher-income jobs splitting the
income distribution. The magnitude of this polarization varies by country, owing to disparate social-security systems and policy responses.
Until 2008, when economic crisis roiled much of the world, the concerns associated with rising
inequality were at least partly masked by higher leverage, with government expenditures and wealth effects from
rising asset prices supporting household consumption and propping up growth and employment. When that growth pattern broke
down, economic and political conditions deteriorated rapidly. Most obvious, the drop in growth and
employment has amplified the adverse effects of job and income polarization. Beyond the
obvious practical problems this has raised, it has impinged on many citizens’ sense of identity. In
the post-war industrial era, one could reasonably expect to earn a decent living, support a family, and contribute in a visible way to the country’s
overall prosperity. Being shunted into the non-tradable service sector, with lower income and less job security, caused many to lose self-esteem, as well
as fostering resentment toward the system that brought about the shift. (It did not help matters that the same system bailed out the main driver of the
economic crisis, the financial sector – a move that exposed a stark disparity between exigency and fairness.) While
technology-driven
economic transformation is not new, it has never occurred as rapidly or on as large a scale as it
has over the last 35 years, when it has been turbocharged by globalization. With their experiences and
fortunes changing fast, many citizens now believe that powerful forces are operating outside the control of existing governance structures, insulated
from policy intervention. And, to some extent, they are right. The
result is a widespread loss of confidence in
government’s motivations, capabilities, and competence. This sentiment does not appear to be
mitigated much by a recognition of the complexity of the challenge of maintaining incentives
and dynamism while addressing rising inequality (which, at its most extreme, undermines equality of opportunity and
intergenerational mobility). As Brady points out, during the more stable period immediately following World War II, growth patterns were largely
benign from a distributional perspective, and political parties were largely organized around the interests of labor and capital, with an overlay of
common interests created by the Cold War. As outcomes have become increasingly unequal, there has been a fragmentation of interests across the
electoral spectrum, leading to instability in electoral outcomes, political paralysis, and frequent changes in policy frameworks and direction. This
has several economic consequences. One is policy-induced uncertainty, which, by most accounts, amounts to a
major impediment to investment. Another is the distinct lack of consensus on an agenda to restore growth, reduce
unemployment, reestablish a pattern of inclusiveness, and retain the benefits of global interconnectedness. On one level, it is hard not to
see this as a self-reinforcing destructive cycle. Political instability reduces the likelihood of
defining and implementing a reasonably comprehensive, coherent, and sustained economic-
policy agenda. The resulting persistence of low growth, high unemployment, and rising
inequality fuels continued political instability and fragmentation, which further undermines officials’ capacity to
implement effective economic policies.
High rates of leadership turnover cause great power wars

Malone 15 (Iris, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Political Science Department at Stanford University,
“Autocratic Leadership Turnover and International Conflict” June 27, 2015. Stanford University,
Online)
A second field of research, largely borne from work on democratic turnovers, argues that leadershipchange heighten
the risk of conflict-involvement for new leaders because of inexperience handling diplomatic
crises, insecurity, and private information about the costs of war. The literature on democratic turnover
argues that the frequency of democratic turnovers perpetually results in less experienced leaders
assuming office. These new leaders lack the knowledge and familiarity to successfully navigate international crises leading to
an increased risk of bargaining failures and an inability to credibly deter outsiders from opportunistic attacks (Daxecker 2007; Bak
and Palmer 2010). Empirical evidence shows that new democratic leaders are particularly prone to
targeted attacks, but this risk erodes the longer they are in office (Gelpi and Grieco 2001; Chiozza and
Goemans 2004b; Potter 2007). 9 Second, leadership turnover can generate private information problems
because of changes in offense-defense balances and missing information about each other’s
foreign policy intentions (Maoz 1996; Walt 1996). In order to develop reputations as tough types, new leaders are
motivated to bluff and misrepresent their preferences. 10 Outsiders, conversely, have an
incentive to challenge new leaders to learn about and gauge their resolve (Wolford 2007). Together,
asymmetric information increases the probability that either side will miscalculate their
opponent’s willingness to use force and lead to a bargaining failure and war. New leaders may
also face diversionary incentives for conflict due to their political insecurity (Enterline and Gleditsch
2000). Facing an imminent risk of removal, leaders are likely to “gamble for resurrection” by initiating
conflict to mobilize domestic support with the hope a foreign victory will ensure their political
survival (Downs and Rocke 1994). General Leopoldo Galtieri’s 1982 invasion of the Falklands four months into his rule is typically
treated as a classical example of diversionary logic. The invasion failed to muster support for Galtieri and he was forced to leave
within days of defeat. Most new democratic leaders generally enjoy comparatively high levels of
personal and political security when they gain office due to institutional design (Bienen and van de
Walle 1991). Gaubatz (1991) notes this relative security means democratic leaders are more likely to
initiate wars early soon after election. This security also means empirical tests on democratic
turnovers have found no link between diversionary conflict and new democratic leaders (Leeds and
Davis 1997; Oneal and Tir 2006). However, unlike democratic leaders, new autocratic leaders remain insecure because they come to
power with limited support and experience to deter additional challenges. Leaders who enter violently or undertake coercive
measures to gain power are likely to lack broad support for their rule rendering them weak and vulnerable to political challenges by
other elites. This insecurity generates a commitment problem between the new leader and
domestic elites as he would like to commit to acquiesce to the demands of oppositional forces
in order to stabilize his rule, but these commitments are not credible because both parties
recognize that the shock is only temporary (Fearon 2004). Non-democratic leaders may find diversionary conflict an
attractive option because they remain insecure and often face worse personal outcomes after expulsion. Diversionary incentives
may be particularly compelling for autocrats as a favorable outcome can actually lengthen their tenure (Chiozza and Goemans
2004a; Debs and Goemans 2010). Lai and Slater (2006) argue military regimes are more likely to use diversionary conflict because of
pre-existing organizational biases in the junta towards the use of conflict. This complements newer research by Colgan (2013) and
Horowitz and Stam (2014) that revolutionary or militaristic leaders are likely to pursue more risk-acceptant policies that increase the
likelihood of war. Another motivating factor that can increase the appeal of diversionary war is a
leader’s personal concerns for survival after office (Goemans 2000). When institutions lack the
capacity to credibly protect leader after irregular turnovers, leaders facing a forcible removal
may choose to “fight for survival” by rationalizing that the costs of war are comparable to the
costs of expulsion should they fail (Chiozza and Goemans 2011). These theories all suggest the conflict-
propensity of new leaders rises because of inexperience, instability, and private information, but
make a few simplifying assumptions. First, experience-based mechanisms do not accommodate
previous times served in office, the experience other advisors or political elites may bring from
past administrations or the rate at which leaders may acquire this experience to overcome their
hindrance. Variation in incoming experience levels could produce heterogeneous effects among new leaders that moderate their
conflict-propensity. Second, in contrast to the reputational-based predictions posed here, Powell (2004) argues uncertainty
about the perceived costs of conflict can, in some circumstances, introduce a delay in fighting
because outsiders prefer to screen each other with attractive offers in order to learn about the
other state’s true type rather than initiating conflict. Third, support for diversionary war theory remains tepid as
scholars have found little empirical evidence in support and note the theory over-exaggerates the willingness of elites to gamble on
conflict.11 Further, some scholars have determined this vulnerability is likely to ameliorate the risk of conflict due to strategic
avoidance logic (Smith 1996; Fordham 2005). Given a credible belief the vulnerable leader is likely to act belligerent, outsiders may
strategically avoid engaging in conflict for fear of reciprocation or escalation. New
leaders after a turnover may be
hampered by inexperience and insecurity that temporarily change the perceived costs of war in
ways that increase the risk of international conflict. As a consequence, the conflict participation
of new autocratic leaders may temporarily rise as they maneuver to establish tough reputation,
strong diplomatic relations, and domestic support.
Automation Bad - Terrorism
Automation causes terrorism
Prakash 16 (Abishur, Geopolitical futurist in Center for Innovating the Future, “Will
Automation Lead to Terrorism? – Next Geopolitics – Medium” September 21, 2016. Medium,
Online)//RB
Around the world, automation is predicted to create chaos. In the US, 80 million jobs are at risk
from automation. In South Africa, over 50% of jobs are at risk from automation. In Germany, 51% of jobs are at risk, while in Canada 42% of
jobs are at risk of being automated over the next 10–20 years. Unemployment has been linked to terrorism in the past.
But, this link usually has to do with a specific part of the world, namely the Middle East North
Africa (MENA) region. Automation isn’t limited to MENA. It will affect the entire world. Every
country, regardless of their economic, geopolitical or social level, will be affected by robotics,
artificial intelligence and more. This will change the future of terrorism, and the risk automation
creates for governments around the world. Automation-Fuelled Terrorism When it comes to automation-
fuelled terrorism, automation will displace all kinds of people. And these people are likely to fall
into two groups (when it comes to radicalization) — those who are jobless and gravitate towards
existing terrorist groups, like Al Qaeda or ISIS, or those who become jobless and create new
terrorist groups. Take Ethiopia for example. The biggest industry in Ethiopia is agriculture. And, in a study from Oxford, the industry with the
highest risk of being affected by automation was agriculture. Because of this, an estimated 85% of jobs in Ethiopia are at risk of being automated, the
highest automation risk in the world. Compared to other African nations, Ethiopia has been largely successful in combating terrorism (as we know it). In
fact, Ethiopia has done so well that when US President Barack Obama visited Ethiopia in 2015, he signalled an interest in learning from Ethiopia in this
regard. But, as Ethiopia takes steps to deal with traditional terrorism, from extremist groups like Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab and others, what about groups
that can emerge from unemployed agriculture workers? Ethiopia cannot afford to provide unemployment insurance, social assistance, job re-training
and more to large swaths of the population who are vulnerable to have their job replaced by automation. Therefore,
these people are
at risk of “being on their own”. Without income, these unemployed workers can grow angry.
Can these workers get together and create an extremist group, known as “United Freedom for
Ethiopia” (UFE) and begin blowing up factories that deploy automation? Or, launch assaults on
convenience stores and grocery stores to steal supplies and feed poor families? Will such people
be viewed as terrorists in the traditional sense, or in a different sense? How do you view them?
Trump retaliates – Goes global – No de-escalation

Gartner 16 (John Gartner Et. Al, 3-31-2016, John Gartner is a private-practice psychologist,
part-time assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School and
author of In Search of Bill Clinton: A Psychological Biography. "9/11: What Would Trump Do? ,"
POLITICO Magazine, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/donald-trump-2016-
terrorist-attack-foreign-policy-213784)
“Trump, a thin-skinned malignant narcissist who can leave no slight unavenged … is the candidate most likely to overreact to a terrorist event”
Trump, a thin-skinned malignant narcissist who can leave no slight unavenged, no matter how
slight (God help us if Kim Jong-un makes fun of his hands), is the candidate most likely to overreact to a terrorist
event or threat in an impulsive, misguided and heavy-handed way that would win us enemies
and influence people around the world to hate us. For example, his proposal to “register” all Muslims in America will
humiliate a proud people and radicalize scores of young people. Malignant narcissists are not your garden-variety
narcissists. They combine narcissism with paranoia, anti-social traits and a propensity for
aggression. Trump sees threats where they don’t exist—like Mexican immigrants who “might be ISIS”—and feels
no compunctions about breaking rules, such as those against torture or collective punishment,
to lash out at those imaginary threats. The Geneva Convention is for politically correct suckers. The law of the jungle, not the rule
of law, is the organizing principle of malignant narcissists. And if they can’t rule the jungle they’ll burn it down. Malignant narcissism is an untreatable
personality disorder, for the simple reason that no one can ever tell the malignant narcissist he is wrong. Anyone who questions a malignant narcissist’s
judgment is immediately dismissed as an idiot or attacked as a threat. Anyone who questions their ruthless tactics is belittled as soft and naive. It’s not
accidental that Trump has said “my primary consultant is myself.” The appeal of narcissistic leaders is real and understandable. In America we’ve had a
history of charismatic hypomanic narcissists, warm narcissists if you will, like TR and FDR, who were positive forces of nature, leading the country out of
hard times by using their larger than life personalities to inspire a faith in America that made us feel larger against our enemies, while single handedly
pushing the nation in a more progressive direction that broadened democracy to include the needs and voices of the many. But even malignant
narcissists, who concentrate all the power in themselves, can lend strength, inspire confidence and chart a collective direction for their country. Hitler
took a dispirited defeated nation in the throws of depression and with the promise to make Germany great again turned it into a world power. But the
downsides are unimaginable: Hitler also replaced democracy with dictatorship, tolerance with genocide, and sowed the seeds of his nations destruction
with his ruthless will to conquer. In
short, a president Trump is one of the biggest threats imaginable to our
national security. His need to appear strong will make us weak. A malignant narcissist is much
like a malignant tumor. Sooner or later it will kill the body politic. *** “The nihilistic Trump, who regards human
beings as brutish children, might well react to a terror attack like a brutish child” Michael D’Antonio is author of more than a dozen nonfiction books,
including Mortal Sins and Never Enough, Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success. Within moments of our first meeting, Donald Trump told me that if
he is guided by any principle it is this: “If
you hit me, I’ll hit back, ten times harder.” (I came to think of this as
the Trump Rule of Ten.) In subsequent meetings he added to what might be called a personal
philosophy with references to how much he enjoyed conflict—“I always loved to fight”—and his
belief that people are “inherently dishonest.” Add Trump’s frequent references to the viciousness that dwells in the human
heart and his belief that character is fixed at roughly age six, and you can imagine of way Trump could respond to a terror attack on America. The
nihilistic Trump, who regards human beings as brutish children, might well react to a terror attack like a brutish child. President Trump would
pressure intelligence agencies to immediately identify the source of the attack. Civil liberties may be
suspended in the emergency pursuit of information, suspects and conspirators. Those taken into custody would be tortured, if Trump deemed it
necessary. Speed would be an important part of the Trump response to terror, so we should not
expect much deliberation or consultation with Congress or allies. And given his penchant for
disproportional warfare, he would order a massive military response just as soon as he felt
confident about a target. In such a scenario, the destruction of an office tower in New York would be
answered with the annihilation of a city controlled by those Trump deemed to have sponsored the attack. To get a sense of
how this might work, imagine the Bush administration’s tragedy in Iraq carried out in a matter of weeks, not years. If the targets of such a crude
and violent response follow the established script, they would then attack the West on a scale that would make
Brussels, and Paris, and San Bernardino seem like rehearsals. As the fight escalates, according
to the Trump Rule of Ten, Americans would truly experience the terror the attackers intend. If
the actions of the President Trump that I describe above seem too awful to consider, hope resides in the idea that much of what the man says and does
is, to echo a term he recently used on CNN, “show business.” If this is true, then we might discount the bellicose rhetoric and the marginal figures he
has named as advisers. However, this wish, that Trump doesn’t mean what he says, is a poor foundation on which to place our confidence in the future.
We shouldn’t have to guess about our president’s temper. *** “As a self-professed America Firster, Trump seemingly thinks of statecraft in terms of
profit-and-loss. Yet with apologies to Clausewitz, international politics is not the continuation of business by other means” Andrew Bacevich is author of
the new book America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, to be published on April 5. Unmoored
to principles and
precedents, possessing a remarkably shallow grasp of history, Donald Trump is unlikely to
demonstrate much by way of the cool calculation that successful crisis management requires.
True, the actual exercise of power can educate, as it did in the case of John F. Kennedy, for example. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK’s “pay
any price, bear any burden” inclinations had given way to let’s make a deal: my nukes in exchange for yours and let’s not do this again. Whether Trump
is similarly educable stands as an open question. Confronted with some unexpected threat, would he pause to evaluate the precipitating factors?
Kennedy did, and it served him well. Or would he give in to an impulse to lash out? That describes the George W. Bush administration’s response to
9/11. To put it another way, would intellect or emotion shape Trump’s approach to making decisions? More than anything else, of course, Trump prides
himself in being the dealmaker par excellence. Yet based on his recent pronouncements—casually proposing to revive the practice of torture, for
example, or speculating that Japan and South Korea might consider acquiring nuclear weapons—he appears all but incapable of appreciating the
possibility of adverse second order consequences. True, for anyone running for president, a certain amount of shooting from the hip is to be expected.
Trump is hardly the only candidate making bold statements—carpet bomb ISIS, move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem on day one. But in most
cases such promises are offered less as a serious basis for action than as a way of currying favor with particular constituencies. In Trump’s case,
unfortunately, it’s hard to tell if he’s striking a pose or making statements that he intends to be taken seriously. (To be fair, it’s just as hard to interpret
various off-the-wall statements made by Trump’s immediate rival Ted Cruz). As a self-professed America Firster, Trump seemingly thinks of statecraft in
terms of profit-and-loss. Yet with apologies to Clausewitz, international politics is not the continuation of business by other means. The object of the
exercise is not simply to gain some immediate advantage at the expense of others, but to enhance the freedom, abundance, and security enjoyed by
the American people while at the same time promoting conditions that others—allies and adversaries alike—find tolerable. Surrounding himself with
advisers who are somewhat more—what’s the word? seasoned? sane?—might encourage Trump to curb his wilder inclinations. But who in their right
mind would sign up to serve in his administration? Probably people who think like Trump. Now there’s a scary prospect. *** “A 9/11-style attack on
U.S. soil would mean that any remaining restraints to the use of weapons of mass destruction … would likely be swiftly swept aside” Elizabeth
Borgwardt is a history professor at Washington University and the author of The Nuremberg Idea, forthcoming from Knopf. Donald
Trump’s
March 21 interview with the Washington Post editorial board should make every potential
voter’s blood run cold. After noting that ISIS should be knocked out flat, yet indicating that large
numbers of U.S. troops should not be involved, Mr. Trump suggested that it was better to be
“unpredictable” in the face of U.S. enemies, before twice dodging a question about whether he
would advocate the use of tactical nuclear weapons against ISIS. (To be fair, the interview transcript indicates that
much more time was spent discussing Mr. Trump’s hand size than anything to do with nuclear weapons.) All this was before the
attacks in Belgium; my sense is that a 9/11-style attack on U.S. soil would mean that any
remaining restraints to the use of weapons of mass destruction—including nuclear weapons—
would likely be swiftly swept aside. General Douglas MacArthur had notoriously floated the
idea of using nuclear weapons against China in the Korean conflict (1950-53) when he was
concerned about Chinese moves to support North Korean aggression. In posthumously published interviews,
MacArthur said that he could have won the war in ten days: “I would have dropped 30 or so atomic bombs … strung across the neck of Manchuria. For
at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the North.” Part
of MacArthur’s logic was that the
United States would have needed to fight communist China eventually, so it would be best to
nuke them while they were still weak, recovering from World War II and the Chinese Revolution (1949), as
opposed to fighting them later after they had become much stronger. “ That makes sense to me!” opined a Trump backer
with whom I recently spoke on this topic. And yet, I offered, most Americans today are probably pretty happy that we didn’t use
nuclear weapons against China in the Korean war, or would be if they knew anything about that historical interlude. “I guess,” he said. “But why not
press your advantage when you have one?” I
offer this example because my sense is that in a putative Trump
administration, “the gloves would be off” and all barriers—including public opinion—to the first
use of various kinds of weapons of mass destruction would likely be at an all-time low. Bruce Cumings,
the leading U.S. historian of Korea, has commented on the MacArthur incident in an analysis from back in 2004. Cumings noted that “MacArthur
sounds like a warmongering lunatic” for advocating the use of nuclear weapons, but also explained that, astonishing as it might seem, the general
actually had some support for his outlandish proposal. Cumings also noted that MacArthur’s conduct, quite appropriately, contributed to the
celebrated war hero’s dismissal by President Truman. But that was then.
Big Farms Bad/Small Farms Good - Environment
Large industrial farms destroy the environment and causes warming – 5
warrants
Good 18 (Kate, the Editorial Manager for One Green Planet and has been with the company
since 2014. She runs editorial operations for the Animal, Earth, Life, and Buzz Monster channels
and coordinates petition content, One Green Planet's newsletter, and assists with social media,
“5 Ways Factory Farming Is Killing the Environment” April 19, 2018. One Good Planet,
Online)//RB
Industrial agriculture is one of the most unsustainable practices of modern civilization. From start to
finish, factory farming is responsible for the abuse of land, animals, and natural resources all for
the express purpose of providing cheap, unhealthy food to the large amounts of people. Industrial
agriculture only really crept its way into normative American culture in the 1970s (thanks to President Nixon’s Agricultural Secretary,
Earl Buttz), but in just four decades, it has spread like a disease across the globe. Our
current global food system is
responsible for one-third of global greenhouse emissions and it completely depends on fossil
fuels for transportation and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Replacing small-scale farms,
where a variety of crops and animals were raised in congruence with single-crop farms and
“animal production facilities,” factory farming has wrought economic problems, public health
concerns, inhumane conditions for billions of animals, and a huge carbon debt on the world’s
agricultural system. With rising concerns over food security and the future of our rapidly deteriorating environment, more
attention has been put on the multitudinous ways factory farming contributes to these issues. It is easy to fall into the traps of
contradictory information that Big-Ag manufactures to justify their unsustainable practices, but I urge you not to believe a word of
it! Below are the top five ways that factory farming harms the planet — read, learn, and pass it on! 1. Air
Pollution Over 37
percent of methane emissions result from factory farming. Methane has a global warming
potential 20 times higher than carbon dioxide. But that doesn’t make the carbon dioxide
emissions any less staggering…the fossil fuels used in energy, transportation, and synthetic
pesticides/fertilizers emits 90 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. On a
lesser note, factory farming also releases harmful compounds like hydrogen sulfide and ammonia
that can cause immediate negative health effects in humans. 2. Deforestation In the United States
alone, over 260 million acres of forest have been cleared to make room for crop fields, most of
which are used to exclusively grow livestock feed. This is not a practice that only occurs in the
U.S., land clearing in Brazil to grow chicken feed is responsible for the destruction of about 3
million acres of rainforest. And these numbers only account for land cleared to feed animals.
Clearing land to grow soybeans in the Amazon rainforest is responsible for clearing over 100 million hectares of forest, releasing
enough carbon into the atmosphere to increase the rate of global warming by 50 percent. 3. WaterPollution Industrial
agriculture sucks up 70 percent of the world’s fresh water supplies. To follow up that staggering
number, the EPA estimates that 75 percent of all water-quality problems in America’s rivers and
streams. Water polluted with agricultural run-off can destroy whole ecosystems and be toxic, if
not lethal to humans and animals alike. Industrial livestock farms, known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations
(sounds warm and fuzzy, right?), contain massive cesspools that store animal waste. These “factory-farm lagoons” have
been known to leak into adjacent waterways. Nitrates, dangerous microbes, and drug-resistant
bacteria run rampant in these lagoons. When these by-products get into local water ways, they
cause toxic algae blooms which lead to “dead zones” and massive fish kills. High levels of
nitrates in drinking water can cause spontaneous abortions and blue baby syndrome and
bacteria outbreaks from agricultural water pollution is responsible for several disease outbreaks
across the United States. Click here to see how levels of animal waste impact your state’s water supplies. 4.
Monocultures Monocultures in industrial farming poses an incredible threat to future food
security across the globe. Single-crop farms are one of the “ingenious” developments that has
come out of industrial agriculture. To support the livestock industry, a small group of
“commodity” crops have taken up the majority of the world’s agricultural land. In the United
States, corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans are planted at unprecedented rate, yet only a small
percentage of these crops feed people. Planting millions of acres of genetically similar plants has become a global
phenomenon due to the high-yields that these plants can produce under certain conditions. The problem with this, however, comes
when environmental conditions change (good thing our climate is so stable…) or in the form of a crop epidemic (the potato famine
sound familiar?). Large-scale
farming of monocultures depends on massive amounts of synthetic
fertilizers to replace nutrients that are continually drained from soil. This practice also requires
high levels of synthetic pesticides to stave off insects that are attracted to certain crops. If
farmers did not receive subsidies for growing commodity crops, then crop fields could be
populated with a diverse mixture of plant species that can naturally fix nitrogen into soil and
control insects. 5. Fossil Fuels and Carbon Emissions In the satirical web series “Farmed and Dangerous,”
industrial farms begin feeding livestock “petro-pellets,” animal food that is really concentrated
pills of fossil fuels. While this outrageous practice does not happen in real life (…yet), it does
highlight how heavily factory farms rely on fossil fuels to raise animals and grow crops. Synthetic
fertilizers and pesticides are derived from petroleum, the majority of crops grown with the use
of these chemicals are turned into animals feed – hence the comedic irony of cutting out the
crop-middle man and just feeding animals straight petro. Between transportation, synthetic
fertilizers/pesticides, and the incredible amount of energy it takes to run Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, factory farms
uses about 5.5 gallons of fossils fuels per acre. The
average farm in the United States spans 418 acres,
meaning it will devour about 2,300 gallons of fossil fuels. Just think about how many thousands
of farms there are across the globe.
Industrial agriculture is the largest factor contributing to global climate change

Perrone 18 (Tommaso, An environmental journalist who graduated in International Relations,
“How agriculture and climate change are related: causes and effects” February 5, 2018. Lifegate,
Online)//RB
At the same time, agriculture – especially intensive agriculture, characterised by monocultures

and aimed at feeding farm animals – is one of the sectors that generates the highest amount of
emissions of CO2 (the main greenhouse gas). This quantity can be compared only to the sum total of the CO2 emitted by all
forms of transportation. By looking deeper, we can observe that agriculture and the deforestation it causes
were responsible for one fifth (21 per cent) of all CO2 emissions in the decade from 2000 to 2010
(approximately 44 billion tonnes). This occurs because agriculture needs an increasing amount of space
alongside massive amounts of chemical fertilisers now that the demand for meat and its
products has increased dramatically in developing countries. This is damaging forests, which in
turn would be able to absorb CO2 and mitigate anthropic (man-made) emissions. A vicious cycle
that makes agriculture both a victim (given the negative effects of global warming on food supply) and a
perpetrator (one of the main causes of climate change). Most of the time, when agriculture perpetrates its crimes, it isn’t even
contributing to feeding the ever-increasing world population. In fact, 95 per cent of the soy produced in the world
is consumed by farm animals – mostly bovines – which demonstrates this conflict. Also,
according to a study conducted by the Chalmers University of Technology in Goteborg, Sweden
this means that producing one kilogramme of bovine meat require 200 kilos of CO2 emissions.
There are 700 million pigs in China alone, one for every two citizens, half of the global population of farm pigs. In order to feed these
animals, forced to live in cages inside industrial warehouses, Beijing imports 80 million tonnes of soy, especially from Latin America
and more specifically from the Brazilian Amazon where endless fields of soy are destroying one of the most biodiverse places in the
world. One of the world’s green lungs. Agriculture and climate change: is agroecology the answer? The Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) seems to have a clear idea of what should be done and is promoting sustainable practices in various countries
through agroecology. This
is a series of social and environmental measures aimed at creating a
sustainable agricultural system that optimises and stabilises crop yields. These practices also
tackle the effects of climate change, such as desertification and the rise in sea levels, and among
them organic agriculture plays an essential role as it respects natural cycles, drastically reducing
human impact.
It's one of the biggest factors in climate change

Gustin 17 (Georgina, “a Washington-based reporter who has covered food policy, farming and
the environment for more than a decade. She started her journalism career at The Day in New
London, Conn., then moved to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where she launched the "food beat,"
covering agriculture, biotech giant Monsanto and the growing "good food" movement, “Factory
Farms Put Climate at Risk, Experts Say in Urging Health Officials to Speak Out” May 23, 2017.
Inside Climate News, Online)//RB
Roughly 200 experts in disciplines from nutrition to animal welfare are calling on the World
Health Organization to take a more serious look at the impact of industrial livestock production
on human health and the climate. In a letter sent Monday, the group—which includes former New York Times food
writer Mark Bittman and environmentalist Bill McKibben—appealed to the WHO, asking that its next director-general work "to
reduce the size and number of factory farms." The WHO's World Health Assembly got underway Monday, and the body will elect a
new leader this week. "As the global health community acknowledges the intertwined nature of
planetary and human health, it must also confront the role that factory farming plays in climate
change," the letter says. The group points to predictions that, without a reduction in meat consumption,
agriculture—including livestock production and growing grain to feed livestock—is on track to
gobble up half the world's carbon budget if countries expect to meet the 2050 target of limiting
global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius. The livestock industry's contribution to
greenhouse gases come from direct sources, including methane emitted from the animals
belching and their manure, but also from indirect sources, including land conversion and
deforestation linked to growing feed. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says that
agriculture, including livestock production, is responsible for 9 percent of overall greenhouse gas
emissions. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) gives a higher global
number, estimating that livestock production accounts for about 14.5 percent of all human-
caused emissions, or about 7.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide or its warming equivalent. Sara Place, who
works on sustainable beef production for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, said Monday that the letter's points about the
impact of the beef industry globally misrepresents the U.S. beef industry, the world's largest producer. "In the U.S., direct emissions
from beef, in terms of methane emissions, was 1.9 percent of U.S. emissions," Place said, citing 2014 numbers from the EPA.
"Transportation is 25 percent of our emissions. Numbers that are accurate at the global level don't necessarily apply to the U.S."
While short on policy recommendations and details, the letter suggests that advocacy groups and academics are going to push the
issue at a global level. "The letter highlights the interconnectedness of health, climate and meat consumption. They're overlapping
issues," said Sunjatha Bergen, a food and livestock specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "This is an issue that the
WHO should look at." Globally, meat
consumption has increased over the past 40 years, particularly in
developing countries as incomes have risen, according to the FAO. The letter points to data
indicating that factory farms have served this increased demand, especially for poultry and
swine—but it says this surge in production has come at a cost to health and the environment.
Industrial farming causes a laundry list of environmental issues
Climate Hustler 17 (“IMPACT OF BIG AGRICULTURE ON THE ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE
CHANGE” 2017. Climate Hustler, Online)//RB
There’s no way of getting around it; we all need to eat. With the ever-rapidly increasing population on Earth, the task of putting food
in everyone’s mouth, which was no easy task, to begin with, is getting to be an increasingly herculean challenge. One of
the
ways mankind has endeavored to face this challenge is through the adoption of large-scale
farming practices, otherwise known as big agriculture, in the hopes of achieving the economies
of scale that would allow us to feed the greatest number of people utilizing the limited
resources at our disposal. The question is, at what cost to the global environment do we
undertake these mega-projects, and are they, ultimately, worthwhile? DEFORESTATION One of
the most severe and easily noticeable impacts brought about by big agriculture is deforestation.
This simply refers to the large scale worldwide clearing of the forests which cover various parts
of the Earth (not to be confused with smaller scaled tree removal sometimes performed by residential tree services). The
direct causes of deforestation are numerous, including over-heavy logging, cattle ranching, and,
most devastatingly, slash and burn farming to make way for crops or pasture. Loss of forest
cover has a knock-on effect in many other areas; millions of species lose their homes; uncovered
soils lose their moisture and potentially turn into deserts; and can also exacerbate global
warming, as trees serve to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. CLIMATE CHANGE
Agriculture and climate change are subjects that have a very strong correlation, seeing as
agriculture has always been largely dependent on climate to determine its scope, timing, and
success. It has only ben with the onset of big agriculture and the technological and scientific
advancements that facilitate it that the reverse has come to be apparent. Big agriculture is
affecting the Earth’s climate. The biggest climate change factor that can be laid at the doorstep of big agriculture is the
large-scale production of greenhouse gasses, which include carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Greenhouse gasses
act to trap heat within the Earth’s atmosphere, thereby leading to an increase in the Earth’s
average temperature, or “Global Warming”. Additionally, the loss of land cover through
deforestation interferes with the Earth’s temperature regulation mechanisms, resulting in a
heating up process referred to as radiative forcing, which is another contributor to the global
warming phenomenon. POLLUTANTS One of the hallmarks of big agriculture is its reliance on
synthetic pesticides as well a whole range of agricultural chemicals. The danger inherent in
utilizing these methods is that there is always the risk of these non-biodegradable materials
leaking into groundwater systems, as well as lingering in crops and food supplies, subsequently
posing a threat to the end consumer. Synthetic pesticides have also been known to kill or harm
birds, fish, plants, or wildlife other than those which were being originally targeted. This is why the
natural food movement is so crucial, as the farming of organic fruits and vegetables don’t contribute to the pollutants found in
“conventional” farms. GENETIC
ENGINEERING In the efforts of big agriculture to develop crops that
are resistant to herbicides through the science of genetic engineering. One of the pitfalls of this
is that spillover contamination has led to the creation of herbicide resistant “super-weeds”,
which threaten to overrun farmlands or trigger the use of even deadlier herbicides in greater
amounts in order to tackle them.
Industrial ag is the main source of climate change

Cummins 13 (Ronnie, founder and director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), a
non-profit, U.S.-based network of 850,000 consumers, dedicated to safeguarding organic
standards and promoting a healthy, just and sustainable system of agriculture and commerce,
“How Factory Farming Contributes to Global Warming” January 21, 2013. EcoWatch,
Online)//RB
A growing number of organic consumers, natural health advocates and climate hawks are taking
a more comprehensive look at the fundamental causes of global warming. And its led them to
this sobering conclusion: our modern energy-, chemical- and genetically modified organism
(GMO)-intensive industrial food and farming systems are the major cause of man-made global
warming. How did they reach this conclusion? First, by taking a more inclusive look at the scientific data on
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—not just carbon dioxide (CO2), but also methane and nitrous
oxide. Next, by doing a full accounting of the fossil fuel consumption and emissions of the entire
industrial food and farming cycle, including inputs, equipment, production, processing,
distribution, heating, cooling and waste. And finally, by factoring in the indirect impacts of contemporary agriculture,
which include deforestation and wetlands destruction. When you add it all up, the picture is clear—contemporary
agriculture is burning up our planet. And factory farms or, in industry lingo, Confined Animal
Feeding Operations (CAFOs), play a key role in this impending disaster. The science behind global warming
is complex. Without question, coal plants, tar sands and natural gas fracking have contributed
heavily to GHG pollution, the major cause of global warming. We must unite to shut down these
industries. Similarly, consumer overconsumption of fossil fuels represents another big piece of
the climate-crisis equation. We absolutely must rethink, retrofit and/or redesign our gas-
guzzling cars and our energy-inefficient buildings, if we want to reduce fossil fuel use by 90
percent over the next few decades. But we also must address the environmental impact of factory farming. Today,
nearly 65 billion animals worldwide, including cows, chickens and pigs, are crammed into CAFOs.
These animals are literally imprisoned and tortured in unhealthy, unsanitary and unconscionably
cruel conditions. Sickness is the norm for animals who are confined rather than pastured, and
who eat GMO corn and soybeans, rather than grass and forage as nature intended. To prevent
the inevitable spread of disease from stress, overcrowding and lack of vitamin D, animals are fed
a steady diet of antibiotics. Those antibiotics pose a direct threat to the environment when they
run off into our lakes, rivers, aquifers and drinking water. CAFOs contribute directly to global
warming by releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere—more than the
entire global transportation industry. The air at some factory farm test sites in the U.S. is dirtier than in America’s most
polluted cities, according to the Environmental Integrity Project. According to a 2006 report by the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations (FAO), animal agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of all human-induced greenhouse gas
emissions, including 37 percent of methane emissions and 65 percent of nitrous oxide emissions. The methane releases from billions
of imprisoned animals on factory farms are 70 times more damaging per ton to the earth’s atmosphere than CO2. Indirectly,
factory farms contribute to climate disruption by their impact on deforestation and draining of
wetlands, and because of the nitrous oxide emissions from huge amounts of pesticides used to
grow the genetically engineered corn and soy fed to animals raised in CAFOs. Nitrous oxide pollution is
even worse than methane—200 times more damaging per ton than CO2. And just as animal waste leaches antibiotics and hormones
into ground and water, pesticides and fertilizers also eventually find their way into our waterways, further damaging the
environment. Factory farms aren’t just a disaster for the environment. They’re also ruining our health. A growing chorus of scientists
and public health advocates warn that the
intensive and reckless use of antibiotics and growth hormones
leads to factory-farmed food that contains antibiotic-resistant pathogens, drug residues such as
hormones and growth promoters, and “bad fats.” Yet despite these health and environmental
hazards, the vast majority of consumers don’t realize that nearly 95 percent of the meat, dairy
and eggs sold in the U.S. come from CAFOs. Nor do most people realize that CAFOs represent a corporate-controlled
system characterized by large-scale, centralized, low profit-margin production, processing and distribution systems.
But, small farms solve – They’re more sustainable and produce comparatively
less environmental damage
Roberts 17 (Tobias, Writer, Farmer, Recovering Development Worker, “How Small Farmers
can Deal with Climate Change” August 8, 2017. The Huffington Post, Online)//RB
The dwindling agrarian and small farming communities around the world have certainly not had
it easy during the last 50 years or so. The lure of urban life and salaried jobs along with the
increasing corporatization of agriculture across the world which essentially made small, family
farms unprofitable are just two of the many factors that have contributed to the vanishing of
many small communities. At the same time, small, rural places also are a reservoir of wisdom and knowledge held by
people and communities who have resisted the onslaught of globalization, the homogenization of culture, and the imposition of
Western norms and standards. When it comes to finding ways to confront the myriad of crises that our
current civilization has created, most of us look to scientists, business gurus, and political
leaders to offers solutions that will help us find a way out of the problems that are mounting.
However, communities and individuals who have maintained a faithfulness to traditional
livelihoods also have important insights into how we can live more sustainably and respond to
the predicaments that have come with industrialized life. The Cruelty of Climate Change For generations,
farmers have passed along a deep seated wisdom that has come through centuries of observing their land and their places. Most
rural and agrarian communities know when the rains will come, when the wind will blow the
hardest, when the soil will be most prepared to offer a good yield of crops and will subsequently
plan their livelihoods around these important pieces of knowledge. When an elderly woman
from some agrarian community looks into the evening sky and proclaims that tomorrow will be
a rainy day, it´s not just a premonition, but rather an intuition that is almost instinctual; a
knowledge that has come from the closeness and proximity to the land and the elements. In
recent years, however, that knowledge, and the livelihoods that depend on that knowledge, has slowly come under attack by global
climate change. The
cyclical patterns of rainy seasons and dry seasons; the severity of crop diseases,
and a whole host of other new challenges have essentially made much of the traditional wisdom
of small farmers impractical and obsolete. The underlying cruelty in these changes isn´t just the
fact that small farmers no longer have control over their agrarian livelihoods, but rather the fact
that they had absolutely no control over this entire process. Overconsumption in the First World
has led to the small farmers in the rest of the world not knowing when they should plant their
corn, harvest their quinoa, or fertilize their rice fields. While the boom of the fossil fuel age certainly allowed
some people to benefit from the technological advances, those who didn´t benefit are not forced to suffer the worst of the
consequences that have come with global climate change. How Can Small Farmers Respond to the Challenges of Climate Change?
There are no simple answers to climate change. Though we may hope that changing a few light
bulbs and purchasing energy saving appliances is all that it takes to limit the effects of the excess
carbon in the air, we should resist the temptation of find comfort in naiveté. Similarly, small
farmers around the world know that they need to find ways to respond to the changing weather
and climate patterns if they are going to be able to maintain land-based livelihoods. Traditional
wisdom will continue to offer some guidance. For example, in the mountains of El Salvador, small farmers have
traditionally rotated wheat and corn harvests, utilizing the wheat straw to protect the young
corn plantings from extreme weather during their most vulnerable stage of development. While
this was traditionally done as a way to protect the small corn seedlings from damage caused by
hard rains (which usually came during the onset of the rainy season), this practice of mulching
fields of young crops will also be a useful strategy to confront the prolonged periods of drought
caused by the uncertainty and inconsistency of the beginning of the rainy season caused by
climate change. However useful traditional wisdom may be, the instability of our global climate will require
small farmers to find new tools to confront climate change-caused challenges to their
livelihoods.
***Food Shortages
Labor Conditions/Shortages = Food Shortages
Undocumented workers working in poor conditions will cause food shortages
Meierotto 15 Dr. Lisa Meierotto is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Service at
Boise State University. She teaches in the Global Studies and Environmental Studies programs.
Meierotto earned her Ph.D. in environmental anthropology from the University of Washington,
and also holds an M.A. in International Development and Social Change from Clark University.
Previous research focused on the environmental impacts of undocumented immigration on the
U. S. Mexican border. Current research focuses on human rights and environmental justice,
especially considering the social and environmental ramifications of global migration trends.
[https://thebluereview.org/food-and-immigration-food-systems-and-food-security/]
If we lose the ability to produce our own food, through either mass deportation or more
restrictive immigration policy, we lose the chance to improve labor conditions for farm workers,
to regulate chemical inputs and to monitor the quality and availability of the foods that sustain
us. We would also lose the economic benefits of producing our own food. In an agricultural state like
Idaho, Trump-style immigration reform could be bad news for agribusiness, and bad news for the everyday consumer of food — in
other words, all of us. Alabor shortage could directly lead to a food shortage, or indirectly lead to
economic decline as other countries fill the food production void. Currently, the majority of Americans live
with “high food security,” a USDA term signifying access to nutritious food on a regular basis. If one does not have regular
access to nutritious food they have “low food security.” Food security is typically positively
correlated with income in the U.S. — higher income households are better able to purchase
food, can afford food with higher nutritional value (fruit, vegetables, meat, whole grain and dairy, as opposed to highly processed
cheap food like ramen noodles and boxes of mac and cheese). In 2013, nearly 50 million Americans lived in food insecure
households, including approximately 15.8 million children, according to Feeding America. Food insecurity primarily
affects low income people, including immigrants, who often do not have enough money to purchase healthy food
or live in so-called food deserts. These are typically low-income urban areas where people lack access to grocery stores and have
poor public transit or rural areas where big chain supermarkets don’t exist. Thus, food insecurity is a way in which
inequality manifests itself in the food system. Food insecurity is also related to immigration
policy. First, one of the worst paradoxes of our current food system is that the people who harvest, pack and distribute our food
are incredibly food insecure. Their wages are so low that they have significant difficulties providing
adequate nutrition for their families. But further, proposed immigration reforms such as those promoted by Trump
might actually make food insecurity worse, and not just for undocumented agricultural workers. FOOD AND IMMIGRATION
OBSERVATIONS Just as a hypothetical exercise, let’s assume that Trump as president finds a way to block border crossings and
deport all “illegals,” as he refers to the undocumented population. The result could be higher food insecurity for all Americans, not
just low-income households. The following facts and research findings about food are relevant to any immigration policy debate:1.
Immigrant populations are the primary source of agricultural labor. According to the United
States Department of Labor, in the early 2000s, over half of U.S. farm workers were foreign-
born, the vast majority from Mexico and Central America. In some specific agricultural sectors such as the dairy industry, the
percentage of immigrant workers is even higher. In addition, 13 percent of the U.S. population is foreign born. When you factor in
first generation foreign-born U.S. residents, approximately one quarter of the population holds immigrant status (Migration Policy
Institute). Over 70 percent of the undocumented immigrant population migrated here from Mexico or Central America. Over 11
million undocumented people currently live in the U.S., raising their families, working, shopping and dreaming here in the U.S. 2.
Restrictive immigration policy or mass deportations would reduce food production. One recent study
(Zahniser, et al, 2012) contrasted two hypothetical scenarios on the effect of changing immigration policy on agricultural outputs.
The authors argue that because labor costs account for nearly 40 percent of production costs for fruits and vegetables, substantial
change to immigration policy would have significant effects on the agricultural industry. They then conducted a computer simulation
study with two different scenarios: 1) increasing the number of temporary farm workers and 2) decreasing the number of
unauthorized workers in all economic sectors. Their research suggests that increasing the number of farm employees working under
legal, temporary guest-worker programs would lead to an overall increase in agricultural outputs. On other hand, tighter
immigration policy (i.e. less availability of what are now undocumented farm workers) would
result in an overall decrease in agricultural output and overall economic decline as exports and
outputs decline.3. If immigrant agricultural workers can no longer enter or remain in the country, food prices will
increase and food variety could decrease. One risk of a dwindling agricultural labor force is that farmers will have
incentives to switch to crops that can be harvested mechanically in lieu of crops that need human precision to pick (e.g., corn or soy
rather than tomatoes or strawberries). It is well known that rates of undocumented immigration declined during the Great
Recession. However, there was also a corresponding drop in available farm labor. Frank Gasperini, CEO of the National Council of
Agricultural Employers, says that farms have reported labor shortages growing worse since 2010, reaching as high as 50 percent at
times (quoted in Cernansky at “Civil Eats”). Because
the agricultural industry depends on a large supply of
low-wage labor, the labor pinch will either drive prices up or force companies to look abroad for
cheaper suppliers. 4. Keeping our agricultural workers here offers better opportunity for genuine
reform of our food system. Growing our food domestically, and maintaining the well-established migrant labor networks
with which to do so, increases the likelihood that we will be able to tackle the big issues facing agriculture today: global climate
change, the risks of pesticides, herbicides and insecticides, genetically modified and engineered organisms, soil fertility, water
consumption, etc. We have a wealth of scientists, activists and policy makers in the United States interested in making our food
system sustainable, productive and just. If
we reduce our capacity for agricultural production by eliminating
our labor force we will have to import more food and this food will come from places where it is
difficult to monitor environmental and human rights concerns. The American agriculture
industry is riddled with inequalities and short-comings. But our best shot at building a better
system, one that is built on fair wages, farm worker protection and sustainable production lies
right here at home.
If we don’t do the plan food production will go down drastically

Garfield 17 Leanna is a reporter at Business Insider, covering innovations in urban design,
architecture, and environmental sustainability. Her work has also appeared in Slate,
Entrepreneur, The Independent, Inc, and the World Economic Forum.
[http://www.businessinsider.com/trumps-immigration-agriculture-food-policy-2017-1]
Donald Trump has been very clear about his intentions to deport an estimated 11 million
undocumented immigrants in the US and build a wall along the southern border. Besides the human cost, Trump's
anti-immigration stance could also strain American farms. Of the 1.5 to 2 million people working
in agriculture today, at least 50% to 70% of farm workers are undocumented, according to a
recent report by the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF). If the agriculture sector were to
eliminate all undocumented workers, the US would be left with a $30 to $60 billion food
production loss, the researchers write. Retail food prices would increase by 5% to 6% on average, with some categories seeing
higher jumps than others. For example, the National Milk Producers Federation expects a 90% increase in milk prices if the country
removes the immigrant labor supply, Modern Farmer reports. The report also states that few US workers would be able
to fill these farm labor jobs, mainly because they are grueling. Shifts in 100-degree Farenheit weather over
12-hour shifts without overtime pay are common. The demand for farm labor far exceeds the local supply of
workers who are skilled, legal citizens, according to the AFBF report. This is especially true in agriculture-heavy parts of
states like California and Texas. Some parts of the US are already experiencing the effects of stricter immigration laws on farms. In
2011, after
Georgia passed an immigration enforcement law called HB 87, the state experienced
an estimated $140 million in agricultural losses. Farms in Georgia were about 40% short of the number of workers
they needed, according to a University of Georgia study. As Quartz notes, one farmer let a third of his crops die in his field because
he couldn't find enough workers. Georgia's former governor, Sonny Perdue — whom Trump nominated for the Secretary of
Agriculture position on January 18 — will be in charge of mitigating all this.
Lack of skilled immigrant labor will cause higher food prices and food shortage
Thorn 17 Bret Thorn is responsible for reporting on culinary trends in foodservice. He joined
Nation’s Restaurant News in 1999, after spending about five years as a journalist in Thailand,
where he wrote business and food stories. His columns in NRN won the 2006 Jesse H. Neal
National Business Journalism Award for best staff-written editorial or opinion column. A magna
cum laude graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., with a bachelor’s degree in history,
Thorn also studied at Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine in Paris.
[http://www.supermarketnews.com/news/lack-skilled-immigrant-labor-could-cause-higher-
food-prices]
American
U.S. relies on international trade and immigrant workforce for food supply Bret Thorn 2 | Mar 22, 2017
agriculture has long depended on immigrant labor — particularly labor by undocumented
workers. A 2014 study commissioned by the American Farm Bureau Federation put the percentage of undocumented farm
laborers at between 50 percent and 70 percent of the total workforce. President Donald Trump has vowed to crack down on illegal
immigration. Shortly after his election in November, he told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that he planned to deport millions of undocumented
immigrants immediately. “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members,
drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or
we are going to incarcerate,” Trump said. He then said that once that initial group was eliminated and “the border is secure,”
immigration officers would make a “determination” about the remaining undocumented workers. The
current admiration’s
rhetoric on illegal immigration and reports on crackdowns on undocumented workers have
brought jitters not only to immigrant workers, but also to their employers. It’s unclear exactly what a
crackdown on labor would do to produce pricing, particularly considering other trade-related and taxation issues that are up in the
air. Those potential initiatives include mentions by the Trump administration of a tax of up to 20 percent on imports from Mexico to
pay for the proposed border wall, and a new corporate tax structure proposed by Congress that would give tax breaks to exporters
and remove tax exemptions from importers. The border adjustment tax would basically change how goods are taxed, taxing them
where they’re consumed rather than where they’re produced. Several companies have come out in support of a border adjustment
tax of some kind, according to the American Made Coalition. The group lists MillerCoors and Blue, Diamond Growers among the list
of supporters. “While
our global competitors continue to improve their tax codes by cutting rates
and encouraging investment and job creation, our tax code remains frozen in place. The result is
lost investment, fewer jobs and lower wages,” the American Made Coalition states in its press materials. Although
the idea behind the tax is to encourage domestic production, the National Retail Federation opposes it, saying in a statement on
Feb. 28 that the costs on “everyday necessities like food, gas, clothing and prescription medicine” for the average American
household would go up by $1,700 in the first year. American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall also expressed concerns
about the tax. “We’re still studying that tax reform, and we’re hoping some common sense comes to that area. We want to make
sure it doesn’t roll over into a trade situation and cause a trade war that would not be good for anyone in agriculture,” Duvall told
agriculture publication AgFax. DeWayne Dove, vice president of purchasing for purchasing cooperative SpenDifference, said items
besides avocadoes (the U.S. imports 75% of the fruit from Mexico, according to the USDA) that would be affected by a tax on
imports from Mexico would include Brussels sprouts, strawberries, tomatoes, “wet vegetables” such as broccoli and cilantro,
peppers and squash. “The earliest experts say [such a tax] could occur, based on the need to work itself through the legislature and
then be executed, is the end of 2017,” Dove said. With the more than $115 billion in agricultural imports, according to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, possibly being squeezed (of which $9.5 billion are fresh fruit and vegetables from Mexico), laborers in
the United States become even more important, and past crackdowns on undocumented workers have not gone well. After Georgia
passed HB 87 in 2011, economists and marketing professors at the University of Georgia surveyed farmers and calculated that the
state’s farming sector lost $140 million due to labor shortages that meant crops weren’t harvested. Add to that other segments
affected, such as distributors and retailers, and the figure was estimated to be as high as $400 million. “The potential impacts to the
supply chain of zealous enforcement are real,” said Joe Kefauver, managing partner of public affairs firm Align Public Strategies. “The
White House may want to look at what happened in Georgia and other Southern agricultural states. … [A] significant portion of their
crops went un-harvested and literally died in the fields, greatly impacting both price and availability of products,” Kefauver said.
“Those jobs were not back-filled by non-immigrants as anticipated by state lawmakers, and, in fact, were not filled at all.” Those jobs
couldn’t have been back-filled, according to Kathy Means, vice president of industry relations at the Produce Marketing Association,
noting that farm workers are skilled laborers performing jobs that native-born Americans don’t
want. In a speech on Feb. 28, Trump advocated implementing a merit-based immigration system focused on skilled workers.
Experts say farm workers would fit into that category. “It does take a special person to get out and work in the
fields in the hot sun, stooping, lifting. It’s just hard work,” said Charles Hall, executive director of the Georgia
Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association. He added that you have to know what you’re doing to harvest properly. “You have to
know when that peach or tomato or pepper is ripe. Someone who is not skilled with that sense of touch, they’re going to be picking
product that’s not ripe, and consumers will not appreciate it.” Since farm workers are paid by the amount that they pick, he said, it’s
not uncommon for skilled workers to earn $15 to $18 per hour. Unskilled workers would earn less, he said, making the job
undesirable to locals. Produce isn’t the only food likely to be affected by a labor shortage. The National
Milk Producers Federation said half of the workers on U.S. dairy farms are immigrants, and, according to a report released in
September 2015, losing
them would increase retail milk prices by 90 percent and cost the U.S.
economy $32.1 billion in economic output. However, it should be noted the survey does not distinguish between
undocumented and documented immigrant workers. Means of the Produce Marketing Association said her industry is used to
adjusting to changes in everything from weather to labor to economic policy. “We deal with everything from freezes to hurricanes to
port strikes. … It’s not that [the current situation] is situation-normal, it’s that the produce industry is highly adaptable,” she said.
Illustration: SN/Anna Kang But it’s a global industry, and disruptions in long-established networks might not just devastate individual
farmers and packing lines, but pricing as well. “It’s an inter-tangled web,” said David Anderson, a livestock and dairy economist at
Texas A&M University. He noted that the United States imports about one million head of calves from Mexico, which go to ranches
and then to feedlots and then to packing plants, from which they could then be exported back to Mexico or other countries that buy
beef from the United States. “We’ve
got both sides of that, benefiting from importing feeder cattle,
which helps us keep up our processing capacity, and then we export the [finished] beef back,”
Anderson said. None of these factors takes into consideration the possibility of retaliatory
tariffs by other countries, he said. “I think in the food context, that’s really important,” he said.
Food Shortages Cuase War
Food Insecurity triggers violent crimes and resource wars
Hompa 17 Dr. Justa Hopma joined the department in January 2017 and is a Research Fellow in
Global Food Justice. She currently investigates the role of civil society in food system change in
Chile and Bolivia as part of her first post-doctoral research project. Prior to this, she completed a
doctorate in Geography & Politics at the University of Aberystwyth for which she analysed the
potential for food system transformation in the Arab region, with a specific focus on Jordan.
Justa’s research focuses on the political economy of food security and food sovereignty and
seeks to understand how international food regimes are reproduced.
[http://www.newsweek.com/food-insecurity-conflict-sudan-famine-548033]
The relationship between food insecurity and conflict is almost so logical that it appears to state
the obvious: Conditions of food insecurity contribute to the outbreak of social, political and military conflict,
which in turn produces further food insecurity. Many studies concerned with making sense of food insecurity and conflict focus on
these causal linkages blaming one on the other in an attempt to identify ways of breaking through the vicious cycle. But it’s more
helpful to view the creation of conditions of food insecurity (or food security) as a broader social and political process, by which food
and agriculture are controlled by a powerful group—whether that is the state or private interests. In this way, food has long
been used as an instrument of power—and a quick glance at the historical record shows that the ability to
control food production, distribution and consumption constitutes a form of power that lets
populations live or die. History throws up countless examples of this. Take the way that, in the Middle
Ages, walled cities under siege could be starved out to force their capitulation. More recent history gives us the systematic
deprivation of food, including the well-known German Hungerplan of World War II, that involved a deliberate policy
decision to rob millions of Soviet citizens of their food. Or the lesser-known, long-term British occupation of the port
of Aden from 1839 to 1963, that allowed it to control Middle Eastern food distribution channels, with
sometimes devastating consequences that weakened independent forces in the Arab region. So creating or exploiting different kinds
of what we now describe as “food
insecurity” have long been an integral part of conflict. The case of north-
eastern Nigeria is a harrowing present-day example that clearly shows how food security
is implicated in longer-
standing social and political conflict. In explaining the rise of religious extremism both today and in the 1980s, Nigerian
scholars Abimbola Adesoji and Elizabeth Isichei stress the links between poverty, a lack of educational opportunities, widespread
corruption and receptiveness to militant Islam in Nigeria’s northern region. Since 2012, however, the conflict between government
forces and the jihadist organization Boko Haram has escalated into widespread violence. Agriculture
has often been a
direct target in the infliction of violence and Boko Haram has attacked farmers and farm resources, including land and
livestock. Large numbers of livestock have been killed and farmers murdered. Crops have been destroyed and land mines have
rendered land unusable. The resulting shortfall in food production has not only contributed to scarcity in the north-eastern region
but is also linked to price rises for food in southern Nigeria and neighboring countries Niger and Cameroon. In January 2017, the
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) reported that: “More than 4.8m people are in urgent
need of food assistance and 5.1m are predicted to be food insecure if not supported by the humanitarian community.” Regional
humanitarian coordinator Toby Lanzer appears somewhat reluctant to use the word “famine” but warns that such extreme
prolonged and general scarcity of food is but one step away in northern Nigeria. In spite of the clear indications that it’s almost
always a combination of social, political and environmental factors that leads to situations of widespread hunger, many news outlets
continue to represent famine through language that uses natural metaphors. The Huffington Post, for example, speaks of a “perfect
storm” of contributing factors while other publications outline how drought and war “spark” famine or contribute to its “outbreak”.
The consistent use of such language suggests that the onset of famine is rapid and calamitous, like a fire or infectious disease. But
the reality is very different. As the cases of both Nigeria and South Sudan make clear, the development of famine is a
dynamic social and political process with a long build-up. The continued representation of famines as disastrous
events largely sprung upon populations by the forces of nature, prevents us from understanding famine—and food insecurity—as a
socio-political process, even though doing so is especially important for realising its future prevention. Famine as a war crime South
Sudan is in a similar situation to north-eastern Nigeria. A lengthy conflict has produced a situation in which 4.8m people are facing
“severe” food insecurity and “more than 8m people "face some degree of food insecurity”. Referring to the situation there, Leslie
Lefkow, deputy director at the Africa division of Human Rights Watch, has written that creating some mechanism of accountability is
one of the only hopes of resolving the conflict there. Lefkow recognizes that: There is no offence of ‘creating a famine’ under
international law but in a conflict—civil or international—‘objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population’ may not be
attacked. They have a protected status as civilian objects and because their protection goes hand in hand with the prohibition on
using starvation of the civilian population as a weapon of war. Put this way, willingly contributing to the increased
food insecurity of populations can be linked to war crimes. Importantly, recognising that famine—but also
various other conditions of food insecurity and food security—results from socio-political processes is a prerequisite for developing
such legal accountability. Once we do this, we’ll be in a better position to acknowledge the power embedded within the ability to
organize and control food production as well as the multiple ways in which food products circulate the planet. And this is as true
during times of war as it is in times of peace.
Food shortage leads to an increase in violence

Koren 16 Ore Koren is a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota and a Jennings
Randolph Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/11/23/food-scarcity-causes-
conflicts-but-so-does-food-abundance-heres-why/?utm_term=.49a2e0088165]
For a new U.S. administration facing global security challenges, the relationship between food security — what the
World Bank defines as “access to enough food for an active, healthy life” — and armed conflict deserves serious
consideration. As new research shows, even an abundance of food resources can cause conflict. Recent studies theorize that in
Syria, where an estimated 250,000 to 400,000 people have died since 2011, the drought that preceded the civil war played a
significant role in fueling political tensions. Increases in food prices caused by drought were also a factor in the 2011 Arab Spring
uprisings in Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen and Egypt. The
fact that prolonged food shortages can lead to drastic,
violent behavior is becoming increasingly evident. The relationship between food and war is both complex and
multidimensional, though. The links between food scarcity and war Warmer countries are more war-prone — that’s
what researchers studying the relationships between environmental factors and civil war argue. As global temperatures increase,
prolonged heat waves reduce crop yields. The impact is strongest in tropical regions, which are more likely to experience the
harshest effects of global warming. Lower crop yields increase the competition for remaining crops. And rising prices mean that
many people cannot afford to buy food to compensate for resources lost because of climatic shifts. In
countries that lack a
social “safety net,” the only alternative in many cases is to obtain food through stealing, looting
and — frequently — fighting over fertile land. Anecdotal evidence from eastern Africa and the Middle East, at least, supports this
theory. Attempts to measure the linkages between climate change and armed conflict, however, have yielded mixed results, with
some studies at least partly reaffirming these connections and others debunking them. Some regions adapt to climate conditions
better than others Studies of the “Green Revolution” movement of the 1960s suggest that regions such as Asia were far more
successful than Africa at adopting drought-resistant crops, which improved food security and helped offset the risk of war. Similar
efforts in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East were weak and generally unsuccessful until the late 1980s. [Three important points
to help in understanding South Sudan’s worsening crisis] These efforts met with limited success because of the types of grain
available and other socioeconomic complexities, which left these regions food insecure. Had Syria successfully adopted drought-
resistant crops, for instance, the social unrest of 2011 might have taken a different, less-violent course. As researchers continue to
debate how climate change and its effects on global
food stocks will impact food security in future decades,
short-term environmental “shocks” such as droughts or floods have become more frequent in
many parts of the world and are a potentially salient cause of armed conflict. These environmental
disturbances can lead to sharp price increases that, in turn, can cause another well-established tradition: the food riot, when
civilians take to the streets to protest high food prices. [Where and why food prices lead to social upheaval] Low-income countries
are particularly susceptible because high food prices in these situations have an especially destabilizing effect. In these countries,
high food prices expose the government’s lack of ability to shield consumers. They also create opportunities for
civilians to mobilize against the regime. Even in locations where food is sourced locally, drought-
induced shocks may incite violence against civilians when rebel groups seek to appropriate local
food supplies. My research documents this happening not only in the Syrian conflict but also in India and Thailand during a
2004 drought. Riots, protests and massacres are among the types of unrest that can lead to civil war
— and all can be linked to food conflicts.
Food storage causes war and collapse ---- historical quantitative studies prove
Zhang et al 07 (David, (Associate Prof. Geography @ U. Hong Kong), Peter Brecke, (Associate
Prof. @ Sam Nunn School of Int’l. Affairs @ GIT), Harry F. Lee, (Dept. Geography @ U. Hong
Kong), Yuan-Qing He, (Cold and Arid Regions Env’tal and Engineering Research Inst. @ Chinese
Academy of Science), and (Jane Zhang, (Dept. Anthro. @ U. College London), Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science, “Global climate change, war, and population decline in recent
human history”, 104:49, p. 19214-19219)
Recently, important attempts have been made to use highresolution, reconstructed paleo-climatic data to elucidate individual cases
of prehistoric cultural/population collapses caused by agricultural failure in the Middle East, United States, and China (2–4).
Webster (5) pointed out that warfare was an adaptive ecological choice in prehistoric societies
with limited resources and growing populations, although he was not able to use systematic, scientific data to
support his conclusion. The concept of environmental conflict has been suggested by several researchers, but they focus only on
conflicts caused by shortterm climate variations and meteorological events (6–9). Galloway (10) found that long-term climate
change controlled population size in middle-latitude areas. However, his finding lacked quantitative precision because of the
absence of highresolution climate records at the time. We studied a long span of Chinese history and found
that the number of war outbreaks and population collapses in China is significantly correlated
with Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperature variations and that all of the periods of nationwide unrest,
population collapse, and dynastic change occurred in the cold phases of this period (11–13). As a result of recent scientific
breakthroughs in establishing more precise paleo-climatic records [see supporting information (SI) Text],
we extend the earlier study to the global and continental levels between A.D. 1400 and A.D. 1900, during the
Little Ice Age (LIA; see SI Text). The hypothesis we propose posits that long-term climate change has significant direct effects on
land-carrying capacity (as measured by agricultural production). Fluctuation of the carrying capacity in turn affects the food supply
per capita. Ashortage of food resources in populated areas increases the likelihood of armed
conflicts, famines, and epidemics, events that thus reduce population size. As a feedback mechanism,
population decline has a dominant tendency to increase the food supply per capita (seen in
decreasing food prices), which results in relative peace and fast population growth. The interactions among
these components in a social system create an important rhythm of macrohistory in agricultural societies. The simplified pathways
of the above chain reactions and feedback loops are represented in SI Fig. 3. With respect to the character of the causal pathways,
the relation between climate and agricultural production has been demonstrated by many empirical studies (10, 14). Under
ecological stress, adaptive choices for animal species are the reduction of population size, migration, and dietary change.
Depopulation typically takes place through starvation and cannibalism. Humans have more pathways, social mechanisms, to adapt
to climate change and mitigate ecological stress. Besides migration, they include warfare, economic change, innovation, trade, and
peaceful resource redistribution. We believe that in late agrarian society established political boundaries in populated areas limited
mass migration; the result of such mass migration, when it occurred, often was war. Economic change was a costly and slow process
that involved changing cultures, technologies, and habits. When the speed of human innovation and its transfer were not fast
enough to keep pace with rapid ecological change, famine and disease became difficult to avoid. Trade and redistribution under the
condition of shrinking resources would not help much because the ecological stress was at a global or very large regional scale.
Finally, humansocial development in the form of international and national institutions was not
strong enough to buffer the tensions caused by food resource scarcity. Therefore, war and
population decline became common consequences of climate-induced ecological stress in the late
preindustrial era. Recent developments in resource and environmental studies (e.g., refs. 8, 9, 15, and
16) suggest that limited resources and environmental degradation would have caused armed
conflicts in human history. However, these perceived climate–war– population decline sequences have never been
substantiated with scientific evidence consisting of long-term time series. In the following sections, we verify our hypothesis and
evaluate the role of climate change on war outbreak and population decline with empirical data at global and continental scales.
Food shortage causes nuclear war

Campbell and Weitz 2007 Kurt M. CEO and co-founder of the Center for a New American
Security and former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asia and the Pacific and Richard is
a senior fellow and director of program management at Hudson Institute, “Conclusions” CSIS,
November, p. 95, [http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/071105_ageofconsequences.pdf]
In the case of severe climate change, projected massive nonlinear events in the global environment give rise to massive nonlinear
societal events. In this scenario, nations
around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change
and pernicious challenges, such as pandemic disease and water and food shortages. The internal cohesion
of nations will be under great stress, including in the United States, due to a dramatic rise in migration, changes in
agricultural patterns and water availability, and wealthier members of society pulling away from the rest of the population.
Protests, civil unrest, and violent upheaval of governments are possible. The flooding of coastal
communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to
challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources and even
territory, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely, and nuclear war is possible. Globalization could halt and alliances
collapse.
Food shortages causes disease spread and international wars

Podesta and Ogden 07 John is president and CEO of Center for American Progress and
former chief of staff for President Clinton and Peter is the senior national security analyst for the
Center for American Progress, “Security Implications of Climate Scenario 1” CSIS, November, p.
55, [http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/071105_ageofconsequences.pdf]
Water-borne and vector-borne diseases (such as malaria and dengue fever) will be particularly prevalent in countries that
experience significant additional rainfall due to climate change.222 Shortages
of food or fresh drinking water will also
render human populations both more susceptible to illness and less capable of rapidly
recovering. Moreover, the risk of a pandemic is heightened when deteriorating conditions prompt
human migration.223 This increase in the incidence of disease will inevitably generate disputes
between nations over the movement of people. Immigrants—or even simply visitors—from a country in which
there has been a significant disease outbreak may not be welcomed and could be subject to quarantine. If the policies that underlie
such practices are perceived as discriminatory or motivated by factors other than legitimate health concerns, it will severely damage
political relations. This outcome might be averted if countries establish in advance common immigration policies that are specifically
designed to cope with international health crises. However, it is most likely that this kind of coordination will occur after the fact, as
it did in Europe following several cholera pandemics in the mid-19th century. In addition to the challenges posed by restrictions on
the movement of people, restrictions on the movement of goods will be a source of economic and political turmoil. Pandemic-
affected countries could lose significant revenue from a decline in exports due to limits or bans
placed on products that originate or transit through them. The restrictions placed on India during a plague
outbreak that lasted for seven weeks in 1994 cost it approximately $2 billion in trade revenue.225 Countries that depend on tourism
could be economically devastated by even relatively small outbreaks: the fear of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) sharply
curtailed international travel to Thailand in 2003, whereas the 2006 military coup had little impact on tourism.226 And as with the
controls placed on the movement of people across borders, restrictions on the movement of goods can be politicized in a way that
generates significant inter-national friction. Even
in the absence of trade restrictions, however, the
economic burden that disease will place on developing countries will be severe. Added health care
costs combined with a loss of worker productivity from worker absences will exact a large economic toll. In 2001, the U.S. General
Accounting Office (now the U.S. Government Accountability Office) estimated that Africa’s gross domestic product would be one-
third higher if malaria had been eradicated in 1970.227 The outbreak of disease can also lead a government to
adopt policies that may be seen as discriminatory or politically motivated by segments of its
own population (e.g., treatment may be provided first, or exclusively, to a particular ethnic group, religious faction, or political
party). This can provide anti-governmental groups with the opportunity to increase their
popularity and legitimacy by providing those health services that the government does not.228
When these groups are sponsored by foreign governments (e.g., Iran’s support for Hezbollah in Lebanon) the line between medicine
and foreign policy vanishes. In these economic and social circumstances a country’s political direction can change rapidly. For
instance, the inability or perceived unwillingness of political leaders to stop the spread of disease or to provide adequate care for the
afflicted will undermine support for the government.229 In countries with functioning democracies, this could lead to the election of
new leaders with political agendas radically different from their predecessors. It
could also breed greater support for
populist candidates whose politics resonate in a society that believes that its economic and
social hardships are due to neglect or mismanagement by the government. In countries with
weak or non-democratic political foundations, there is a heightened risk that this will lead to
civil war or a toppling of the government altogether.
Food shortages cause global instability--best studies prove

Brinkman 11 Henk-Jan Brinkman Chief of Policy, Planning and Application in the
Peacebuilding Support Office of the United Nations and Cullen S. Hendrix, Assistant Professor at
the The College of William & Mary and Fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International
Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin, “Food Insecurity and Violent Conflict:
Causes, Consequences, and Addressing the Challenges”, Occasional Paper n° 24, July,
http://ucanr.edu/blogs/food2025/blogfiles/14415.pdf
Most of the types of political violence addressed here are more prevalent in societies with higher levels of chronic food insecurity.
There is a correlation between food insecurity and political conflict in part because both are symptoms of
low development (Collier et al., 2003). Nevertheless, a growing body of research makes both direct links and
indirect links – as proxied by environmental scarcity or access to water resources – between food scarcity and various
types of conflict. The causal arguments linking food insecurity to political violence lack microfoundational evidence – evidence
based on actions of individuals – to explain how the mechanism works, but there are plenty of theories. The theories tend to rest
either on the perspective of motivation, emphasizing the effect of food insecurity on economic and social grievances; or on the
perspective of the opportunity cost, emphasizing the perceived costs and benefits of participating in violence relative to other
means of securing income or food (Gurr, 1970; Tilly, 1978; Humphreys and Weinstein, 2008; Blattman and Miguel, 2010). These
arguments are most valid with respect to participation in civil war and rebellion, where participation is better explained by a mixture
of grievances – which provide motivation – and selective incentives – protection from violence and opportunities to engage in
predation or to receive food, clothing, shelter and other material benefits – rather than grievances alone (Berman, 2009). A study of
demobilized combatants in Sierra Leone found that poverty, lack of educational access and material rewards were associated with
participation in the civil war (Humphreys and Weinstein, 2008). Interestingly, in Liberia, women were more likely than men to fight
for material benefits (Hill et al., 2008). Thus, grievances are important, but so are motivations related to that individual’s economic
and opportunistic considerations. Civil Conflict Civil conflict is the prevalent type of armed conflict in the world today (Harbom and
Wallersteen, 2010). It is almost exclusively a phenomenon of countries with low levels of economic development and high levels of
food insecurity. Sixty-five percent of the world’s food-insecure people live in seven countries: India, China, the Democratic Republic
of Congo (DRC), Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia (FAO, 2010), of which all but China have experienced civil conflict in
the past decade, with DRC, Ethiopia, India and Pakistan currently embroiled in civil conflicts. Pinstrup-Andersen and Shimokawa
(2008) find that poor health and nutrition are associated with greater probability of civil conflict, though their findings are based on
small sample sizes. Countries
with lower per capita caloric intake are more prone to experience civil
conflict, even accounting for their levels of economic development (Sobek and Boehmer, 2009).
This relationship is stronger in those states where primary commodities make up a large
proportion of their export profile. Some of the countries most plagued by conflict in the past 20 years are commodity-
rich countries characterized by widespread hunger, such as Angola, DRC, Papua New Guinea and Sierra Leone. The mixture of
hunger – which creates grievances – and the availability of valuable commodities – which can provide opportunities for rebel
funding – is a volatile combination. World commodity prices can trigger conflict, as higher prices, especially for food, increase
affected groups’ willingness to fight. Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson (2008) find that as a country’s import prices increase,
thereby eroding real incomes, the risk of conflict increases. Oeindrila Dube and Juan F. Vargas (2008) arrive at similar conclusions
when looking at Colombia, where higher export prices for coffee (which is labour intensive and a source of rural income) reduced
violence in coffeeproducing areas while higher export prices for oil (which is capital intensive and a source of income for rebels and
paramilitary groups) increased violence in regions with oil reserves and pipelines. Other
research links transitory
weather shocks to civil conflict. In these studies, weather shocks – like drought and excess
rainfall – are thought to fuel conflict by causing crops to fail and reducing agricultural
employment opportunities, thus increasing food insecurity both in terms of food availability and
food access (ability to pay). The people most likely to participate in armed conflict – young men from rural areas with
limited education and economic prospects – are likely to seek work in the agricultural sector. As that work dries up, fighting looks
more attractive. However, the empirical link between transitory weather shocks and civil conflict is still ambiguous. Some studies
find that civil conflict is more likely to begin following years of negative growth in rainfall (Miguel, Satyanath and Sergenti, 2004;
Hendrix and Glaser, 2007), suggesting that drought and decreased agricultural productivity expand the pool of potential combatants
and give rise to more broadly held grievances. However, approaches that look at levels of rainfall, rather than growth in rainfall from
year to year, find tenuous, or in fact positive relationships, between rainfall abundance and the onset of conflict (Burke et al., 2009;
Buhaug, 2010; Hendrix and Salehyan, 2010; Ciccone, forthcoming). Some case-based research, however, links drought to conflict –
though mediated by the government’s response to the crisis. For example, during the Tuareg rebellion in northern Mali, drought –
aggravated by the government’s embezzlement of drought relief supplies and food aid – was a significant source of grievance that
motivated young men and women to take up arms (Benjaminsen, 2008). Recently, warmer temperatures have been linked to an
increase in civil conflict, though this finding has been challenged (Burke et al., 2009; Buhaug, 2010). Civil war is also more likely in the
aftermath of quick-onset natural disasters, such as earthquakes, major volcanic eruptions, floods, and cyclonic storms (Brancati,
2007; Nel and Righarts, 2008). The relationship between disaster and conflict is strongest in countries with high levels of inequality
and slow economic growth; food insecurity and resource scarcity are among the more plausible explanations for this correlation.
Interstate War The links between food insecurity and interstate war are less direct. While countries often go to war over territory,
previous research has not focused directly on access to food or productive agricultural land as a major driver of conflict (Hensel,
2000). However, wars have been waged to reduce demographic pressures arising from the scarcity of arable land, the clearest
examples being the move to acquire Lebensraum (“living space”) that motivated Nazi Germany’s aggression toward Poland and
Eastern Europe (Hillgruber, 1981) and Japan’s invasion of China and Indochina (Natsios and Doley, 2009). Water, for drinking and for
agriculture, is also a cause of conflict (Klare, 2002). Countries that share river basins are more likely to go to war than are other
countries that border one another (Toset et al., 2000; Gleditsch et al., 2006). This relationship is strongest in countries with low
levels of economic development. Institutions that manage conflicts over water and monitor and enforce agreements can
significantly reduce the risk of war (Postel and Wolf, 2001). Jared Diamond (1997) has argued that for centuries military power was
built on agricultural production. Zhang et al. (2007) show that long-term fluctuations in the prevalence of war followed cycles of
temperature change over the period 1400–1900 CE, with more war during periods of relatively cooler temperatures and thus lower
agricultural productivity and greater competition for resources. Similar findings linking cooler periods with more war have been
established for Europe between 1000 and 1750 CE (Tol and Wagner, 2008). Democratic and Authoritarian Breakdowns Democratic
breakdowns occur when leaders are deposed and replaced by officials who come to power without regard for elections, legal rules,
and institutions. Not all breakdowns are violent – “bloodless” coups account for 67 percent of all coups and coup attempts – but
many have been very bloody, and the autocratic regimes and instability that follow democratic breakdowns are more likely to lead
to the abuse of human rights, in some cases leading to mass state killing (Poe and Tate, 1994; Harff, 2003). Food insecurity, proxied
by low availability of calories for consumption per capita, makes democratic breakdown more likely, especially in higher-income
countries, where people expect there to be larger social surpluses that could be invested to reduce food insecurity (Reenock,
Bernhard and Sobek, 2007). Though statistical evidence is lacking, rising food prices have been implicated in the wave of
demonstrations and transitions from authoritarian rule to fledgling democracy in some countries across North Africa and the Middle
East in 2011. There are some historical precedents for this: a bad harvest in 1788 led to high food prices in France, which caused
rioting and contributed to the French revolution in 1789; and
the wave of political upheaval that swept Europe
in 1848 was at least in part a response to food scarcity, coming after three below-average
harvests across the continent (Berger and Spoerer 2001). Protest and Rioting Throughout history higher food prices have
contributed to or triggered violent riots. Protests and rioting occurred in response to sharp increases in world food prices in the
1970s and 1980s (Walton and Seddon, 1994). Record-high world food prices triggered protest and violent rioting in 48 countries in
2007/08 (see Figure 1). The
ratio of violent to non-violent protest was higher in low-income countries
and in countries with lower government effectiveness (von Braun, 2008). Recent research links
higher world food prices for the three main staple grains (wheat, rice and maize) to more
numerous protests and riots in developing countries, though this relationship can be mitigated
by policy interventions designed to shield consumers from higher prices (Arezki and Brückner, 2011;
Bates, 2011). International market prices are not the only source of food-related protests. The lifting of government subsidies can
lead to rioting as well. Until recently, the biggest demonstrations in modern Egyptian history were the three-day “bread riots” in
1977 that killed over 800 people, which were a response to the Egyptian government’s removal of state subsidies for basic
foodstuffs, as mandated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (AFP, 2007). “IMF riots” can be traced to popular grievances over
withdrawn food and energy subsidies (Walton and Seddon, 1994; Abouharb and Cingranelli, 2007). However, the relationship
between “IMF riots” and food insecurity is more complicated. Generalized food and energy subsidies are regressive, meaning that
wealthy and middle-class households generally capture more of the benefits. As such, it may be real income erosion, rather than
acute food insecurity, that is driving participation in protest. Communal Violence Competition over scarce resources, particularly
land and water, often causes or exacerbates communal conflict (Homer-Dixon, 1999; Kahl, 2006; Ban, 2007). Communal conflict
involves groups with permanent or semi-permanent armed militias but does not involve the government. However, it can escalate
to include government forces, as in the massacres in Darfur, Rwanda and Burundi. These conflicts have the potential to escalate to
civil war when the government is perceived to be supporting, tacitly or otherwise, one communal group at the expense of the other
(Kahl, 2006). While the conflict in Darfur began as a communal conflict over land and water, its impact escalated to devastating
proportions following the government’s support for Janjaweed militias in their fight against the Sudan People's Liberation
Army/Movement and Justice and Equality Movement rebels. Communal conflicts are common in the Sahel, the zone of transition
between the Sahara desert and the savanna, particularly in years of extremely high and low rainfall (Hendrix and Salehyan, 2010).
Recurrent, long-lasting droughts in the Sahel have undermined cooperative relationships between migratory herders and sedentary
farmers, leading
to food insecurity and increased competition for water and land between farmers
and herders, but also within herding and farming groups. As a pastoralist in the Sudan noted: “When there is
food, there is no cattle raiding.” (quoted in Schomerus and Allen, 2010). Once violence begins, conflict escalates and persists
because of security dilemmas (fear of future attacks leads to preemptive attacks – see Posen, 1993) and lack of alternative dispute
mechanisms between groups and effective policing within groups (Fearon and Laitin, 1996). These conflicts have been particularly
lethal in Kenya, Nigeria, the Sudan and Uganda. Repeated clashes between Fulani herders and Tarok farmers in Nigeria’s Plateau
State killed 843 people in 2004. Similar clashes between Rizeigat Abbala and Terjam herders in the Sudan killed 382 in 2007. Cattle
raiding in the Karamoja Cluster, a cross-border region of Ethiopian, Kenyan and Ugandan territory, resulted in more than 600 deaths
and the loss of 40,000 heads of livestock in 2004 alone (Meier, Bond and Bond, 2007). These conflicts tend to occur in politically
marginalized territories far from the capital (Raleigh, 2010). Context Matters: Demographic, Social, Political, and Economic
Mediators Food insecurity is a clear contributor to political instability and conflict. But
neither hunger nor conflict exist
in a vacuum: other aspects of the political, economic and social environment affect the degree
to which food insecurity, and grievances more generally, are expressed violently (Tilly, 1978).
Food shortages trigger nuclear escalation

FDI 12 (Future Directions International, a Research institute providing strategic analysis of
Australia’s global interests; citing Lindsay Falvery, PhD in Agricultural Science and former
Professor at the University of Melbourne’s Institute of Land and Environment, “Food and Water
Insecurity: International Conflict Triggers & Potential Conflict Points,”
http://www.futuredirections.org.au/workshop-papers/537-international-conflict-triggers-and-
potential-conflict-points-resulting-from-food-and-water-insecurity.html)
There is a growing appreciation that the conflicts in the next century will most likely be fought
over a lack of resources. Yet, in a sense, this is not new. Researchers point to the French and Russian
revolutions as conflicts induced by a lack of food. More recently, Germany’s World War Two efforts
are said to have been inspired, at least in part, by its perceived need to gain access to more food. Yet
the general sense among those that attended FDI’s recent workshops, was that the scale of the problem in the future
could be significantly greater as a result of population pressures, changing weather, urbanisation, migration, loss of
arable land and other farm inputs, and increased affluence in the developing world. In his book, Small Farmers Secure Food,
Lindsay Falvey, a participant in FDI’s March 2012 workshop on the issue of food and conflict, clearly expresses the
problem and why countries across the globe are starting to take note. . He writes (p.36), “…if people are hungry,
especially in cities, the state is not stable – riots, violence, breakdown of law and order and migration result.” “Hunger
feeds anarchy.” This view is also shared by Julian Cribb, who in his book, The Coming Famine, writes that if “large
regions of the world run short of food, land or water in the decades that lie ahead, then wholesale, bloody
wars are liable to follow.” He continues: “An increasingly credible scenario for World War 3 is not so
much a confrontation of super powers and their allies, as a festering, self-perpetuating chain of resource
conflicts .” He also says: “The wars of the 21st Century are less likely to be global conflicts with sharply defined sides and huge
armies, than a scrappy mass of failed states, rebellions, civil strife, insurgencies, terrorism and genocides, sparked by bloody
competition over dwindling resources.” As another workshop participant put it, people do not go to war to kill; they go to war over
resources, either to protect or to gain the resources for themselves. Another observed that hunger results in passivity not conflict.
Conflict is over resources, not because people are going hungry. A study by the International Peace Research
Institute indicates that where food security is an issue, it is more likely to result in some form of
conflict. Darfur, Rwanda, Eritrea and the Balkans experienced such wars. Governments, especially
in developed countries, are increasingly aware of this phenomenon. The UK Ministry of Defence, the
CIA, the US C enter for S trategic and I nternational S tudies and the Oslo Peace Research Institute, all
identify famine as a potential trigger for conflicts and possibly even nuclear war .
Newest evidence confirms the link between food shortages and war
Hendrix 16 - associate professor at the Sié Chéou- Kang Center for International Security and
Diplomacy at the Korbel School at the University of Denver; nonresident senior fellow at the
Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC; and senior research advisor at
the Center for Climate & Security, Chicago Council on Global Affairs (Cullen, “US MUST ADDRESS
GLOBAL FOOD PRICES, FOOD INSECURITY TO PREVENT CONFLICT, RISKS TO US NATIONAL
SECURITY,” https://www.thechicagocouncil.org/press-release/us-must-address-global-food-
prices-food-insecurity-prevent-conflict-risks-us-national)
A new study from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs warns that civil unrest stemming from food price
volatility and food insecurity in key world regions stands to directly impact U.S. national security interests .
The report urges the United States to recognize the linkages and rededicate itself to a program of research, knowledge transfer and
assistance in developing agricultural capacity abroad in order to proactively address food price stability and to reduce national
security threats. The biggest risks for future instability are in Sub-Saharan Africa and developing Asia, argues the
report, with the Middle East vulnerable as well. If policymakers do not implement protective measures, recurrent food
crises and price spikes could trigger the kinds of events that the report notes led in part to the conflict in
Syria and to other mass uprisings of the Arab Spring. “Though the links between food prices and
conflict seem obvious, several countries that have experienced strife were not thought to be
particularly food insecure or considered fragile before the conflict, implying that previous risk
assessments underestimated the potential for food prices to be destabilizing,” said Dr. Cullen S. Hendrix, who
authored the study and directs the Environment, Food and Conflict Lab at the Korbel School at the University of Denver. “This report
lays out for policymakers some of the linkages that make countries vulnerable, why U.S. national security is at risk and what we can
do about it.”
Impact defense doesn’t apply---it’s based on historical examples that had

supply cushions---that’s no longer true
Brown 13 - United States environmental analyst, founder of the Worldwatch Institute (Lester,
New Era of Food Scarcity Echoes Collapsed Civilizations,
http://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-agriculture/new-era-food-scarcity-echoes-collapsed-
civilizations.html)
Ever since agriculture began, carryover stocks of grain have been the most basic indicator of
food security. The goal of farmers everywhere is to produce enough grain not just to make it to the next harvest but to do so
with a comfortable margin. From 1986, when we lost the idled cropland buffer, through 2001, the
annual world carryover stocks of grain averaged a comfortable 107 days of consumption. This
safety cushion was not to last either. After 2001, the carryover stocks of grain dropped sharply as world
consumption exceeded production. From 2002 through 2011, they averaged only 74 days of consumption, a drop of one third. An
unprecedented period of world food security has come to an end. Withintwo decades, the world had lost both of
its safety cushions. In recent years, world carryover stocks of grain have been only slightly above
the 70 days that was considered a desirable minimum during the late twentieth century. Now stock levels must take
into account the effect on harvests of higher temperatures, more extensive drought, and more
intense heat waves. Although there is no easy way to precisely quantify the harvest effects of any of these climate-related
threats, it is clear that any of them can shrink harvests, potentially creating chaos in the world grain market. To mitigate this risk, a
stock reserve equal to 110 days of consumption would produce a much safer level of food security. The world is now living
from one year to the next, hoping always to produce enough to cover the growth in demand.
Farmers everywhere are making an all-out effort to keep pace with the accelerated growth in
demand, but they are having difficulty doing so. Food shortages undermined earlier civilizations. The Sumerians
and Mayans are just two of the many early civilizations that declined apparently because they moved onto an agricultural path that
was environmentally unsustainable. For the Sumerians, rising salt levels in the soil as a result of a defect in their otherwise well-
engineered irrigation system eventually brought down their food system and thus their civilization. For the Mayans, soil erosion was
one of the keys to their downfall, as it was for so many other early civilizations. We, too, are on such a path. While the
Sumerians suffered from rising salt levels in the soil, our modern-day agriculture is suffering from rising carbon dioxide levels in the
atmosphere. And like the Mayans, we too are mismanaging our land and generating record losses of soil from erosion. While the
decline of early civilizations can be traced to one or possibly two environmental trends such as deforestation and soil erosion that
undermined their food supply, we are now dealing with several. In addition to some of the most severe soil erosion in human
history, we are also facing newer trends such as the depletion of aquifers, the plateauing of grain yields in the more agriculturally
advanced countries, and rising temperature. Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that the United Nations reports that food
prices are now double what they were in 2002–04. For most Americans, who spend on average 9 percent of their income on food,
this is not a big deal. But for consumers who spend 50–70 percent of their income on food, a doubling of food prices is a
serious matter. There is little latitude for them to offset the price rise simply by spending more.
Closely associated with the decline in stocks of grain and the rise in food prices is the spread of
hunger. During the closing decades of the last century, the number of hungry people in the world was falling, dropping to a low of
792 million in 1997. After that it began to rise, climbing toward 1 billion. Unfortunately, if we continue with business as usual, the
ranks of the hungry will continue to expand. The bottom line is that it
is becoming much more difficult for the
world’s farmers to keep up with the world’s rapidly growing demand for grain. World grain
stocks were drawn down a decade ago and we have not been able to rebuild them. If we cannot
do so, we can expect that with the next poor harvest, food prices will soar, hunger will intensify,
and food unrest will spread. We are entering a time of chronic food scarcity, one that is leading
to intense competition for control of land and water resources—in short, a new geopolitics of
food.
US Shortage Global Shortages
US food shortage spills over
Coleman 12, Senior Fellow and Director of the Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy Initiative
at the Council on Foreign Relations, interviewed by Christopher Alessi, “U.S. Drought and Rising
Global Food Prices,” 8/2/12, http://www.cfr.org/food-security/us-drought-rising-global-food-
prices/p28777
This is the hottest summer on record in the United States since 1895, and people are beginning to wonder whether this type of
drought that we're experiencing could become a new normal. The United States is a pivotal player in world food production and has
the most sophisticated agricultural sector in terms of seeds, technology, irrigation, deep commodity markets, and future markets. If
the United States crop is so devastated by drought, what is going to happen to the rest of the world? How do rising U.S. food prices
affect global food prices down the world's food supply chain? Which areas of the globe are most at risk? There are many large food
producers in the world. China is the largest wheat producer, but it is also the largest wheat consumer. What makes the
United States unique is that we are the largest exporter, so we produce about 35 percent of the world's corn
and soybean supply. Those two commodities are crucial in the food chain, because they are used for feed stock for
animals. Around the world you have rising middle classes, a growing demand for meat and protein in the diet, and countries
around the world are becoming increasingly dependent on relatively inexpensive food stocks
from the United States. When you see a crop failure of the magnitude you have seen this summer, it flows
through the whole food chain. Right now you have American livestock producers taking their pigs and cattle to the
slaughter house because they simply don't have the food to be feeding them. So you're going to see meat prices in the short term in
the United States go down, but over the longer term you're going to see rising meat prices; [experts] are predicting already 4 to 5
percent price increases in meat for the next year. That flows through the whole food chain, [to] big-population countries that import
a lot of food, such as the Philippines, Afghanistan, Egypt. And when you see rapidly rising food prices, of course it
leads to instability. We've seen [this] in the last five years across many of those countries, and you see rising food
prices translate almost directly into street protests. You're going to see the continuation of
[political] instability driven in part by rapidly rising food prices. In 2008, we had food protests across much of
the Middle East, so governments are going to be very much on the alert for unrest and very sensitive to it. Egypt is already spending
about one-third of its subsidies on food, and it is draining the Egyptian foreign exchange reserve to continue those subsidies. This
combination of an already mobilized population out on the streets demanding lots of different changes [in Egypt], and rising food
prices is going to create a very unstable atmosphere.
US policy is key to global food security-

USAID 16, united states AID, USAID for the American people, 10/3/16, U.S. Government Global
Food Security Strategy, https://www.usaid.gov/what-we-do/agriculture-and-food-security/us-
government-global-food-security-strategy, P.P
This strategy reflects the unique skills, resources, and lessons learned from U.S. federal departments and agencies that contribute to
global food security, as well as input from partners throughout the private sector, academic institutions, and civil society. It charts a
course for the U.S. Government to contribute to the achievement of global food security and the range of Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs), together with partners across the globe. Right now, the world is closer than ever before to ending global hunger,
undernutrition, and extreme poverty, but significant challenges and opportunities remain, including urbanization, gender inequality,
instability and conflict, the effects of a changing climate, and environmental degradation. Despite our collective progress in global
food security and nutrition over recent years, a projected 702 million people still live in extreme poverty, nearly 800 million people
around the world are chronically undernourished, and 159 million children under five are stunted. Food security is not just an
economic and humanitarian issue; it is also a matter of security, as growing concentrations of poverty and hunger leave countries
and communities vulnerable to increased instability, conflict, and violence. The U.S. Government, in partnership
with other governments, civil society, multilateral development institutions, research
institutions, universities, and the private sector, will build on experience to date to address
these challenges, take advantage of opportunities, and advance food security and improved
nutrition by focusing efforts around three interrelated and interdependent objectives:
Inclusive and sustainable agricultural-led economic growth, as growth in the agriculture sector has been
shown in some areas to be more effective than growth in other sectors at helping men and women lift themselves out of extreme
poverty and hunger. It does this by increasing availability of food, generating income from production, creating employment and
entrepreneurship opportunities throughout value chains, and spurring growth in rural and urban economies. Strengthened
resilience among people and systems, as increasingly frequent and intense shocks and stresses threaten the ability of
men, women, and families to sustainably emerge from poverty. A well-nourished population, especially among women
and children, as undernutrition, particularly during the 1,000 days from pregnancy to a child’s second birthday, leads to lower levels
of educational attainment, productivity, lifetime earnings, and economic growth rates. Through this approach, we will
strengthen the capacity of all participants throughout the food and agriculture system, paying
special attention to women, the extreme poor, small-scale producers, youth, marginalized
communities, and small and medium enterprises. Several key elements of our approach strengthen our ability to
achieve these objectives. The first is targeting our investments in countries and geographic areas where
we have the greatest potential to sustainably improve food security and nutrition and strategically
focusing our resources on those approaches and interventions that evidence shows will reduce
extreme poverty, hunger, and malnutrition at scale. The second is implementing a comprehensive, multi-faceted
whole-of-government approach rooted in lessons learned and evidence to date that reflects emerging trends. The third is country
leadership, recognizing that developing countries, above all others, must own and be empowered to lead and guide these efforts to
drive progress. The fourth is partnerships with a wide range of development actors and groups, which will improve the reach,
effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability of our efforts. This includes using foreign aid strategically to catalyze domestic resource
mobilization and private sector-driven trade and economic development. The fifth is harnessing the power of
science, technology, and innovation to dramatically improve food and agriculture system practices
as well as increase local capacity to address these issues. Finally, we will focus on the sustainability of our
programs as we work to create the conditions where our assistance is no longer needed, including reducing susceptibility to
recurrent food crises and large international expenditures on humanitarian assistance and ensuring a sustainable food and
agriculture system with adequate and appropriate finance available to key actors. Our vision is a world free from hunger,
malnutrition, and extreme poverty, where thriving local economies generate increased income for all people; where people
consume balanced and nutritious diets, and children grow up healthy and reach their full potential; and where resilient households
and communities face fewer and less severe shocks, have less vulnerability to the shocks they do face, and are helping to accelerate
inclusive, sustainable economic growth. This strategy builds on the U.S. Government’s strong foundation of
global food security and nutrition investments and aims to break silos, integrating programming
across sectors and agencies for maximum impact and effective stewardship of United States
taxpayer dollars. By implementing this whole-ofgovernment strategy over the next five years, we believe that, together with
our many partners across the globe, we can achieve this vision within our lifetimes.
US ag shortages go global
Edmark 15 - U of A System Division of Agriculture (Dave, “Food security vital for national
interests, world markets,” Cattle News Network, http://www.cattlenetwork.com/news/food-
security-vital-national-interests-world-markets)
Improving global food security should be a U.S. priority because it is the right thing to do and it will create new
market opportunities for American agriculture in the long run, said Stephanie Mercier, a senior policy and advocacy adviser for the
Farm Journal Foundation. A more stable world Recognizing a U.S. tradition of aiding in world food relief
dating back to World War I and including the Marshall Plan after World War II, Mercier noted that
encouraging food security also promotes a more stable world. “The World Bank has done
research that shows a country facing extreme poverty and hunger faces a much higher
probability in any given year of seeing internal conflict erupt either in the form of a civil war or a
military coup,” she said. Mercier noted that the U.S. ability to help countries improve their economies has
frequently led to the creation of new opportunities for U.S. exports. Fifty percent of U.S. agricultural
exports go to developing countries, she said, and six of the world’s fastest growing economies are in sub-Saharan
Africa.
US ag decline leads to global food crises

Raisbeck 3 - Vice Chairman, Cargill, Incorporated (David, Address to the World Agricultural
Forum, The Role of Agriculture in the Global Economy)
Today, U.S.
agricultural exports top $50 billion a year. Six of its top ten customers are developing
countries, and three-fourths of U.S. agricultural exports go to Asia and the Americas. There have been
three transforming events during that half-century that reshaped this global agricultural market. The first was the formation of the European
Community and the creation of its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The CAP’s generous farm supports took the EC from a 20-million-ton-per-year net
grain importer in the 1960s to a 20-million-ton-per-year net grain exporter by the 1980s. The second transforming event was the collapse of the
centrally planned economies, particularly the former Soviet Union. At their peak, the USSR and the PRC were importing 40-50 million tons of grain per
year. Today those countries are net grain exporters. The third transforming event was the emergence of developing countries as commercial grain
importers. They have absorbed the 80-plus million tons of grain imports erased by the other two events. While total world grain trade has grown little
in the last few decades, these events have shifted grain trade patterns dramatically. Quite simply, the future for world grain trade depends upon the
rate of growth in food demand in the developing world. This helps explain why agriculture is the linchpin of the Doha Round. Doha can shape for a
generation the progress we make in merging agriculture into the rest of the global economy. And that progress will determine to a large extent how far
we get in ending hunger and reducing poverty while protecting the environment. For many of the world’s people, agriculture remains a subsistence
activity. Ninety percent of the food produced in the world is consumed within the country producing it, and most of that usage lies outside of the
commercial system. A company like Cargill only begins to touch the food system as commercial production emerges and agricultural products flow to
urban centers and into international markets. But as
commercial food trade emerges, new opportunities arise to
eliminate hunger and enhance food security. The first opportunity is to lower food costs. Access
to low-cost imports helps keep food costs down, especially for the poor who often spend 70
percent or more of their personal income to eat. Second, food trade creates choice. Trade offers variety; it also provides
access to foods year round that often can be grown locally only on a seasonal basis. And, it provides efficient local farmers new marketing
opportunities. The result is higher living standards for those able to participate. Finally, food
trade provides more reliable access
to supplies at lower cost. Crops often fluctuate 25 percent from one year to the next within a
growing region. Global production, however, typically fluctuates less than three percent annually, as
good crops in some places offset poor crops elsewhere. Moreover, storing food typically costs 20 percent or more of its value annually, even ignoring
waste, pests, quality losses and the like. Most foods can be shipped halfway around the world for 10 percent of their value, or half the cost of storage.
In other words, food trade lowers costs, widens choices and provides more reliable access to supplies. Each is important in eliminating hunger. But,
food trade cannot play this role effectively in the face of large market access barriers. The major problem limiting agriculture’s role in the global
economy is that agricultural trade barriers on average are ten times higher than industrial trade barriers, and many agricultural barriers are
prohibitively restrictive. Unless these barriers are brought down dramatically on all agricultural products in all countries, the global food system needed
to end hunger will not develop adequately. We will lose an important opportunity to reduce food insecurity, perhaps for a generation. Eliminating
hunger, however, is not just about cost, choice and access to supplies; it also is about the ability to pay. Reducing poverty is a major key to ending
hunger. Today, about half the world’s population – 3 billion people – live in abject poverty. Roughly three-fourths of these poor people live in rural
areas dependent upon agriculture. No country that has raised the majority of its people out of poverty has done so without attacking the causes of
rural poverty. In fact, agricultural development is a necessary trigger for broader, sustainable economic development for most countries. Agricultural
development stimulates self-sustaining growth in two principal ways. First, through rising productivity it increases the incomes of farmers. Second, it
releases labor from subsistence farming that can be employed in manufacturing or service activities. Agribusiness companies want to bring poverty-
reducing tools to farmers in developing countries. We can offer more productive inputs; we can provide practical finance; we can reach out to new
market opportunities; we can show farmers ways to lower or manage risks. But we cannot do these things alone. They require public investments in
physical infrastructure and well-functioning marketing systems. They also require an economic climate that welcomes investment, as capital flows to
where it’s needed and wanted. This does not mean “special incentives.” Rather, it means creating a predictable, level playing field in which competition
through price and service determines success. Like ending hunger, reducing poverty requires that current high levels of agricultural protection come
down. Subsidized competition and trade-distorting domestic supports in developed countries must be curbed. But market access barriers must be
brought down everywhere. Forty percent of global agricultural trade already is among developing countries themselves. Most of the future growth in
demand will be in developing countries, so they must join in as full partners in the creation of a more open global food system. It is the surest route to
reducing poverty in all countries. Frankly, the proposed Harbinson text on the modalities for the agricultural negotiation is disappointing on this score.
It offers developing countries a program of “special and differential treatment” that largely is a series of exceptions to and exemptions from reform. In
their own best interests, developing countries should resist this temptation to be excluded from reform. They should insist on disciplining developed-
country subsidy practices, and the least developed countries may deserve longer transition periods. But, developing countries refusing to lower their
own market access barriers will prove a prescription for perpetuating poverty, not reducing it. The third area in which agricultural liberalization can
help is in protecting fragile environmental resources. The pressures of hunger and poverty often result in agricultural practices in low-income countries
that harm the environment in two ways: by exhausting the soil’s productivity rather than replenishing it; and by forcing agriculture to expand to new
lands rather than to use the most highly productive lands better. These pressures will only intensify over time. Food demand will continue to rise as
global population increases. Most of that population growth will be concentrated in developing countries. Higher per capita incomes and accelerating
urbanization in the developing world will only further intensify agriculture’s use of scarce land and water resources. Unless productivity per acre, per
dollar of investment and per hour of work rises, agriculture will continue to expand into more virgin areas, strain limited water resources and exhaust
overworked soils. This again is an area where agribusiness can help, if conditions permit the growth of the commercial sector of agriculture. But, many
poor countries currently pursue policies that discourage farmers from increasing their productivity. Examples include: overvalued exchange rates,
which limit exports; under investment in rural infrastructure, which raises marketing costs; and uncertain land title and commercial dispute settlement
systems, which deter risk taking. It is these policies that could be left unreformed if “special and differential treatment” for developing countries heads
down the wrong path. Feeding a growing and more prosperous global population in a more environmentally sustainable way can only be achieved by
adopting productivity- and efficiency-enhancing technologies. And adopting better technologies is directly linked to the opening of trading
opportunities that can generate cash for reinvestment and market opportunities for expanded output. So, from a commercial perspective, the world’s
hopes for eliminating hunger, reducing poverty and protecting fragile environments ride in important ways on the success of the Doha Agenda. Is the
world ready to create an open food system obeying the same kinds of rules that govern a more open industrial economy? Progress will require
commitments of several kinds. First, developed countries must be prepared to grant greater access to their own markets to all countries, not just a
select few. Developed countries also must find less trade-distorting ways to support rural incomes, and they must end the practice of subsidizing their
exports. But developing countries need to embrace a similar vision of openness; nearly half of current global food trade, and virtually all of its growth
potential, is among developing countries themselves. Second, the developed world needs to help developing countries build up their capacity to
participate in a global economy and to ensure that the poor gain from globalization. Rich countries have pledged to reduce global hunger dramatically.
Donor countries and institutions seem prepared to reverse the decline in aid going to rural development. And companies are prepared to invest in
creating and expanding commercial opportunities for developing country entrepreneurs. If appropriately supported by agricultural trade liberalization,
such investment flows can make the prospects of the poor in Africa and South Asia resemble more closely the gains made by the poor in parts of East
Asia over the last 20 years. Finally, attitudes toward new technologies, especially agricultural biotechnology, need to be reexamined. New technologies
can raise agricultural productivity and human nutrition at an affordable cost. It would be unfortunate if developing countries were denied these tools
by trade barriers disguised as safety or marketing regulations unsupported by sound science. We already have seen food aid rot on loading docks while
millions go malnourished because of such fears. A saner, more responsible path is needed. Trade, aid and technology are tools that can enlarge
agriculture’s role in the global economy. They do so by expanding commerce, increasing productivity and leveling the competitive playing field. But
that’s neither the goal nor the payoff. The
real benefit from enlarging agriculture’s role in the global economy
is the greater food security, economic development and environmental sustainability it will
bring to the world’s poor.
The U.S is the largest agricultural exporter in the world and our economy
depends on it
Huguley 17 (Shelley, has earned an Agriculture Communications degree from Texas Tech
University and has worked in numerous ag media positions, October 24 2017, “U.S. dominates
agricultural exports, NAFTA ‘very important’ for agriculture” ,
http://www.southwestfarmpress.com/legislative/us-dominates-agricultural-exports-nafta-very-
important-agriculture nicwha)
About 35 percent, or one-third, of U.S. farm income comes from this nation’s export market, making trade
with other countries not simply a good idea, but “very, very important,” says Dr. Luis Ribera, professor and director of the Center for
North American Studies at Texas A&M University. The U.S. is the largest agricultural exporter in the world, he
notes, shipping $135 billion in commodities in 2016. “We depend on agricultural markets,” he said at
the Rural Economic Outlook Conference at Stillwater, Okla. “We need to maintain the markets that we have —
and possibly expand them.” In 2015, 71 percent of the cotton grown in the U.S. was exported,
along withmore than 55 percent of sorghum and rice. U.S. agricultural imports are a multi-billion
dollar industry, accounting for $115 billion in 2016. Of the coffee and limes Americans consume, 100 percent are
imported. “What would happen if we didn’t have coffee?” Ribera asked, getting a laugh from conference attendees when he jokingly
answered: “Chaos!” Americans spend about 6.4 percent of their consumer dollars on food. Contrast that with countries like Nigeria,
where consumers spend 56.4 percent of their income to eat. “The 6.4 percent U.S. consumers spend is the cheapest in the whole
world,” Ribera says. “That means we cover our food needs with only 6.4 percent of our income, leaving the rest to buy other things,
like gadgets, or homes, or travel. With 25 percent of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP), trade
with the U.S. is of
great interest to other countries, he says. “We have 350 million people [in the U.S.] with money, who control about 25
percent of the world economy, so there’s no question about why other countries want to get their
products into the U.S. market.” And that’s where the North American Free Trade Agreement comes into play. NAFTA,
the trade pact between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, signed into law in 1993 during the Clinton administration, was designed to
reduce tariffs and tariff barriers, as well as increase trade in services among countries. And, according to Ribera, it has been very
successful in fulfilling its objectives. “We have quadrupled our exports to NAFTA countries, while only tripling exports to the rest of
the world,” Ribera says. “NAFTA is very important for U.S. agriculture. There are a lot of things about it that can be improved, but
there’s no question it has been successful in terms of agricultural trade.” U.S.
agricultural exports have increased
from $46.2 billion in 1994 to $134.9 billion in 2016, a 192 percent increase, he says. During the same
period, U.S. agricultural exports to Canada and Mexico grew from $10 billion to $38 billion, a 288 percent increase, making those
nations the second and third largest markets for our exports. With all the discussion by the Trump administration about
renegotiating NAFTA, Ribera says, it is important to point out that, if agriculture were the main issue, he thinks it would be easier to
get an agreement done. But agriculture constitutes only about 7 percent of trade between the three countries. “So basically, non-
agriculture issues have dominated the NAFTA discussion,” he says. “There are some agricultural issues — for example, the Canadian
dairy, poultry and egg supply system, but those are smaller issues compared to the larger issues of, say, the automobile industry.
“The country of origin rule is a main issue of the Trump administration. In order for a car to move between the three countries and
be considered tariff-free, about 62.5 percent of the parts have to be produced in NAFTA countries. The Trump administration wants
to increase that percentage to near 85 percent, or have a specific quota on how much needs to be produced in the U.S. for that car
to be sold in the U.S. tariff-free.”
US feeds the world

Bjerga, ’12: (Alan Bjerga is a lecturer at Georgetown U and staff writer @ Bloomberg,
http://www.northfoodgroup.com/index.php/market-news/85-exports-key-to-us-agriculture-
growth-ex-usda-leaders-say, “Exports Key to U.S. Agriculture Growth, Ex-USDA Leaders Say”,
2012)WM
The U.S. will need to step up efforts to sell surplus farm production overseas if the country hopes
to preserve this year’s record profit and exports, former U.S. Agriculture Secretary Clayton
Yeutter said. Trade, especially with prospering Asian nations, will be crucial to securing markets for U.S. farm
goods, said Yeutter, who served under President George H.W. Bush and later became the U.S.
trade representative. He was one of seven former secretaries who spoke today at a panel
discussion on the future of agriculture at a government forum in Arlington, Virginia. The U.S. is
the world’s largest agricultural exporter. “I want to be sure we don’t get lulled into complacency
by thinking we can sell everything we produce here in the U.S.,” Yeutter said. Farm exports in the year that began
Oct. 1 will be $131 billion, surpassed only by record shipments a year earlier, Joe Glauber, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s chief economist, said at
the forum. Farmer net income will reach $91.7 billion this year, second only to last year’s $98.1 billion, the USDA said on Feb. 13. Farmland values have
also reached records. Higher Productivity Needed Higher productivity will be necessary to meet world food
needs, with the global population expected to increase by more than 2 billion by 2050, said John
Block, who served under President Ronald Reagan. Grain stockpiles at the end of this marketing year may total
471.7million metric tons, 1.6 percent more than last year, the USDA said Feb. 9. World food prices that reached a record in
February 2011 contributed to uprisings in North African and Middle East nations. “Modern
commercial agriculture is what is feeding the world now,” said Block, who criticized opponents of biotech crops that
are resistant to drought. U.S. farmers may plant 94 million acres of corn this year, the most since World War II, Glauber said earlier today. In
domestic policy, U.S. farmers will need to get by with fewer subsidies and be more responsive
to interests of groups outside agriculture, said Mike Espy and Dan Glickman, both secretaries under President Bill Clinton.
USDA spending would rise 2.5 percent to $154.5 billion in the year starting Oct. 1 before crop-subsidy cuts kick in, beginning long-term reductions in
farmer aid, according to the budget President Barack Obama sent to Congress Feb. 13. Subsidies would fall by $32 billion over 10 years under that
proposal, which lawmakers may consider as White House guidance as they forge a new five-year farm bill to replace the one that expires Sept. 30. Farm
Bill U.S. Senator Mike Johanns, a Republican from Nebraska who led USDA under President George W. Bush, said he is optimistic that the Senate will
approve a farm bill, while the legislation’s fate in the House of Representatives “is much more unpredictable.” Subsidies predicted to reach $11 billion
in 2012 are under scrutiny as Congress begins crafting the legislation, which will authorize spending for all USDA programs, including farmer
payments,food stamps and rural development. The payments, while providing a safety net for farmers, encourage production and lower commodity
costs for Cargill Inc. and Archer Daniels Midland Co. (ADM) Subsidies are “not the only issue we should be talking about,” Glickman said. “The biggest
challenge is our research budget,” he said. “You look at the world 20 and 30 and 40 years out, you wonder, do we have the ability to have another
Green Revolution” that can boost productivity to meet global needs, he said. The panel also included Ann Veneman and Ed Schafer, who both served
under George W. Bush. Including the moderator, Tom Vilsack, the current USDA chief, the panel represented more than a quarter of all the secretaries
in the agency’s 150-year history.
US exports key to global food securirty.

Kosiewicz 17 (Ash, is a Senior Communications Manager for the World Food Program, January
18th 2017, https://wfpusa.org/articles/trump-is-inheriting-an-american-legacy-fighting-hunger/
nicwha)
In 2014, a 60 Minutes crew traveled to the border of Jordan and Syria. It was a desolate “no man’s land” where many Syrian
refugees had fled after three years of civil conflict. As hundreds of people became visible on the horizon — the end of a 300-mile
journey — they described what they saw as people “pouring over the land like a flash flood.” Some came without shoes, others with
only one set of clothing. Scott Pelley, a member of that crew and now anchor of the CBS Evening News, reflected on his time
observing what the World Food Programme (WFP) was doing to alleviate the hunger of nearly 1.5
million Syrian refugees every month. To his viewers, Pelley remarked that WFP might be “one of the best
ideas America ever had.” That idea was but one crucial step along a remarkable journey that
continues to this day. Over the course of seven decades, the U.S. government and its people have led the
global fight against hunger. It’s a legacy built upon a proud and loud declaration that America — through the actions of
everyday folks and the decisions of their public representatives — will do its part to help feed families in need
around the world. Food assistance as we know it today began after the Great Depression. The
U.S. government equipped struggling farmers with tools and financial support to boost their
incomes. As they succeeded, they needed new markets for their crops. That market would
become hungry families and farmers in countries abroad. And so the stage was set: To marry the
comeback of the American farmer with the fight to end hunger. It was a grand bargain driven by the belief
that the United States had a unique role to play on the world stage. That American generosity, self-interest and
ingenuity could be harnessed to bolster economic development abroad and save the lives of
innocent children impacted by war and natural disasters. Since that moment, this American legacy has been
built milestone by milestone. As a new U.S. administration under President Donald Trump takes office, take a journey with us here at
World Food Program USA as we share with you how fighting hunger has become part of America’s DNA.
Food Prices Rising
Food prices increasing
Williams 18 (Tom, Reporter, “Food prices could increase as farms count cost of heatwave”
July 20, 2018. Oxford Mail, Online)//RB
THE price of food could go up due to the ongoing heatwave with farmers warning the dry spell
has wreaked havoc with their crops. Charles Bennett, of the family-run Sandy Lane Farm near Tiddington, said it was
way behind schedule this year with hundreds of seedlings still awaiting being planted out. Water-starved soil has blocked
attempts to plant crops such as carrots which could hit the farm's winter harvest and leave them
having to buy in from elsewhere to fill its veg boxes and market stalls. Mr Bennett said: "They should
have been out a month ago but are still sitting there in containers. "It's certainly the driest
summer since 1976 and a fairly unprecedented period without rain. "We feel like we are
growing in the south of France. That's not to say it's all bad. Some crops like squashes and
onions are doing incredibly well and arable farmers are saving a lot from not having to dry out
their crop. "But everyone is experiencing the same issues with certain crops. "Ultimately I think it’s likely we’ll see
the price of food go up and we will all end up paying a bit more." The farm is now hoping for a
prolonged rain shower to relieve the pressure and is considering making changes to crops in
future years. But the increasingly unpredictable weather is making the job harder with farms
adopting a strategy of 'hedging their bets' and hoping something comes off.
Food prices are increasing now

WTNH 18 (“Food prices up nearly 27 percent over the last decade” July 18, 2018. News 8
WTNH, Online)//RB
(WTNH) - Check those prices on what you buy at the grocery store, they might be higher than what
you are used to. Food prices are up almost 27 percent over the last decade. Related Content: Trouble in
Big Food: America's cereal, soda and soup companies are in turmoil Some of the biggest increases are with butter
and margarine. Those products are up almost 55 percent. Uncooked ground beef is up 52 percent, while
uncooked beef steaks, seafood and bacon are all up about 41 percent. Higher oil prices, which push up shipping
costs, is one of the factors for the rise in prices.
Food prices are rising now

Yaukey 17 (John, Economics analyst, “When will food prices stop rising? No time soon, experts
say” January 2017. ABC News, Online)//RB
Unfortunately, for
millions of cash-strapped consumers, the cost of putting a meal on the table or a
beer on the bar is likely to remain high for years, economists say. Typically, food price swings go through
cycles that can last a few years. That was the case in the 1970s, when food prices were pushed up by high energy costs, decreased
supplies and regional droughts. But those forces were fairly elastic, and prices contracted again. From the mid-1970s until recently,
food prices on average fell dramatically. This
spike is different. "Some of the reasons are rooted in the new
world economy," said Edward McLaughlin, an expert on food retailing at Cornell University. Those reasons include
the use of grains for fuel and the developing world's increasing demand for a higher-protein
diet, which also cuts into grain supplies. Add those factors to more typical trends, like soaring
energy costs, and it's clear the latest jump in prices has unique twists for consumers the world
over, economists say. Perhaps most worrisome, some leading causes of the recent price increases show no signs of receding,
prompting some economists to warn of "the end of cheap food." The Agriculture Department expects U.S. food
prices to rise beyond inflation for the next few years. "The question now is the rate of the increase," said
Ephriam Leibtag, an economist with the department's Economic Research Service. Overall, food prices in this country
have gone up almost 5% during the past year, the highest annual increase in almost 20 years,
according to the Labor Department. Some staples have risen well beyond that. Egg prices have shot up
more than 30%, dairy prices have jumped 12% and the price of baked goods has risen 9%. In 2008, the consumer price
index for all food is projected to increase 4% to 5% as retailers pass on higher energy and
commodity costs to consumers. That's almost twice the inflation rate of about 2.6%. Despite the
recent price hikes, Americans spend less of their income on food now — about 9% — than they have historically. In the 1950s, they
spent about 21% on food, according to The Economist magazine. But that doesn't mean much to shoppers trying to keep pantries
stocked. "The prices just inch up every week without stop," Joanne Krebble said while shopping at the Brookville
Market in Washington. "It's everywhere you look."
***Working Conditions Advantage
Working Conditions  Food Insecurity
Lack of protections for undocumented workers threatens public health and puts
national food security at risk
CLF 17 The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future works with students, educators,
researchers, policymakers, advocacy organizations and communities to build a healthier, more
equitable, and resilient food system. [https://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-
institutes/johns-hopkins-center-for-a-livable-future/news-room/News-Releases/2017/lack-
protections-for-undocumented-workers-puts-public-health-food-system-at-risk.html]
United States immigration reform efforts should address serious health risks faced by
undocumented agricultural workers, according to a new report released today by the Johns Hopkins
Center for a Livable Future (CLF) in the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental
Health and Engineering. Researchers argue that the current systemic lack of protections for
undocumented workers threatens both public health and national food security. According to the
report, health risks linked to agricultural work include pesticide exposure, injuries, poor air
quality, contact with animal waste, exposure to antibiotic resistant bacteria, and exposure to
novel strains of the flu virus. Additional factors like frequent migration, poor housing conditions,
lack of access to healthcare, and fear of job loss or deportation make undocumented immigrants
and their families especially vulnerable. “The significant mental and physical health risks
undocumented agricultural workers face demand urgent attention and action,” said Claire Fitch,
lead author of the report and Program Manager of CLF’s Food System Policy Program. “Until workers have
authorization to work in the U.S. and other legal protections such as the right to organize, wages and
working conditions will remain depressed for all U.S. agricultural workers.” According to the report,
protecting the health and safety of agricultural workers is critically important for the U.S. food
system, which relies heavily on the work of undocumented immigrants. An estimated 50-75
percent of the nation’s two million farmworkers are undocumented. Hundreds of thousands more
undocumented workers are employed in slaughter plants and food-processing facilities. Groups like the
American Farm Bureau Federation increasingly acknowledge that the impermanent, underrepresented,
and at-risk agricultural workforce makes the industry susceptible to worker shortages, which cost
American farms more than $300 million in 2010. Researchers argue that comprehensive immigration
reform is needed to protect workers, the U.S. food system, and public health. Key steps that
policymakers can take toward this goal include: Extending eligibility for health insurance benefits for
workers and their families Removing exemptions for agricultural workers and increasing minimum wage
in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) Mandating that agricultural employers provide full workers’
compensation coverage Removing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) exemption
for the number of employees required for enforcement and inspection Ensuring that agricultural workers
and their families have access to safe, affordable housing Replacing the H-2A visa with a variation of the
Blue Card program Expanding and increasing funding for the National Institute for Occupational Safety
and Health (NIOSH) and OSHA Strengthening enforcement of human trafficking violations and sexual
harassment in agriculture Strengthening protections for workers who report hazards, exposures, and
health conditions, and protecting workers’ right to organize “Vilifying political rhetoric and enforcement
actions that aim to punish undocumented immigrants fail to confront Americans’ reliance on these
workers for the food they eat,” said Bob Martin, co-author of the report and director of CLF’s Food
System Policy Program. “We need to change the debate and discuss immigration reform in a way
that acknowledges these workers’ contributions to our food system, prioritizes occupational
health and safety, and empowers workers to demand fair and safe working conditions.”
Undocumented farm workers put the entire food system at risk because of
their bad working conditions
Sullivan 17 Bartholomew D Sullivan is the Communications Director at the Office of
Congressman Steve Cohen [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/04/04/study-
undocumented-farm-workers-put-food-system-risk/100036382/]
WASHINGTON — Harold McClarty of HMC Farms in Fresno County, in California’s Central Valley, hires up
to 1,500 farm laborers each year to tend and pick his orchards full of peaches, nectarines, plums and
apricots and knows many of those workers have family members here illegally. “ We had incredible
labor issues last year and we anticipate it will only get worse and worse,” he said, adding that all of
the people he hires are documented. Talk of stepped-up immigration enforcement has people concerned,
he said, but talking about the politics of farm labor are “just not my thing,” noting real immigration reform
hasn’t happened under Democratic or Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan. But unless something
is done soon, he said, “you’re going to be living in a world without peaches maybe — at least California
peaches.” Albert Garnica, vice president of operations at Taylor Farms in Salinas, Calif., is another grower
who expects the harvest will be hit with a labor shortage. “Right now, with the new administration,
people are afraid to come out to go to work, and then you have the older generations of
workers retiring, so you’ve got both hitting at the same time,” Garnica said. More than half his
workers come in on H-2A visas for temporary farm workers, he said. Agricultural panel talks specialty
crops, farm labor problems Instead of getting tough with migrant workers, a new study by the Johns
Hopkins Center for a Livable Future finds that the lack of legal protections for undocumented agricultural
workers threatens both public health and a reliable food supply. “Vilifying political rhetoric and
enforcement actions that aim to punish undocumented immigrants fail to confront Americans’ reliance on
these workers for the food they eat,” said Robert P. Martin, a co-author of the report ”Public Health,
Immigration Reform and Food System Change,” released Monday. The report notes an increasing
recognition that the industrial produce and animal production and processing of U.S. agriculture by 2
million farm workers “would collapse without the immigrant and migratory workforce,” up to 75% of
which is estimated to be undocumented. The report says that a lack of legal status hurts agricultural
workers’ health and their ability to advocate better working conditions, jeopardizing “the
resiliency of the food system by maintaining an unstable and vulnerable workforce, which may
threaten the supply and safety of food.” Farm workers are exposed to pesticides causing
sometimes serious illnesses, from skin rashes and respiratory conditions to a variety of cancers,
but many don’t feel safe notifying authorities. “Poverty, a lack of access to health care, and a
fear among undocumented workers seeking health care — due to employer retaliation or risk of
deportation — are broader factors that also contribute to the underreporting of pesticide-
related illness,” the report says. It notes that the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama
administration revised worker protection standards regarding such exposure that took effect in January.
They require annual training and prohibit those under 18 from handling pesticides. Farm workers also
are subject to injuries and other biological and physical hazards they may be reluctant to report.
Workers in animal production are subject to airborne pollutants, including multi-drug resistant methicillin-
resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) that one epidemiological study found in the nasal passages of
swine operation workers 96 hours after they’d left work. The report cites a 2008 Pew Commission on
Farm Animal Production study that raised public health concerns that industrial animal processing
operations could lead to novel influenza viruses and more efficient human-to-human transmission. In
addition, farm worker conditions like poverty, substandard housing, long periods away from
families and limited education have been shown to lead to depression. Agricultural workers are
also vulnerable to labor trafficking and exploitation in part because of the exclusion of migrant
and seasonal workers from U.S. labor laws. The study notes that farm workers are not covered by
workers’ compensation in many states, aren’t entitled to overtime pay under federal law and aren’t
covered by the National Labor Relations Act, “effectively eliminating their rights to collective bargaining.”
Eliminating immigrant labor would reduce the U.S. dairy herd by 2.1 million cows and would increase the
retail price of milk by 90%, the report notes, citing an August 2015 Texas A & M AgriLife Research study,
prepared under contract for the National Milk Producers Federation. The report, written by Martin, Claire
Fitch and Carolyn Hricko of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, says that
these issues should be front and center as the country debates immigration reform, and makes a series of
recommendations. While calling for a path to citizenship for this critical labor force, it calls for removing
exemptions for agricultural workers and raising the minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standard Act;
requiring employers to provide worker compensation; extending health insurance benefits using the
Affordable Care Act’s subsidies to cover agricultural workers; and improving health and safety inspections
at small agricultural operations. “The U.S. food supply should be considered insecure as long as it
relies on an impermanent, underrepresented and at-risk work force,“ it concludes.
Undocumented workers working for low wages threatens food security

Meierotto 15 Dr. Lisa Meierotto is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Service at
Boise State University. She teaches in the Global Studies and Environmental Studies programs.
Meierotto earned her Ph.D. in environmental anthropology from the University of Washington,
and also holds an M.A. in International Development and Social Change from Clark University.
Previous research focused on the environmental impacts of undocumented immigration on the
U. S. Mexican border. Current research focuses on human rights and environmental justice,
especially considering the social and environmental ramifications of global migration trends.
[https://thebluereview.org/food-and-immigration-food-systems-and-food-security/]
If we lose the ability to produce our own food, through either mass deportation or more
restrictive immigration policy, we lose the chance to improve labor conditions for farm workers,
to regulate chemical inputs and to monitor the quality and availability of the foods that sustain
us. We would also lose the economic benefits of producing our own food. In an agricultural state like
Idaho, Trump-style immigration reform could be bad news for agribusiness, and bad news for the everyday consumer of food — in
other words, all of us. Alabor shortage could directly lead to a food shortage, or indirectly lead to
economic decline as other countries fill the food production void. Currently, the majority of Americans live
with “high food security,” a USDA term signifying access to nutritious food on a regular basis. If one does not have regular
access to nutritious food they have “low food security.” Food security is typically positively
correlated with income in the U.S. — higher income households are better able to purchase
food, can afford food with higher nutritional value (fruit, vegetables, meat, whole grain and dairy, as opposed to highly processed
cheap food like ramen noodles and boxes of mac and cheese). In 2013, nearly 50 million Americans lived in food insecure
households, including approximately 15.8 million children, according to Feeding America. Food insecurity primarily
affects low income people, including immigrants, who often do not have enough money to purchase healthy food
or live in so-called food deserts. These are typically low-income urban areas where people lack access to grocery stores and have
poor public transit or rural areas where big chain supermarkets don’t exist. Thus, food insecurity is a way in which
inequality manifests itself in the food system. Food insecurity is also related to immigration
policy. First, one of the worst paradoxes of our current food system is that the people who harvest, pack and distribute our food
are incredibly food insecure. Their wages are so low that they have significant difficulties providing
adequate nutrition for their families. But further, proposed immigration reforms such as those promoted by Trump
might actually make food insecurity worse, and not just for undocumented agricultural workers. FOOD AND IMMIGRATION
OBSERVATIONS Just as a hypothetical exercise, let’s assume that Trump as president finds a way to block border crossings and
deport all “illegals,” as he refers to the undocumented population. The result could be higher food insecurity for all Americans, not
just low-income households. The following facts and research findings about food are relevant to any immigration policy debate:1.
Immigrant populations are the primary source of agricultural labor. According to the United
States Department of Labor, in the early 2000s, over half of U.S. farm workers were foreign-
born, the vast majority from Mexico and Central America. In some specific agricultural sectors such as the dairy industry, the
percentage of immigrant workers is even higher. In addition, 13 percent of the U.S. population is foreign born. When you factor in
first generation foreign-born U.S. residents, approximately one quarter of the population holds immigrant status (Migration Policy
Institute). Over 70 percent of the undocumented immigrant population migrated here from Mexico or Central America. Over 11
million undocumented people currently live in the U.S., raising their families, working, shopping and dreaming here in the U.S. 2.
Restrictive immigration policy or mass deportations would reduce food production. One recent study
(Zahniser, et al, 2012) contrasted two hypothetical scenarios on the effect of changing immigration policy on agricultural outputs.
The authors argue that because labor costs account for nearly 40 percent of production costs for fruits and vegetables, substantial
change to immigration policy would have significant effects on the agricultural industry. They then conducted a computer simulation
study with two different scenarios: 1) increasing the number of temporary farm workers and 2) decreasing the number of
unauthorized workers in all economic sectors. Their research suggests that increasing the number of farm employees working under
legal, temporary guest-worker programs would lead to an overall increase in agricultural outputs. On other hand, tighter
immigration policy (i.e. less availability of what are now undocumented farm workers) would
result in an overall decrease in agricultural output and overall economic decline as exports and
outputs decline.3. If immigrant agricultural workers can no longer enter or remain in the country, food prices will
increase and food variety could decrease. One risk of a dwindling agricultural labor force is that farmers will have
incentives to switch to crops that can be harvested mechanically in lieu of crops that need human precision to pick (e.g., corn or soy
rather than tomatoes or strawberries). It is well known that rates of undocumented immigration declined during the Great
Recession. However, there was also a corresponding drop in available farm labor. Frank Gasperini, CEO of the National Council of
Agricultural Employers, says that farms have reported labor shortages growing worse since 2010, reaching as high as 50 percent at
times (quoted in Cernansky at “Civil Eats”). Because
the agricultural industry depends on a large supply of
low-wage labor, the labor pinch will either drive prices up or force companies to look abroad for
cheaper suppliers. 4. Keeping our agricultural workers here offers better opportunity for genuine
reform of our food system. Growing our food domestically, and maintaining the well-established migrant labor networks
with which to do so, increases the likelihood that we will be able to tackle the big issues facing agriculture today: global climate
change, the risks of pesticides, herbicides and insecticides, genetically modified and engineered organisms, soil fertility, water
consumption, etc. We have a wealth of scientists, activists and policy makers in the United States interested in making our food
system sustainable, productive and just. If
we reduce our capacity for agricultural production by eliminating
our labor force we will have to import more food and this food will come from places where it is
difficult to monitor environmental and human rights concerns. The American agriculture
industry is riddled with inequalities and short-comings. But our best shot at building a better
system, one that is built on fair wages, farm worker protection and sustainable production lies
right here at home.
Legalizing the undocumented agricultural workers would protect our nation’s

food security
Fitz 12 Marshall Fitz is a senior fellow at American Progress. He previously served as vice
president of Immigration Policy, during which time he directed the organization’s research and
analysis of the economic, political, legal, and social impacts of immigration policy in America and
develops policy recommendations designed to further America’s economic and security
interests. Fitz has been one of the key legislative strategists in support of comprehensive
immigration reform and has served as a media spokesperson on a broad array of immigration
policy and legislative issues. He has also been a leader in national coalitions that advance
progressive immigration policies.
[https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/reports/2012/11/14/44885/time-to-
legalize-our-11-million-undocumented-immigrants/]
Many sectors of our economy depend heavily on immigrant workers, including agriculture,
construction, hotels, and restaurants. In some industries, undocumented immigrant workers make up
significant proportions of the workforce. As we have shown elsewhere, the economic impact of removing
all of these workers would be catastrophic. But the status quo is likewise untenable because the
relentless drumbeat of federal immigration enforcement and the efforts by some states to
demonize the undocumented makes these workers increasingly vulnerable. These efforts are not just
bad for the marginalized workers—they hurt all Americans. Good-faith employers must compete against bottom feeders who exploit
this vulnerable workforce, and native-born workers must
compete against workers who cannot protect
their basic rights, including the right to fair wages. It is a lose-lose situation that would be flipped to a
win-win if our Congress had the courage to create a process for legalizing hardworking immigrants who are committed to this
country. Our failure to tackle this issue has disproportionately harmed certain industries, including
agriculture and the service sector. Agriculture Nowhere is the tension between immigrant labor and the economy more
obvious than in agriculture. By most estimates, undocumented immigrants make up more than half of the
workers in the agriculture industry. Likewise the U.S. Department of Agriculture has estimated that each farm job
creates three “upstream” jobs in professions such as packaging, transporting, and selling the produce, meaning that what happens in
the agricultural sector affects the economy as a whole. Agriculture is particularly susceptible to the whims of
the labor market, since crops become ripe at a fixed time and must be picked quickly before they rot. Migrant laborers often
travel a set route, following the growing season as it begins in places such as Florida and works its way north. Disrupting this
flow of pickers can be devastating to local economies and the nation’s food security. After the
passage of Georgia’s anti-immigrant law, H.B. 87, for example, the Georgia Agribusiness Council estimated that the state could lose
up to $1 billion in produce from a lack of immigrant labor. A survey of farmers conducted by the Georgia Department of Agriculture
found 56 percent of those surveyed were experiencing difficulty finding workers—a devastating
blow to the state. Even a program by Gov. Nathan Deal (D-GA) to use prison parolees to fill the worker shortage quickly fell
apart, with most walking off the job after just a few hours. Creating a process for legalizing these undocumented
workers would help stabilize the agricultural workforce and enhance our nation’s food security. It
would also diminish the incentive of states to go down the economically self-destructive path that Georgia, Alabama, Arizona, and
others have pursued.
Farmworkers Exploited
The agribusiness exploits undocumented workers and force them into
inhumane conditions
Walshe 13 Sadhbh Walshe is a film-maker and former staff writer for the CBS drama series
The District. Her pieces have also been published in the Chicago Tribune and Irish Times
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/31/agribusiness-exploitation-
undocumented-labor]
This week, a bipartisan group of senators and the president unveiled their respective plans for much needed and long overdue
immigration reform. For the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants who have settled in this
country, the path to citizenship being paved for them looks like it will be more tough than fair.
While we don't yet know how this will all play out, at least there will be a path. For one group of immigrants, however
– the farm workers who sustain our food supply – there is reason to fear that what awaits them
is not a path to citizenship, but their cemented status as indentured servants. Most farm work in
America is performed by immigrants, most of whom are undocumented and therefore
exploitable. The big agribusinesses that hire these immigrants will tell you that they need an
unfettered supply of cheap foreign labor, because they cannot find Americans willing to do
these jobs. When you consider what these jobs entail – hours of backbreaking work in terrible
and often dangerous conditions, subsistence wages with little or no time off, and none of the
protections or perks that most of us enjoy (like paid sick days, for instance) – it's hard to see why
anyone with other options would subject themselves to a life that is barely a step above slavery.
In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill into law which introduced some protections for these imported serfs, under
what has become known as the guest-worker program. These protections include a minimum wage guarantee, housing that meets
an acceptable standard for the duration of the contract, and a guarantee that the worker be paid three-quarters of their full pay
should should a season end early. Most employers would be delighted to get away with all this: being able to hire low-wage workers
at will, without the hassle of paying disability insurance or other niceties. But agribusinesses find the guest-worker program's pitiful
protections such a burden that they have mounted a relentless campaign to undermine them, and for the most part, work around
them anyway; they hire undocumented workers instead. According to a report compiled by Eric Ruark (pdf), the director of research
at the Federation for American Immigration Reform (Fair), as of 2006, only
27% of workers hired by agribusinesses
are American citizens, 21% are green card holders, around 1% are part of the guest worker
program … and a whopping 51% are unauthorized immigrants. It's agriculture's worst kept
secret that farm owners routinely break the law by hiring undocumented workers, but the crime
receives tacit approval from lawmakers sympathetic to the plight of major agribusinesses, which seem to consider cheap labor their
right. In South Carolina, for instance, lawmakers passed their version of Arizona's draconian bill, and have mandated that employers
use an e-verify system to check the immigration status of employees. Farm workers, however, were exempted from verification.
The agribusiness sector has gotten away with exploitative and illegal practices because of
ridiculous threats, like the suggestion that should the supply of cheap labor dry up in the US, they will outsource our food
production to China. This idle threat is based on the absurd notion that if they have to pay workers
higher wages, somehow there will be fewer people willing to do the jobs. The other scare tactic is
spreading talk that if they have to increase their expenditure on labor, those costs will have to be passed on to the American
consumer. Several studies have been conducted, however, that expose these hollow threats for the nonsense that they are. A report
by the Congressional Research Service (pdf) found no evidence of a labor shortage in the agricultural sector. On the contrary, it
found that between 1994 and 2008, the unemployment rate for farm workers was consistently higher than for all other occupations.
In other words, agriculture has had a surplus of available workers for decades. During this period, the agricultural industry has
recorded a nearly 80% average annual increase in profits – more than all other major industries. No doubt, these record profits have
something to do with the fact that real wages for farm workers have remained stagnant throughout this time. Finally, a 2011 report
by the Economic Policy Institute found that an increase in farm workers' wages of 40% would result in an annual rise in household
spending by the American consumer of just $16. Clearly, the
economic argument for allowing one industry a
workforce of virtually indentured labor does not hold water. But there is a humanitarian
argument to be made, as well, that should be enough to put an end to this exploitative practice
immediately. In 2009, the New York Times' Bob Herbert wrote an article about the horrible treatment of farm workers in
upstate New York – in this case, hired to feed and care for ducks farmed to be slaughtered for foie gras. "The routine is brutal
and not very sanitary. Each feeding takes about four hours and once the birds are assigned a
feeder, no one else can be substituted during the 22 day force feeding period that leads up to
the slaughter … Not only do the feeders get no days off during that long stretch, and no
overtime for any of the long hours, but they get very little time even to sleep each day. The
feeding schedule for the ducks must be rigidly observed. "When I asked one of the owners, Izzy Yanay, about
the lack of a day of rest, he said of the workers: 'This notion that they need to rest is completely futile. They don't like to
rest. They want to work seven days.'" Herbert went on to make the point that we are much more likely to hear
complaints about cruelty to ducks by force-feeding than we are about the cruelty to the people hired to feed them. Consumers have
long since showed a willingness to pay more for organic meat or chicken because they don't like the idea of animal cruelty. Are we
really not willing to pay a few cents more for farm produce so that human beings are not treated like animals? It remains to be seen
what the bipartisan "gang of eight" senators have in mind specifically for farm workers in any future immigration bill. But one can
only hope that they will not give in to bullying by the
spoiled agricultural industry, which continues to deny
these workers the same rights and protections every other worker in America enjoys.
Employers threaten undocumented workers with deportation to force them

into horrible working conditions
National Farm Work Ministry 18 National Farm Worker Ministry is a faith based
organization which supports farm workers as they organize for justice and empowerment.
NFWM began in 1920 as a ministry of charity and service, providing food, clothing and day care
to the farm workers. [ http://nfwm.org/education-center/farm-worker-issues/farm-
workers-immigration/]
In most states, undocumented farm workers and immigrants lack basic rights such as obtaining a driver’s
license or getting a higher education. Increasingly, anti-immigrant laws at the state level, such as the notorious SB1070 in Arizona
and recent HB 56 in Alabama, are further marginalizing an already disenfranchised population. While immigration policy is
determined at the federal level, states and localities are increasingly passing legislation that imposes criminal penalties on
undocumented immigrants. (Download our Immigration Glossary to learn more about the criminalization of immigrants and harmful
state level laws.) At work, undocumented status makes workers especially vulnerable to abuse, as some
employers and supervisors constantly hold the “deportation card”. For instance, if an employer is
treating a worker unfairly, a worker who speaks up to their boss can be threatened with
deportation. This significantly takes away their rights to stand up for themselves and advocate
for their working conditions. Threats of detention and deportation add to the psychological
stress of a job that is already unstable by its very nature, varying by season and location (almost half of all farm
workers are “migrant” workers who travel to different locations to find work). Many of these undocumented farm
workers would like to change their immigration status and obtain citizenship, but a pathway to
citizenship is almost impossible. With the current structure of the legal system, it’s very difficult to become a legal U.S.
resident even with a family member that’s a U.S. citizen or permanent legal resident. Without family in the U.S., it’s nearly
impossible. The only ways to get permanent residency in the U.S. are to have an immediate family member sponsor you, to get an
employment-based visa requiring high levels of education, to have a case of prosecution in your homeland that is recognized by the
U.S. government, or to be a genius, extremely rich, or a star athlete or artist.
Undocumented farm workers get exploited and are forced into a program like
slavery
Barth 17 Brian Barth is a former landscape designer and urban planner, who focused on food
production in urban places. In 2013, he traded his digging fork and drafting desk for a pen and
has been writing full-time ever since for publications such as Modern Farmer, Pacific Standard,
Nautilus, Landscape Architecture Magazine, Horticulture, and Discover.
[https://modernfarmer.com/2017/02/migrant-farm-workers-the-high-cost-of-cheap-labor/]
At least half of all farmworkers in the United States are undocumented Mexican immigrants. And “documentation” often
dictates inclusion in a guest-worker program that’s been compared to slavery. Americans avoid these
jobs, yet elected a president who promised mass deportation. There’s a crisis brewing in our fields, and it’s about to get much, much
worse. EVERY TIME ROSA GARCIA’S FAMILY* relocates—pursuing the latest harvest opportunity, from Florida’s winter citrus crops to
the autumn vegetables of Michigan—she must negotiate a strange town and, often, a strange school. Now a tenth-grader, Rosa
encounters the same cliquish cruelty all teenagers face, but magnified a hundredfold by virtue of her status as the new girl, the one
with brown skin, the one who appeared midsemester and may soon vanish. “Lunch is the worst,” the 16-year-old says, “because you
have no friends, nowhere to sit, no idea where you’re going next.” “ “It might be two families together in a trailer, six or seven
people in a room. It can be dismal, but we don’t complain, because we always have in the back of our minds that at any moment, we
could face deportation.” Rosa’s parents, Hector and Angelina, crossed the muddy waters of the Rio Grande in 1995 with their two
eldest children, and spent a few months building fences on Texas ranches before settling into the East Coast migrant-farmworker
circuit. Today, all seven Garcias—including Rosa and two more U.S.-born kids—log hours picking produce, though compensation
tends to be calculated at a piece rate instead of by the clock: A 32-pound bucket of tomatoes might bring $1. “Agriculture
is
very heavy work,” says Hector, 45, through a translator. “We toil from sunrise until our bodies can’t take
any more.” A good day yields $60, just enough to keep food on the table and gas in the car. And that’s assuming the ranchero, or
farm owner, pays. After several weeks at one Georgia tomato operation, Hector still hadn’t received a cent from his employer, who
no doubt banked on the improbability of an undocumented itinerant to stay put and push for past-due wages. “We had to move on
and follow the harvest,” Hector explains. “We couldn’t keep waiting.” The family was also evicted, and wound up homeless with less
than $50 to travel several hundred miles to Tennessee. “It was incredibly difficult,” he recalls. “We had to stop and and work along
the way.” While some rancheros provide housing, the benefit doesn’t feel beneficial when the cost of shockingly crude quarters
comes out of your earnings, says Hector. “It might be two families together in a trailer, six or seven people in a room. It
can be
dismal, but we don’t complain, because we always have in the back of our minds that at any
moment, we could face deportation.” In 1954, some 3,000 Mexicans rioted at the border in Mexicali after waiting days
for jobs in the United States, under this country’s Mexican Farm Labor Agreement, established in 1942 to address World War II labor
shortages.In 1954, some 3,000 Mexicans rioted at the border in Mexicali after waiting days for jobs in the United States, under this
country’s Mexican Farm Labor Agreement, established in 1942 to address World War II labor shortages. Rosa and two of her siblings,
born on American soil, are U.S. citizens. The older Garcia children reside here legally under DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals), a 2012 executive order from President Barack Obama that allows undocumented immigrants who arrived prior to their
16th birthdays to seek renewable two-year work permits. In 2014, Obama issued a related executive order creating DAPA (Deferred
Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents), intended to protect parents like Hector and Angelina from
deportation. The policy didn’t survive judicial scrutiny, rendering an estimated 3.5 million undocumented mothers and fathers of
U.S.-born children at risk of having their families ripped apart—especially in the current political climate. And because DACA is an
executive order, as opposed to a congressional act, our new president can overturn it with a single stroke of his pen. The brutal
irony: Until
this past November, many undocumented immigrants trusted our government
enough to divulge fingerprints, addresses, and other personal data required for DACA
enrollment. That trust has left them particularly vulnerable. “They’re afraid of Donald Trump canceling the
program and having their information,” explains Bruce Goldstein, president of the advocacy organization Farmworker Justice.
“These people work really hard at low-wage jobs to feed the country. To be vilified this way is
causing them great harm.” Trump supporters at a 2016 campaign rally in Tampa, FL, hold signs advocating strict border
security. Trump supporters at a 2016 campaign rally in Tampa, FL, hold signs advocating strict border security. Americans who don’t
empathize with the Garcias’ plight argue that Hector and his ilk should have secured H-2A visas, permitting them to work on U.S.
farms temporarily. But that argument fails to grasp how the H-2A program actually operates. Domestic employers, not foreign
workers, petition the Department of Labor for visas. The employers must then find the workers—a task typically outsourced to
foreign private labor contractors. These middlemen entice workers by dangling access to the land of opportunity, charging
thousands of dollars to handle paperwork and transport, and offering to finance the fees through high-interest loans. As a result, H-
2A workers reach the States bound to a single employer here and often heavily indebted to a contractor in their home country. The
set-up practically predetermines abuse. Should
employers renege on promised work and/or wages, H-2A
recipients can’t shop their services around. Walking away from egregious conditions means
voiding the contract and inviting arrest and deportation. Even if these so-called guest workers possess the
resources to seek legal redress, the involvement of middlemen insulates employers, who can always point the finger at labor
contractors. A decade ago, Charles Rangel, the first African American to chair the House Ways and Means Committee, condemned
the H-2A system as a form of indentured servitude, declaring: “This
guest-worker program’s the closest thing I’ve
ever seen to slavery.” The situation hasn’t improved, nor is it likely to. President Donald J. Trump’s various business holdings
have secured at least 1,256 guest-worker visas—most for Mar-a-Lago—over the past 15 years. And Farmworker Justice’s Bruce
Goldstein believes the president’s hard-line rhetoric will urge more agricultural employers to seek temporary visas rather than
chance hiring undocumented help, thus increasing pressure on an already overtaxed “solution.” The number of H-2A visas issued
annually has risen steadily since Rangel’s damning 2007 statement, yet the permits have never covered more than 10 percent of
available fieldwork jobs in any given year.
The fact that at least half of American fieldworkers are
undocumented immigrants reveals a massive gap between the nation’s need for low-wage
workers and its sanctioned supply. And to be perfectly clear, in this context, “immigrant” refers to a specific group: 93
percent of all immigrant farmworkers in this country hail from Mexico. Photojournalist Andrew Lichtenstein, who has been
documenting farmworker struggles in California and the Southeast for decades, took this shot of squalid housing conditions 12 years
ago. The United States’ love-hate relationship with cheap labor sourced south of the border dates to the border’s establishment in
1848, at the end of the Mexican-American War. Prior to the 1930s, Mexicans flowed between the two countries pretty freely, but
the Great Depression bred resentment among native-born Americans, and more than 500,000 people of Mexican heritage—some
U.S. citizens— were “repatriated.” Of course, we dusted off the welcome mat the moment World War II labor shortages
necessitated a thaw, via the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement, commonly known as the bracero (or “strong-armed one”) program.
The government shut down the initiative in 1964, amid accusations of worker abuse as well as complaints that it robbed citizens of
jobs. Around the same time, a burgeoning farmworkers’ rights movement was gaining steam under the leadership of Chicano activist
Cesar Chavez, who grew up picking fruits and vegetables in the fields of California. After founding the National Farm Workers
Association (precursor to the United Farm Workers union) with fellow advocate Dolores Huerta in 1962, Chavez organized a series of
protests, most notably the Salad Bowl Strike of 1970. The largest farmworker strike in U.S. history, the walkout doubled national
lettuce prices overnight and seeded significant reforms in California’s agricultural labor laws, among them the right to collective
bargaining. Migrant workers harvest sweet potatoes (BELOW) and weed rows of tobacco (ABOVE) in eastern North Carolina. Often,
pickers are paid by the bin instead of by the hour. More recently, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW)—born of unrest in
Florida’s notorious tomato industry during the early 1990s—has advanced the cause. By 2015, the primarily Latino coalition had
convinced such food-industry behemoths as Walmart, Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods Market to purchase
tomatoes solely from growers who enlist in CIW’s Fair Food Program, which guarantees decent wages and audits farms to ensure
fair treatment. Those of us who shop at farmers markets and eat at restaurants advertising the provenance of every ingredient
prefer to think we’re innocent of supporting abusive labor practices. Unfortunately, fieldworker woes cut especially deep for organic
producers and independent family farms, where humans perform tasks that chemicals and machines tackle at industrial outfits. “It’s
very difficult for people to reconcile the truth that small local farms—so celebrated by the food movement—might not offer
sustainable jobs,” says Margaret Gray, an associate professor of political science at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. “ It’s
little wonder Americans opt out of fieldwork. And opt out they do, no matter what you’ve read on Facebook re: immigrants “stealing
our jobs.” In one study, less than 0.1 percent of job-seeking citizens took referrals for farm jobs Gray interviewed 160 workers on
small farms in the state’s Hudson Valley for her 2014 book, Labor and the Locavore: The Making of a Comprehensive Food Ethic.
They detailed incidences of wage theft and admitted hiding illnesses and injuries from their bosses for fear of being replaced by
abler bodies. Though laws exist to prevent such injustices, Gray learned that immigrants, particularly undocumented ones, were
loath to speak up. “The
workers who come here are very much in sacrifice mode,” she explains,
“which makes it easy for them to be exploited.” It’s little wonder Americans opt out of this career path. And opt
out they do, no matter what you’ve read on Facebook re: immigrants “stealing our jobs.” One exhaustive case study examined
unemployed, job-seeking citizens in North Carolina over a 15-year period, from 1998 through 2012. Upon being advised about
openings on area farms, less than 0.1 percent of these job seekers, on average, asked to be referred each year. Of the several
hundred referred, 97 percent were hired. Of those, less than half reported to work on the first day. And in no year did more than 11
individuals finish out the season on a farm. None of this would surprise Frank Colaruotolo, who grows vegetables on 120 acres in
Valatie, New York, and considers Anglo Americans the labor pool of last resort. Two years ago, Colaruotolo, short on help, placed a
classified ad in his community newspaper. The experience left the 35-year-old shaking his head: “The one kid couldn’t stop texting
while he was on the plow. The other kid was just dense. How many times can you turn to someone and say, ‘You know, you missed
fruit on that plant’? A bunch of stuff rotted in the field.” Colaruotolo prefers Latino employees because the skills of subsistence
agriculture remain embedded in their culture, if not their very bones. Hector Garcia understands. Of the sole day, in decades, that he
worked alongside Anglos, Hector recalls, “They lasted two hours.” ABOVE The late activist Cesar Chavez, here picketing at Safeway’s
San Diego–area headquarters in 1973, co-founded the United Farm Workers union (originally called the National Farm Workers
Association) in 1962. A 2013 study by the Center for Global Development, an independent Washington, D.C., think tank, analyzed 15
years’ worth of data from the North Carolina Division of Employment Security (which manages the state’s unemployment offices)
and the North Carolina Growers Association (which recruits workers for hundreds of area farms). The findings compare the number
of unemployed citizens with those who accepted referrals for available NCGA farm jobs, those who showed up for the first day of
work, and those who completed the season on a farm: none in 1998 through 2001 and only 11 in 2008, 0.004 percent of all 283,048
job seekers that year. Click to enlarge. Employers may seem the obvious villains in our nation’s epic saga of fieldworker exploitation,
but ultimately, the blame lies with American consumers, who have come to expect outrageously low food prices. We fork over
less for food, as a percentage of household expenditures, than the citizens of 83 other nation tracked by the
USDA: 6.4 percent in 2015, compared with more than 10 percent in most European Union countries and over 40 percent in Nigeria
and Pakistan. Farm owners insist they can’t increase wages and benefits until we open our wallets at the grocery store—a quagmire
that informs policy regulating farm labor. Agricultural workers are not entitled to the minimum wage (if the farm’s crew clocks fewer
than 500 days, combined, per quarter), overtime pay (except in California), or a single day off per week. In most states, these
workers do not have the right to form unions and negotiate collective bargaining agreements. Addressing the systemic problem
wouldn’t require much, according to research by Philip Martin, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University
of California, Davis. Martin concludes that raising farmworker wages 40 percent across the board would add a mere $21.15 to the
annual budget of every American household. Meanwhile, some farm owners refuse to use rock bottom profit margins as an excuse.
Jordan Brown’s The Family Garden, a 20-acre organic vegetable farm in Gainesville, Florida, pays workers an average of $12 per
hour, $1.21 above the living wage in that county. Brown provides workers’ comp and contributes to social security and
unemployment insurance. Each member of his six-person crew (half immigrants) gets one paid sick day a month and three paid
holidays a year. Almost a decade in,though, the 36-year-old struggles to stay in the black. “Farmers feel pushed by their
customers to have both higher-quality products and lower prices,” Brown says. “That emotional
push often gets translated down the line and onto the farmworkers, something I never want to
do.” In 2012, The Family Garden garnered a “Food Justice Certified” label from the Agricultural Justice Project. A handful of similar
labels have popped up on supermarket shelves in recent years, among them the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ “Fair Food” and
the Equitable Food Initiative’s “Responsibly Grown. Farm- worker Assured.” designations. None approach the reach of programs
such as USDA Organic, Fair Trade Certified, or Non-GMO Project Verified, but they do give consumers the opportunity to put their
dollars where their values are. At Swanton Berry Farm—also Food Justice Certified—Jim Cochran, 69, employs seven Anglo and 20
Mexican workers on 80 acres near Santa Cruz, California. Cochran has tried a variety of tactics to integrate the two groups, asking his
Anglo sales staff to spend four hours a week in the fields and organizing English classes to equip the Latino fieldworkers for less
laborious tasks. “It just doesn’t happen,” he admits. “There seems to be a thing in Mexican farmworker culture, where they’re all in
it together and nobody’s better than anyone else, that may discourage people from learning English.” This 1947 photograph
captures Mexican laborers preparing to leave a farm in California’s Imperial Valley, just north of the Mexicali border, for work in Los
Angeles Which is not to suggest the Mexicans earn less at Swanton Berry. In 1998, it became the first unionized organic farm in the
nation. The same United Farm Workers contract covers all of Cochran’s employees, ensuring a single pay structure and benefits
package. No matter the position, everyone starts out at $10.75 an hour accruing raises based on seniority. They also receive medical
coverage and paid vacation time, as long as they put in 30 hours a week—automatic for fieldworkers, but not the sales staff.
“The
fieldworkers are better compensated than the sales folks. It’s justified because they have the
more arduous job,” says Cochran. Some 30 miles away, toward Salinas, another farm owner may have even more empathy for
his workers. Javier Zamora immigrated to Los Angeles from southwestern Mexico at the age of 20 in 1986 and gained legal status
shortly thereafter with the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act. It took a couple decades, but Zamora eventually
earned his high school diploma and an associate’s degree in organic horticulture from Cabrillo College in Aptos, California. There, he
learned of ALBA, the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association, a California group that acts as an incubator for Latino
immigrants who aspire to become organic farmers. Six years ago, Zamora secured two acres of land with an ALBA-subsidized lease,
and has since bought 200 acres of his own. The 51-year-old’s crew—as many as 26 people at peak season—make $12 to $16 an
hour, depending on seniority. Several net upwards of $40,000 per year. “If you pay your employees well and treat them the way
they deserve to be treated, you empower them to take ownership, and they realize the success of the business is reliant on them,”
says Zamora, now a member of ALBA’s board of directors. Once an undocumented Mexican immigrant, Javier Zamora now owns 200
acres near California’s Salinas Valley, where he farms flowers, strawberries, and vegetables organically. Zamora has traveled to
Washington, D.C., twice over the past year, seeking congressional support for minority farmers. “I wanted to encourage our
representatives to think more about the impact of what they do. It’s my community that benefits or suffers because of their
decisions,” he explains. Zamora knows he’s proof of what an undocumented immigrant can achieve if given the chance, as he was in
1986—when the Immigration Reform and Control Act granted legal status and opened a path to citizenship for 2.7 million people.
The farmer also knows that the potential for such mass amnesty plummeted on November 8, 2016. Trump’s pledge to deport
millions and build a wall at the Mexican border would no doubt wreak havoc on our nation’s food system. A 2014 study from the
American Farm Bureau Federation
analyzed various immigration scenarios and predicted that such an
“enforcement only” policy would lead to a 30 to 40 percent loss of net vegetable and fruit
revenue in the coming years, due to a combination of decreased productivity and higher labor
costs. Last year, the Farm Bureau’s president, Zippy Duvall, warned of an impending labor crisis, alleging that crops were likely to
rot in the fields as a result of labor shortages in at least 20 states. American agricultural employers must secure H-2A visas before
importing seasonal workers, often through private labor contractors, a set-up that almost guarantees abuse. Our president’s
inexcusable depiction of Mexicans as “criminals” and “rapists” has already changed life for the Garcia family. Hector says his children
are bullied at school. Rosa didn’t reveal that part, but her father opens up: “In the lunch- room, some of the other kids have yelled,
‘Build the wall’ or ‘Go back to your country.’ We haven’t dealt with this level of hatred and racial profiling in the past. I try not to
think too much about the big problems that are on their way, but we fear that our family will be separated. We fear the racism that
has been awoken, and the intolerance that we are facing.” Like the majority of immigrant laborers, Hector is willing to toil long hours
for low pay because it is an improvement over the life he left behind. “We
didn’t come here to take anyone’s jobs
away. We came to escape the poverty that we have in our country and to provide our children
with a better future. We are doing work that most Americans are not willing to do.”
Employers threaten undocumented workers with deportation if they complain

about poor work conditions
Kelkar 16 Kamala Kelkar works on investigative projects at PBS NewsHour Weekend. She has
been a journalist for nearly a decade, reporting from Oakland, India, Alaska and now New York.
[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/labor-laws-left-farm-workers-behind-vulnerable-abuse]
Blocking farm workers from a federal right to organize unions would guarantee, “a continuance
of virtual slavery until the day of revolt,” a New York politician warned his colleagues during a hearing in the 1930s.
Eighty years later, with Mexicans having largely replaced black Americans in the fields, farm workers
lack the federal rights afforded to most laborers — even as they face some of the toughest
working conditions in the country. In several states, efforts to expand these rights are moving forward. California
passed an historic law on Monday entitling them to the same overtime pay as most others, while New York faces a lawsuit for
excluding farm workers from a right to organize and also a Senate bill that would change that. But the bulk of farm workers in the
U.S. remain excluded from freedoms outlined in the National Labor Relations Act from 1935 and the Fair and Labor Standards Act
from 1938 — exceptions said to be written by politicians who represented Southern plantation owners. “The entire agricultural
industry’s greatest subsidy is the lack of protection for agricultural workers,” said Margaret Gray, who interviewed 160 farm workers
in New York’s Hudson Valley for her book, “Labor and the Locavore: The Making of a Comprehensive Food Ethic.” “Thesystem
was dependent on the exploitation of slaves. That legacy carries through and directly affects
farm workers,” she said. The decision to exclude farm workers from certain labor protections was established during the New
Deal Era. The workers — who were almost exclusively black — were never included in the discussions, nor did representatives
mention race. But New York Rep. Vito Marcantonio was the principal voice of dissent, saying they should be able to organize against
“the most outrageous exploitation in America.” “A
continuance of these conditions is preparing the way for a
desperate revolt,” Marcantonio said. Despite Marcantonio’s efforts, the National Labor Relations Act passed. Another
politician later said farm workers were excluded from the rights because the act would not have gone through the Senate “with such
a disproportionate representation of rural people.” Farm workers pick eggplant in the early morning fog on a farm in Rancho Santa
Fe, California United States August 31, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Blake - RTX2NQI4Farm workers pick eggplant in the early morning fog
on a farm in Rancho Santa Fe, California United States August 31, 2016. Photo by Mike Blake/Reuters California, with a $54 billion
agricultural industry and about 417,000 workers, has by far the most productive farms in the nation. It has led the country in
addressing these disparities, most recently with a bill that will expand when farm workers are entitled to better overtime pay. On
Monday, Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 1066, which in 2019 will start phasing in new rules to provide overtime pay for
more than eight hours of work a day, or 40 hours a week. It will lower the current 10-hour-day threshold by half an hour each year
until it reaches the new standard by 2022. During his first year in office in 1975, Brown had also signed a landmark agreement that
gave farm workers the right to organize. But
farm workers in many other states are still trapped in
conditions that were outlawed for most others in the 1930s. The agriculture industry was and
continues to be one of the most dangerous in the private sector. In 2011, 570 of them died,
which is seven times the rate of the national average among workers in private industries. They
often support families off meager wages and live in isolation during seasonal work. And since
many are undocumented, they often live in fear that any grievances could get them deported,
said Gray. “It almost replaces the need for racism, because there’s a new fear-based system by the
state if you’re undocumented,” Gray said. Law Professor Juan Perea of Loyola University Chicago traced the origins of
these laws for the Ohio State Law Journal in 2011. “The original, Southern desire to preserve an exploited,
economically deprived non-white agricultural labor force pinned to the bottom of the social and
economic hierarchy continues to manifest itself full force,” Perea told the NewsHour. “The only
difference today is now it’s brown and black people.” An agricultural worker survey in 2010 under the U.S.
Department of Labor revealed that 75 percent of farm workers in the nation were born in Mexico and 53 percent of respondents
were undocumented, making statistics often difficult to acquire. The
U.S. Department of Agriculture states that
there were more than 1 million of farm workers in 2012, making up less than 1 percent of the
waged workers in the country “and continue to be one of the most economically disadvantaged
groups.” The New York Civil Liberties Union echoes Perea’s sentiment in a civil suit against New York that it filed in May. It states
that a worker at one of New York’s biggest dairy farms was fired for meeting with people who help farm workers organize to talk
about getting English classes and gloves to protect the workers from dangerous chemicals. The lawsuit says the retribution was a
violation of the New York State Constitution, which guarantees that “employees shall have the right to organize and to bargain
collectively through representatives of their own choosing.” Excluding
farm workers from rights guaranteed in
the state constitution is a “racist, holdover policy from Jim Crow,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna
Lieberman recently told the NewsHour. “It’s something that feels absolutely obvious now but was hiding in plain sight before.” New
York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Governor Andrew Cuomo agreed that it was unconstitutional, announcing the
administration would not defend the act in court. Now the New York Farm Bureau, comprised of farm owners who feel they have
been abandoned by the government, is attempting to intervene and preserve the exclusion, “because the interest of its members
will not be represented.” Gray pointed out an irony in this: the bureau is only able to intercede because of farm owners’ right to
organize. “When you look at something like the New York state Farm Bureau, it’s a multi-million dollar organization that has
probably a dozen lobbyists,” she said. “The organizations that
represent farm workers, they’re struggling
financially and with resources.” But she said that empowering farm workers with the same civil rights
as most other laborers could be a hard hit to the farm owners’ bottom lines, which are already
depleted by the rising costs of resources and competition from other countries. Any proposed changes
are always met with mountains of resistance, she said. “Leave it to New York City politicians to get it all wrong about agriculture and
family farmers,” Assemblyman Marc Butler (R,C-Newport) wrote in a statement in response to Cuomo. “Gov. Cuomo and others like
him have done much to vilify the family farmer.” Which may be why Brown signed the overtime legislation without providing
comment. A spokeswoman told the Los Angeles Times that he is letting the signature speak for itself. His decision was commended
by the U.S. Department of Labor, which is the arbiter of the wage bill that excludes farm workers. In a follow-up email, a
spokesperson said that Congress wrote the federal statute that the department is tasked with enforcing. The National Labor
Relations Board, which enforces the federal act that protects employees who want to organize, said the same thing — unless
Congress changes America’s slave-era agricultural worker rules, it’s not part of the board’s job to protect them. “We enforce
legislation as it is enacted,” said the board’s spokeswoman Jessica Kahanek in an email.
Migrant Workers face higher rates of deaths than native workers, even when
inn the same job
Moyce and Schenker [Sally C., professor at Samuel Merritt University who specializes in
community health and nursing and has PhD in nursing Science and Health Care Leadership, Marc
is a MD, MPH(Masters of Public Health) who si a professor at UC Davis and founding director of
the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, 1/24/18, “Migrant Workers and Their
Occupational Health and Safety,” https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-
publhealth-040617-013714]ZZ
Migrant workers are recognized to be among the most vulnerable members of society. They are
often engaged in what are known as 3-D jobs—dirty, dangerous, and demanding (sometimes
degrading or demeaning)—and these workers are often hidden from or invisible to the public
eye and from public policy (81). They work for less pay, for longer hours, and in worse
conditions than do nonmigrants and are often subject to human rights violations, abuse, human
trafficking, and violence (48).Most importantly, these precarious workers may take greater risks on the job, do work
without adequate training or protective equipment, and do not complain about unsafe working conditions. This
situation is the most critical for immigrant workers who lack work authorization and are at risk for losing their jobs or even being
deported. These conditions put immigrant workers at increased risk for occupational fatalities and
injuries when compared with native-born workers, even those doing the same job in the same
industry. Recent increases in incidents and costs of occupational injuries and fatalities have been
attributed largely to immigrant workers, reflecting the increased burden of occupational injuries
and fatalities shouldered by immigrant workers (28). Put another way, the proportion of fatal and
nonfatal workplace injuries among immigrants has been increasing, reflecting a shift of the most
hazardous jobs to the immigrant workforce. Worldwide, immigrant workers have higher rates of negative
occupational exposures, leading to poor health outcomes, workplace injuries, and occupational fatalities. Globally, in 2014, the ILO
estimated that there were 2.3 million occupational fatalities from a variety of different sources (92). The higher rates of occupational
fatalities among immigrant workers may be attributed to a variety of factors, including inherent risks in the jobs themselves and the
lack of training and protection for immigrant workers.
In the United States, immigrant workers are
overwhelmingly employed in the service sector; natural resources, construction and
maintenance (NRCM); agriculture; and production, transportation, and material movement:
industries that report much higher rates of injury compared with other industries (10). In Canada,
the pattern of employment is similar, and most immigrants work in agriculture. Like the United States, Canadian agriculture is one of
the most dangerous industries and has the highest rates of occupational injuries and fatalities (80). In contrast, in Australia, native-
born workers are more likely to work in agriculture and construction, likely due to the push for “skilled” or professional migration to
Australia, referring to workers with skills that will contribute to the Australian economy. Consequently, occupational injury may be
higher among native-born than foreign-born workers in Australia (85). Using the European Working Conditions Survey, an analysis of
nearly 30,000 workers in 31 European countries reveals higher rates of negative occupational exposures among migrants when
compared with native workers. Migrant
workers were more likely than native workers to be exposed to
high temperatures, loud noises, strong vibrations, and fast work speeds and to stand for long
periods of time. These individuals often worked without contracts and had unfavorable work
schedules (88). The industries most likely to employ migrant workers are often those that carry
the most risk for adverse worker health. According to the US Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, immigrant
workers were 15% more likely to be fatally injured on the job than were their native-born counterparts (12). Migrant workers are
less likely to have a permanent job contract than are native-born workers, and studies have shown greater reporting of poorer
health to be associated with the lack of a permanent job contract (91).
Migrants suffer a litany of health issues—limited health services, substandard

living conditions, cultural barriers, disease, occupational hazards, stress.
Hansen and Donohoe 03 (Eric, St. Mary’s Medical Center, and Martin, Old Town Clinic and
Oregon Health and Science University, “HEALTH ISSUES OF MIGRANT AND SEASONAL
FARMWORKERS,” J Healthcare Poor Underserved, 05/14/03,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12739296)
*MSFWs = migrant and seasonal farmworkers*
Migrant workers
Occupational hazards MSFWs face numerous occupational hazards. Farm labor is seasonal and intensive.
labor in all seasons and weather conditions, including extreme heat, cold, rain, and bright sun.
Work often requires stoop labor, working with soil and/or heavy machinery, climbing, and
carrying burdensome loads, all of which lead to chronic musculoskeletal symptoms. Direct contact
with plants can cause allergic rashes or, in the case of tobacco farmers, “green tobacco sickness” (i.e., transdermal nicotine
poisoning). Agriculture is one of the most hazardous occupations in the United States. In 2000,
there were 780 deaths and 130,000 disabling injuries in agriculture.12 The only industry that had more
deaths was construction, with 1,220.12 The actual rate of occupational injuries and illnesses in agriculture
may, in fact, be much higher. Underreporting of medical conditions is significant due to limited
access to health services, different cultural conceptions of health and disease, and fear of lost
wages or jobs.13 Although OSHA regulations require agricultural employers of 11 or more workers to provide drinking water
and hand-washing and toilet facilities, compliance with these regulations is poor; sanitation violations have been noted in up to 69
percent of its field inspections.10 Moreover, farms with fewer than 11 employees, a category that includes 95 percent of U.S.
farms, are exempt from many OSHA regulations.14 As a result, some MSFWs resort to drinking or bathing in
water contaminated with pesticides, chemical fertilizers, or organic waste. Health problems Although
MSFWs and their families suffer from the same health problems found in the general
population, the occupational hazards, poverty, substandard living conditions, migrancy, and
language and cultural barriers that they face result in unique health hazards as well. As a result,
the average life expectancy of MSFWs is 49 years, compared with the national average of 75
years.15 Various categories of health problems faced by MSFWs are discussed below. Infectious disease. Migrant workers
are at increased risk for contracting a variety of viral, bacterial, fungal, and parasitic
infections.13,15-19 They are approximately 6 times more likely to have tuberculosis than the
general population; up to 44 percent of migrants have positive purified protein derivative of tuberculin skin tests.13
Parasitic infection rates are 11 to 59 times higher than in the general population.15 Untreated
parasitic conditions can lead to chronic anemia or malnutrition. There is a high incidence of
sexually transmitted diseases, primarily among young, single men in labor camps, who face
social isolation and have limited recreational facilities. While the national seroprevalence rate
of HIV infection is 0.4 percent, HIV seroprevalence rates among migrant workers are 2.6 to 13
percent.17-19 Migrant women are at particular risk of contracting HIV because of boyfriends or husbands visiting prosti-
tutes; variable cultural beliefs about the use of contraceptive methods such as condoms; and a lack of access to educational,
counseling, and preventive services.18 Migrant workers are also at increased risk for urinary tract infections, partly as a result of a
lack of toilets at the workplace and stringent working conditions that promote chronic urine retention.10,20 Urinary retention in
turn encourages bacterial growth and stretches and weakens the bladder wall; this in turn promotes chronic infections or
colonization. Chemical and pesticide-related illnesses. The full extent of acute and chronic pesticide poisoning among MSFWs is not
known, due to the lack of formal reporting systems, the reluctance of workers to report poisonings, workers’ inability to seek
medical treatment when accidents occur, and a dearth of physician knowledge and training in recognizing and treating pesticide-
related illnesses.20 Migrant
workers suffer from the highest rates of toxic chemical injuries of any
group of workers in the United States; the Envi- ronmental Protection Agency estimates that
300,000 farmworkers suffer acute pesticide poisoning each year.21 Chemical and pesticide poisoning may
result from direct spraying of workers; indirect spray from wind drifts; direct dermal contact with residues on crops; bathing in, or
drinking, contaminated water; or transfer of residues from contaminated hands while eating, smoking, or defecating. Acute
organophosphate exposure causes increased salivation, tearing, blurred vision, nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramps, urinary and
severe acute intoxication,
fecal incontinence, increased bronchial secretions, cough, wheezing, and sweating. In more
dyspnea, bradycardia, heart block, hypotension, pulmonary edema, paralysis, convulsions, or
death may occur. Long-term pesticide exposure may cause permanent neurological deficits,
such as peripheral neuropathy or deficits in motor skills, memory (or, attention), and cancer.3,22
This is especially true with certain outlawed (in this country) persistent organic pollutants, which may have endocrine, reproduc-
tive, and oncogenic effects on pregnant women and on growing children.14,23 Dermatitis. Agricultural workers have a higher
incidence of skin disorders than employees in any other industry; dermatitis is the most common occupational health problem
among MSFWs.13,20 Skin disorders may stem from exposure to pesticides, fertilizers, latex, chemicals, allergenic plants (e.g.,
poison ivy, ragweed, and sumac), and allergenic crops (e.g., asparagus, barley, tobacco, celery, lettuce, and mustard). Sun, sweat,
chapped or abraded skin, lack of protective clothing, and absence of hand-washing facilities at the worksite all contribute to skin
conditions. Because occupational dermatitis often occurs on the hands, migrant workers may suffer a reduction in their work
capability and/or income.20 Heat stress. Strenuous outdoor
labor with few, if any, rest periods, combined
with a lack of potable water, contributes to a high incidence of heat stroke, heat exhaustion, and
heat cramps. Farmworkers are four times more likely than nonagricultural workers to suffer
from heat-related illnesses.20 Respiratory conditions. Migrant workers are exposed to many hazardous
agents, including organic and inorganic dusts (e.g., cotton, grain, hay, silica), gases (e.g., NH3,
H2S, CO, CO2, CH4, NO2), herbicides (e.g., Paraquat), fertilizers, solvents, fuels, and welding
fumes.14 As a result, they are at risk for mucous membrane irritation, allergies, asthma, hypersensitivity pneumonitis (i.e.,
farmer’s lung), pulmonary fibrosis, chronic bronchitis, pulmonary edema, tracheobronchitis, emphysema, and
asphyxiation.3,13,14,16 Musculoskeletal disorders and traumatic injuries. Agricultural labor places migrant workers
at risk for musculoskeletal disorders as a result of heavy lifting and carrying; prolonged kneeling,
stooping, or otherwise difficult postures; working with the arms above shoulder level; whole body vibration (e.g.,
tractor driving); and rapid repetitive motions.3,13,14,20 Workers face three main categories of problems:
traumatic injuries (e.g., fractures, strains), joint and tissue irritation, and accelerated joint
degeneration. Interventions such as warming up, stretching, and ergonomic education and training might help to reduce
traumatic injuries and chronic musculoskeletal illnesses in this population.13,14 Reproductive health. Prolonged standing
and bending, overexertion, dehydration, poor nutrition, and pesticide or chemical exposure
contribute to an increased risk of spontaneous abortion, premature delivery, fetal malfor-
mation and growth retardation, and abnormal postnatal development.18,20,24 Moreover, low
socioeconomic status; frequently young maternal age; and late, little, or no prenatal care
increase risk to mother and child.18 The infant mortality rate among MSFWs has been
estimated to be twice the national average.25 In one study of California migrant women, 24 percent had had at
least one miscarriage or stillbirth.26 Child health. Although the U.S. government limits the legal age of child
labor in most industries to at least 16 years, for agricultural labor it is 12 years.10,18 Children
are particularly vulnerable to pesticide poisonings and respiratory and communicable diseases. In
fact, children may be more vulnerable than adults to the same dose of pesticides, since they have greater surface area to body
weight ratios than adults, greater circulatory flow rates that affect the distribution of toxic chemicals, and less mature immune
systems that may be less effective than adults’ immune systems in detoxifying and eliminating hazardous agents.27 During
development, changes also occur in liver enzymes that can increase the toxicity of
environmental chemicals, causing a greater proportional impact from the same amount of
chemicals.27 Many migrant children are below average height. They suffer more frequent respiratory, para-
sitic, and skin infections; chronic diarrhea; vitamin deficiencies; and dental problems than other
children.18,20,28 Children of migrant farmworkers experience homelessness, frequent moves, poverty, and interruptions of
schooling and friendships that pose both psychosocial and developmental risks.15 Oral health. MSFWs experience 150 to 300
percent more decayed teeth than their peers.29 Dental caries is the most common untreated health problem in migrant children; at
least one-half of farmworker children have at least one and an average of three carious teeth.18 Children who do not receive dental
care are at increased risk of developing severe periodontal problems as adults. Dental disease results in part from an overall lack of
knowledge about dental care. Many MSFWs have weak knowledge of the relationship between sweet foods and caries and of the
positive effects of good oral hygiene and fluoride on periodontal health.18,30 Cancer. Migrant workers
are exposed to a
wide variety of carcinogens, including pesticides, solvents, oils, fumes, ultraviolet radiation from
chronic sun exposure, and biologic agents such as human and animal viruses. Farm laborers
have increased mortality rates for cancers of the lip, stomach, skin (melanotic and nonmelanotic), prostate, testes,
and hematopoietic and lymphatic systems (e.g., multiple myeloma, and Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas).3,13,14,31 A
recent study reported that the California members of the United Farm Workers of America developed more cases of leukemia,
stomach cancer, and uterine corpus and cervix cancers than the general California His- panic population.32 Farmworkers also
experienced later stage disease at diagnosis in comparison with the general California Hispanic population for most major cancer
Children exposed to pesticides
sites, which may reflect impaired access to preventative and screening health services.32
seem to show higher relative risks than adults for developing many of these cancers.33 Farmworkers
have decreased mortality from cancers of the lung and bladder, which may be related to a lower prevalence of smoking.14 Very few
studies have focused on hired farmworkers, so data must be interpreted cautiously. Methodological challenges for future research
include the difficulty of followup due to migrancy, the complexities of estimating exposure, and the (in)accuracy of occupational
codes on death certificates. Social and mental health. Migrant
workers face numerous sources of stress,
including job uncertainty, poverty, social and geographic isolation, intense time pressures, poor
housing conditions, intergenerational conflicts, separation from family, lack of recreation, and
health and safety concerns.13,14 Manifestations of stress include relationship problems,
substance abuse, domestic violence, and psychiatric illness. Heavier drinking patterns have been noted in
communities of predominantly single men compared with those consisting primarily of families. Children of migrant
workers experience a sixfold greater risk of mistreatment than children in the general
population.13
Migrant workers are at risk for toxic chemical injuries, organic pollutants, and
chemical and pesticide poisining
Donohoe and Hansen 02 [Martin MD, works at Old Town Clinic and Orgegan Health and
Science University, Eric MD, works at St. Mary’s Medical Center, this report was published in the
Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, produced by Johns Hopkins University,
7/1/2002, “Health Issues of Migrant and Seasonol Farmworkers,”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12739296]ZZ
The full extent of acute and chronic pesticide poisoning among MSFWs is not known, due to the
lack of formal reporting systems, the reluctance of workers to report poisonings, workers’
inability to seek medical treatment when accidents occur, and a dearth of physician knowledge
and training in recognizing and treating pesticide-related illnesses.20 Migrant workers suffer
from the highest rates of toxic chemical injuries of any group of workers in the United States;
the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 300,000 farmworkers suffer acute pesticide
poisoning each year.21 Chemical and pesticide poisoning may result from direct spraying of
workers; indirect spray from wind drifts; direct dermal contact with residues on crops; bathing
in, or drinking, contaminated water; or transfer of residues from contaminated hands while
eating, smoking, or defecating. Acute organophosphate exposure causes increased salivation,
tearing, blurred vision, nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramps, urinary and fecal incontinence,
increased bronchial secretions, cough, wheezing, and sweating. In more severe acute
intoxication, dyspnea, bradycardia, heart block, hypotension, pulmonary edema, paralysis,
convulsions, or death may occur. Long-term pesticide exposure may cause permanent
neurological deficits, such as peripheral neuropathy or deficits in motor skills, memory (or,
attention), and cancer.3,22 This is especially true with certain outlawed (in this country)
persistent organic pollutants, which may have endocrine, reproductive, and oncogenic effects
on pregnant women and on growing children.14,23 Dermatitis. Agricultural workers have a higher
incidence of skin disorders than employees in any other industry; dermatitis is the most common
occupational health problem among MSFWs.13,20 Skin disorders may stem from exposure to pesticides, fertilizers, latex, chemicals,
allergenic plants (e.g., poison ivy, ragweed, and sumac), and allergenic crops (e.g., asparagus, barley, tobacco, celery, lettuce, and
mustard). Sun, sweat, chapped or abraded skin, Hansen, Donohoe 157 lack of protective clothing, and absence of hand-washing
facilities at the worksite all contribute to skin conditions. Because occupational dermatitis often occurs on the hands, migrant
workers may suffer a reduction in their work capability and/or income.20 Heat stress. Strenuous outdoor labor with few, if any, rest
periods, combined with a lack of potable water, contributes to a high incidence of heat stroke, heat exhaustion, and heat cramps.
Farmworkers are four times more likely than nonagricultural workers to suffer from heat-related
illnesses.20 Respiratory conditions. Migrant workers are exposed to many hazardous agents, including
organic and inorganic dusts (e.g., cotton, grain, hay, silica), gases (e.g., NH3, H2S, CO, CO2, CH4,
NO2), herbicides (e.g., Paraquat), fertilizers, solvents, fuels, and welding fumes.14 As a result,
they are at risk for mucous membrane irritation, allergies, asthma, hypersensitivity pneumonitis
(i.e., farmer’s lung), pulmonary fibrosis, chronic bronchitis, pulmonary edema,
tracheobronchitis, emphysema, and asphyxiation.3,13,14,16 Musculoskeletal disorders and traumatic injuries.
Agricultural labor places migrant workers at risk for musculoskeletal disorders as a result of heavy lifting and carrying; prolonged
kneeling, stooping, or otherwise difficult postures; working with the arms above shoulder level; whole body vibration (e.g., tractor
driving); and rapid repetitive motions.3,13,14,20 Workers
face three main categories of problems: traumatic
injuries (e.g., fractures, strains), joint and tissue irritation, and accelerated joint degeneration.
Interventions such as warming up, stretching, and ergonomic education and training might help to reduce traumatic injuries and
chronic musculoskeletal illnesses in this population.13,14 Reproductive health. Prolonged standing and bending, overexertion,
dehydration, poor nutrition, and pesticide or chemical exposure contribute to an increased risk of spontaneous abortion, premature
delivery, fetal malformation and growth retardation, and abnormal postnatal development.18,20,24 Moreover, low socioeconomic
status; frequently young maternal age; and late, little, or no prenatal care increase risk to mother and child.18 The infant mortality
rate among MSFWs has been estimated to be twice the national average.25 In one study of California migrant women, 24 percent
had had at least one miscarriage or stillbirth.26
The children of migrants are at even higher risk

Child health. Althoughthe U.S. government limits the legal age of child labor in most industries to at
least 16 years, for agricultural labor it is 12 years.10,18 Children are particularly vulnerable to
pesticide poisonings and respiratory and communicable diseases. In fact, children may be more
vulnerable than adults to the same dose of pesticides, since they have greater surface area to
body weight ratios than adults, greater circulatory flow rates that affect the distribution of toxic
chemicals, and less mature immune systems that may 158 Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers be
less effective than adults’ immune systems in detoxifying and eliminating hazardous
agents.27During development, changes also occur in liver enzymes that can increase the toxicity of environmental chemicals,
causing a greater proportional impact from the same amount of chemicals.27 Many migrant children are below average height.
They suffer more frequent respiratory, parasitic, and skin infections; chronic diarrhea; vitamin
deficiencies; and dental problems than other children.18,20,28 Children of migrant farmworkers
experience homelessness, frequent moves, poverty, and interruptions of schooling and
friendships that pose both psychosocial and developmental risks.15 Oral health.MSFWs experience
150 to 300 percent more decayed teeth than their peers.29 Dental caries is the most common
untreated health problem in migrant children; at least one-half of farmworker children have at
least one and an average of three carious teeth.18 Children who do not receive dental care are at increased risk of
developing severe periodontal problems as adults. Dental disease results in part from an overall lack of knowledge about dental
care. Many MSFWs have weak knowledge of the relationship between sweet foods and caries and of the positive effects of good
oral hygiene and fluoride on periodontal health.18,30 Cancer. Migrant
workers are exposed to a wide variety of
carcinogens, including pesticides, solvents, oils, fumes, ultraviolet radiation from chronic sun
exposure, and biologic agents such as human and animal viruses. Farm laborers have increased
mortality rates for cancers of the lip, stomach, skin (melanotic and nonmelanotic), prostate,
testes, and hematopoietic and lymphatic systems (e.g., multiple myeloma, and Hodgkin’s and
non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas). 3,13,14,31Arecent study reported that the California members of the United Farm Workers
of America developed more cases of leukemia, stomach cancer, and uterine corpus and cervix cancers than the general California
Hispanic population.32 Farmworkers
also experienced later stage disease at diagnosis in comparison
with the general California Hispanic population for most major cancer sites, which may reflect
impaired access to preventative and screening health services.32 Children exposed to pesticides
seem to show higher relative risks than adults for developing many of these cancers.33 Farmworkers
have decreased mortality from cancers of the lung and bladder, which may be related to a lower prevalence of smoking.14 Very few
studies have focused on hired farmworkers, so data must be interpreted cautiously. Methodological challenges for
future research include the difficulty of followup due to migrancy, the complexities of estimating
exposure, and the (in)accuracy of occupational codes on death certificates. Social and mental
health. Migrant workers face numerous sources of stress, including job uncertainty, poverty,
social and geographic isolation, intense time pressures, poor housing conditions,
intergenerational conflicts, separation from family, lack of recreation, and health and safety
concerns.13,14 Hansen, Donohoe 159 Manifestations of stress include relationship problems, substance abuse, domestic
violence, and psychiatric illness. Heavier drinking patterns have been noted in communities of predominantly single men compared
with those consisting primarily of families. Children
of migrant workers experience a sixfold greater risk of
mistreatment than children in the general population.13 Despite the stressors faced by migrant
workers, their lifetime prevalence of psychiatric disorders actually may be lower than that of
Mexican Americans and of the U.S. population as a whole.34 However, prolonged U.S. residence
leads to an increased risk of psychiatric disorders; the increased risk may be attributed to the
loss of protective sociocultural factors (e.g., cohesive communities based on strong social
support, family ties, language and group identity), or it could represent initially healthy migrants
becoming less psychologically healthy with acculturation over time.34
Legal Status Solves
Migrant farmworkers are afraid due to current immigration policy- legal status
solves.
Block and Peñaloza 17 (Melissa, is a special correspondent and journalist for NPR,
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/09/27/552636014/theyre-scared-immigration-
fears-exacerbate-migrant-farmworker-shortage
On a recent, perfect morning at Johnson Farms in northern Michigan, workers climb wooden ladders high up into the trees, picking
bags strapped across their bodies. The branches are heavy with fruit that glows in the morning sun. Their fingers are a blur, nimbly
plucking fruit and filling bushel bags: about 50 pounds per load. It's hard, sweaty work. Apple season was just getting underway on
Old Mission Peninsula, a finger of land poking into Lake Michigan, dotted with lush farms. The pickers range in age from 21 to 65,
and all of them are Mexican. As
in the rest of the U.S., growers in heavily agricultural northern Michigan
rely overwhelmingly on migrant laborers to work the fields and orchards. According to the farm owners,
the workers either came from Mexico on temporary H2A visas or they have paperwork showing
they are in the U.S. legally. Farmers from Georgia to California say they have a problem: not
enough workers to harvest their crops. It's estimated anywhere from half to three-quarters of
farmworkers are in this country illegally, and some growers say that President Trump's anti-immigrant
rhetoric has made a chronic worker shortage even worse. Johnson Farms' owner, Dean Johnson, 67, says it's
just about impossible to find Americans to do this work. "We've tried. We really have," he says. "Sometimes people come out on a
day like today and they'll pick one box, and then they're gone. They just don't want to do it." "It's really sad," adds Johnson's
daughter, Heatherlyn Johnson Reamer, 44, who manages the farm. "They'll come, they'll check it out, and usually they're gone
within a day or two." Farm manager Heatherlyn Johnson Reamer is pictured with her father, Dean Johnson, who owns Johnson
Farms. Without migrant workers to pick the crops, Reamer says, "There wouldn't be food. It's just as simple as that." Melissa
Block/NPR What's behind the farmworker shortage? For one, a stronger U.S. economy is driving many seasonal workers into better-
paying, year-round work, like construction. "There's a huge need in the trades," Reamer says, "especially when we have natural
disasters like we've seen these last few years with the hurricanes and everything. And we've actually lost workers who said, 'Hey, I
got a job. I'm gonna go work for this construction company in Florida.' And they would leave." Another factor: The children of
migrants are upwardly mobile and are leaving the fields behind. Many are going to college and finding better work opportunities in
professions outside agriculture. Add to that Trump's crackdown on immigration, which many growers
complain is crimping their labor supply. "As we all know, there's a pretty good number of workers in this country
illegally," Dean Johnson says. "They're scared. Those people don't want to travel anymore. They're in Florida
and Texas. They won't come up from Mexico." "There wouldn't be food" Johnson says even though Trump's
aggressive stance on immigration hurts him as a grower, he did vote for him last November. "I was in favor of change," he says.
"There's other things involved, besides the immigration issues." His daughter, Heatherlyn, disagrees. "I was actually very
disappointed that Michigan voted for [Trump]," she says. "We need someone who supports agriculture, someone who supports
diversity in this country." The president's talk about building the border wall leaves her cold: "When we heard that, I said, 'You can't
say things like that.' There are so many migrant workers in this country. You just wonder, do you really see who your population is?"
Without migrant workers to pick the crops, Reamer says, "There wouldn't be food. It's just as
simple as that." She mentions Michigan's asparagus crop of 2016, which had to be mowed under
because there weren't enough workers to pick it. Looking around her orchard, Reamer says, "The one thing the
population doesn't understand, for farmers like us — without the migrant labor, this doesn't happen. You
won't have apples in your supermarkets; they just won't get picked. Because, unfortunately, the
average Joe in the United States doesn't want to go out and do this job for 10 hours a day."
Because of the farm labor shortage, many farms across the country are relying more heavily on
workers from Mexico, brought in through the H2A temporary visa program. The workers earn $12.75 an
hour, at minimum, plus transportation and housing. Farmers complain that the program is cumbersome.
There's a lot of red tape, with multiple federal agencies involved, and it's expensive: It can cost
about $2,000 in fees for each worker they bring in. But the growers need the help. Nationwide, the H2A program has grown by 81
percent over the past five years. Workers are afraid and "nobody wants to come" Across Grand Traverse Bay, a migrant worker
named Marcelino — who asks that we not use his last name because he fears being deported — is at home in the trailer he shares
with his two daughters and his wife, Leticia, who is busy making tortillas for dinner. Marcelino and Leticia are both undocumented;
they work side-by-side in the fields. Their daughters are U.S. citizens, born in Michigan. Marcelino tells me he grew up in the
Mexican state of Guerrero. "My home is in the rural, rural place," he says, a village of 20 homes, so small it doesn't even have a
name. He crossed the border illegally in 1989, when he was just 14, to work in the fields. He has lived in this country ever since. In
the winter, the family lives in Florida, where Marcelino and his wife pick oranges. Come March, they head north to Michigan for field
work — cherries, grapes and apples. The girls switch schools, back and forth. Marcelino
has been making the trip for
28 years now. In the past, he says, migrant families would drive north in a long caravan, seven or
eight vehicles, all filled with workers. Now, he says, "Nobody wants to come." They're too
afraid, Marcelino says, and he's fearful, too. His friends in Florida tell him he's crazy to make the
trip, but he needs the work, and, he says, he doesn't want fear to rule his life. Asked what he would say
to people who argue that the U.S. is a nation of laws, and that undocumented workers are taking jobs away from Americans,
Marcelino says: "I'd tell them, come work with us, and if you like the work, and if you produce as much as we do, then here is your
job." He notes that one of his bosses tells him he would need to hire 10 people to do the work he does. Looking ahead, Marcelino
dreams of a better life for his daughters, who have a boost up as American citizens. One wants to be a police officer; the other, a
surgeon. He warns his girls: Pay attention in school and study hard, or else you could end up like us, coming home from the fields, all
dirty and stinky. He pushes them, he says, because "I want them to be better than us."
The current Immigration system creates a working environment of fear,

dependency, and abuse. Citizenship is key to prevent abuse and recruitment
migrant agricultural workers
Schorn 17 (Tracy, is , October 2017 “The Hands That Feed Us: Immigration Policy and the
Nation's Food Supply “
https://libproxy.law.umich.edu:2132/HOL/Page?collection=barjournals&handle=hein.barjournal
s/washinglyr0032&id=85)
Under the U.S. Department of Justice’s new immigration enforcement guidelines,

undocumented farmworkers are priorities for deportation, a situation that does not bode well
for the agriculture industry, or the farmworkers themselves. The relatively small percentage of
the workforce on H-2A visas cannot possibly make up for the labor shortfall. “The issue of
immigration status is critically important for farmworkers,” says Adrienne DerVartanian, an attorney and
director of immigration and labor rights at the nonprofit Farmworker Justice. “So many of farmworkers’ conditions
are linked to their immigration status. [Undocumented status] makes it difficult for workers to
improve their wages and working conditions.” The H-2A visa is not a solution but a “very
troubling program,” says DerVartanian. The structure “lends itself to abuse” because it ties workers to one
employer. If the worker loses their job, they lose their ability to work in the United States. Often
workers gain entry to the jobs through a middleman to whom they are indebted, which “makes
them more desperate to keep their jobs” and tolerate abuse, she says. DerVartanian also rejects the notion
that a domestic workforce won’t do farm work. “There are still U.S. workers . . . who want these jobs, and it’s important they have
access to the jobs. We’ve seen employers who have a preference for H-2A workers [because] they can’t leave. [The employers]
handpick a young male workforce who are not here with families and who are housed with the employer. As a captive workforce,
they must work when the employer asks them to,” she says. Immigration crackdowns are creating a “very high
level of fear,” DerVartanian adds. “We’ve seen a 38 percent increase in arrests, and the anti-immigration rhetoric has an impact
on farmworkers and their communities. That plays out when workers don’t seek health care, don’t bring
their children to school, or won’t speak up about wage theft and working conditions.” The fear is
“harmful to our whole food system,” DerVartanian says. “If workers can’t speak up about conditions
that may impact the safety of our food, we’re all affected. We should all care about what’s
happening with farmworkers. These workers are doing difficult, dangerous work. They produce
food in difficult conditions — the work is arduous and repetitive. We strongly support
legalization for the current workforce.” Protections granted to other U.S. workers, like a
minimum wage, overtime pay, or occupational safety and standards, have often been excluded
from the agricultural sector, making the employment law issues surrounding farmworkers —
legal and undocumented — exceptionally thorny. “Farmworkers face a lot of discrimination in our labor and
employment laws,” says DerVartanian. “[The laws] were rooted in discrimination against African Americans who were historically
doing the farm work in the South.” Farmworker Justice supports recently proposed legislation, the Agricultural Worker Program Act,
which would shield undocumented farmworkers from deportation and give them a pathway to citizenship. The act was introduced in
May 2017 by Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris of California, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Michael Bennet of
Colorado, and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii. Under the act, farmworkers who have worked in agriculture for at least
100 days in each of the past two years may earn lawful “blue card” status. Farmworkers who
maintain blue card status for the next three or five years, depending on the total hours worked
in agriculture, would be eligible to adjust to a green card or legal permanent residency. “It’s a
challenging time for immigration reform,” says DerVartanian, “but there’s a lot of recognition of the value
farmworkers bring and the impact to our [agricultural] system if we don’t keep a steady labor
supply.” Some policymakers recognize that the country needs the economic contribution of
undocumented immigrants to state and federal tax base. According to a recent report by the Institute on
Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants contribute 8 percent of their annual income
to state and local taxes — or collectively $11.7 billion a year. “To put this in perspective, the top 1 percent of
taxpayers pay an average nationwide effective tax rate of just 5.4 percent,” the report states. Sequeira, the Maryland
immigration attorney, will be there to field calls when the day comes that undocumented immigrants are granted a pathway
to citizenship. “It’s a good time to be an immigration lawyer,” she says. In these uncertain times, she’s encouraged other lawyers to
expand their practices to include immigration. She’s doubtful
a domestic workforce comprised entirely of U.S.
citizens will be adequate to meet the need for farm labor currently supplied by immigrants. “[Not
enough] U.S. workers are willing to do that job in intense heat, with strict long hours and no air conditioning,” Sequeira says, not to
mention low wages and the nonpermanent, seasonal nature of farm labor. “I feel for [immigrant farmworkers]. If
we didn’t
have them, we’d be paying twice to three times the cost for our food. We owe these guys
thanks.”
Undocumented Workers aren’t reporting dangerous conditions because of their

Status
Lee 17 [Stephen, expert at Bloomberg news who covers occupational safety, health issues, and
minining, 3/8/17, Deportation Fears Keep Undocumented Workers From Reporting Hazards,”
https://www.bna.com/deportation-fears-keep-n57982084927/]ZZ
Ricardo is a 50-year-old construction worker who has installed floors and walls in Austin, Texas,
for more than 20 years. But he’s also an undocumented immigrant. And since the Trump
administration began ramping up deportation efforts of people like him, Ricardo says he’s much
less willing to report dangerous conditions on worksites to his supervisor or the government. “I
have less trust,” Ricardo told Bloomberg BNA through an interpreter. “If a crime or violence is going on in my
community, I can’t report it. There’s a fear that they’ll ask about your immigration status. The
fear has been constant since [Donald] Trump became president.” Worker: ‘We’re Afraid’ The
increasing silence is creating steadily more dangerous conditions at worksites, according to
Ricardo. “Many times workers are not receiving safety equipment and are not reporting unsafe
working conditions,” he said. “Safety equipment is not being given out, and many times workers
are afraid to ask or demand it—their safety gloves, glasses, hard hats, a harness when working
on heights.” Claudia, a 45-year old electrician from El Salvador who works in Dallas, tells a similar story. “There’s always been a
fear because deportations have always been happening,” Claudia told Bloomberg BNA, also through an interpreter. “But now with
Trump, there’s added fear, because he’s not a man of his word. We’re afraid that anything we say can be used against us.” Both
Ricardo and Claudia asked that their last names not be used by Bloomberg BNA for fear of
deportation. Spillover Effects Still worse, the dangerous conditions that go unreported on these worksites also endanger other
workers and the general public, said Celeste Monforton, a former policy analyst with the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration. Rather than alerting the authorities, Claudia said she has begun fixing dangerous conditions herself, even if it’s not
her responsibility to do so, because “I want to protect myself and my coworkers, and it’s something that will keep the site safer.”
The fear of deportation is also creating dangerous distractions, Ricardo says. “Workers are
thinking about what could happen if they caught by immigration, and then they don’t work or
drive well with that fear,” he said. “You can’t concentrate on the job or other activities. Before,
you could do your work well. Now, it’s more difficult.” Trust Under Obama Being Eroded? Since taking office,
Trump has followed through on his campaign promises by aggressively increasing deportation efforts. On Jan. 25, he signed
an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to take a more active role in
deporting undocumented immigrants. Trump has said the deportations are focused only on
convicted criminals and those who pose a risk to public safety. Under former President Barack Obama’s
regime, OSHA didn’t ask workers about their citizenship status, said David Michaels, the agency’s former chief. The
Occupational Safety and Health Act stipulates that employers must provide all workers with safe
workplaces, regardless of their status, Michaels told Bloomberg BNA. During the Obama years, OSHA
gradually established trust with undocumented workers, who came to see the agency as an ally, Monforton said, now a lecturer at
George Washington University. But that trust is rapidly being eroded under Trump, she said. Rift With Latino
Communities “There was a slow opening up, over the previous eight years, in recognizing that we have undocumented workers in
the country who are doing some of the most dangerous jobs,” Monforton said. “And more workers said, ‘Wow, they really do listen;
they’re going to go in and confirm whether these hazards and violations exist.’ More trust was built up. And pretty much overnight,
that has changed.” Jose Garza, executive director of the Workers Defense Project, confirmed that Trump’s administration has
created a rift between itself and Latinos working in the U.S. “The
actions that this administration has taken
absolutely have done lasting damage within the Latino community,” Garza told Bloomberg BNA. “Trust has
been broken. It’s going to be very hard for this administration to earn that trust back.” Fears Not Unfounded Monforton said
undocumented workers have solid grounds for fearing that OSHA is notifying Immigration and Customs Enforcement about the
undocumented workers its agents find when they visit workplaces. “That wouldn’t surprise me at all,” Monforton said. “The
president’s rhetoric on this has been so strong, and we’ve seen people swept up in raids. It’s playing out already.” There are few
numbers cataloging the undocumented immigrants who have been affected by Trump’s order. ICE didn’t respond to emails from
Bloomberg BNA or calls for comment. Michaels said
all workers must be protected because otherwise
employers will use undocumented immigrants as stand-ins for their most dangerous jobs. “Why
should employers hire documented workers if protecting them requires an investment in safety,
when they can hire undocumented workers?” Michaels said. Pro-Deportation Forces Speak Out Immigration
reformers, however, argue that it’s precisely because undocumented workers won’t speak up that they should be deported. The
safety problems raised by their unwillingness to flag hazards are themselves an argument in favor of removing them, said David Ray,
a spokesman at the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “If we stop illegal immigration, then no one will ever be looking
over their shoulders, wondering if they’re going to be deported,” Ray told Bloomberg BNA. “Everyone will know they’re protected
from exploitation.
If they wish to come here, they should do so through the legal immigration
process. Then they would enjoy the full protection of America’s labor laws and not be living in
the dark.”
Antibiotic Resistance/Disease
Drug resistant bacteria is on the rise in farms
Mole 14 Beth Mole is an author for sciencenews.org and has participated in research about
diseases on farms [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/drug-resistant-staph-can-cling-farm-
workers-days]
Days after leaving the farm, agricultural workers can still tote farm-reared, drug-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus in their noses. The pig-dwelling bacteria may cause infections in the
workers and could put family and community members at risk, too. In a two-week study, researchers led by
epidemiologist Christopher Heaney of Johns Hopkins University collected nasal swabs from 22 hog farm workers in eastern North
Carolina. Nineteen of the workers, or 86 percent, carried staph at some point during the study, and around half had a multidrug-
resistant strain. That’s
compared with only about a third of people in the general population who
carry staph and only about 5 percent who harbor drug-resistant strains. About half of the farm workers
also consistently carried the germs throughout the study period, even if they left the farm for up to four days. Some earlier studies
had suggested that staph bacteria hang around in workers’ noses only for about 24 hours. In general, the
longer someone
carries a germ, the greater their chances of getting sick or of transmitting it to others. The new
results appear September 8 in Occupational & Environmental Medicine. With limited data, the team can’t say how many workers
went on to develop staph infections or whether the bacteria spread to other people. But the work provides important first steps
toward answering those questions, Heaney says. Industrial hog farms are a known source of drug-resistant staph, including
methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.Staph naturally lives on pigs and because many
modern farms use high levels of antibiotics, farms have long been feared to breed drug
resistance. But epidemiologists and public health advocates lack enough data to say whether farms pose a health threat to
workers and neighboring communities. Collecting data on the health of farm laborers has been difficult
because workers are often reluctant to participate in scientific studies, says epidemiologist Tara
Smith of Kent State University in Ohio: Some may be undocumented immigrants and others may
simply be afraid of backlash from employers. It’s also difficult to get people to repeatedly and consistently swab
their noses for staph samples, even if they are interested in participating, she says. For the new study, Heaney partnered with
researchers and community advocates who work in eastern North Carolina, which has the highest density of pig farms in the United
States. Members of the advocacy group Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help met with workers to explain the study
and to anonymously enroll participants. “There’s never any names or addresses given out,” project manager Devon Hall says. “It’s a
trust issue.” Enrolled workers were healthy throughout the study and the majority worked more than 50 hours a week. Some
worked with upwards of 5,000 hogs a day. The researchers collected 327 swabs after asking workers to swab their noses every
morning and evening for seven days and again for one day a week later. This schedule allowed researchers to track which staph
strains the workers picked up and how long they carried the microbes. Half
of the samples were multidrug resistant
— immune to three or more drugs — and one worker carried MRSA throughout the study. Most
of the staph strains had telltale genetic signs of originating in farms, suggesting that the workers
hadn’t picked up the germs elsewhere. Further genetic studies should help pin down the path of bacteria that may
move between pigs and people, Smith says.
Farms are unique breeding grounds for ABR

Antibiotic Resistance and the Industrial Animal Farm 10 Pew applies a rigorous,
analytical approach to improve public policy, inform the public, and invigorate civic life. As the
country and the world have evolved, we have remained dedicated to our founders’ emphasis on
innovation. Today, Pew is a global research and public policy organization, still operated as an
independent, non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to serving the public.
[http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2010/02/08/antibiotic-
resistance-and-the-industrial-animal-farm]
Antibiotics are commonly prescribed drugs that kill bacteria or suppress their ability to grow, allowing the human immune system to
respond and heal from illness. Antibiotic
resistance is a dangerous bacterial trait which enables bacteria
to survive and continue to grow instead of being inhibited or destroyed by therapeutic doses of
the drug. As a result, antibiotic-resistant bacteria can evade the effects of the antibiotic and
multiply, with severe consequences for human health. For example, some of the major bacterial causes of illness
in the United States, including E. coli1,1 Salmonella, Campylobacter, Enterococcus2, Streptococcus3 and Staphylococcus4 are
increasingly resistant to treatment with first-line antibiotics. The
trait for resistance to an antibiotic is a result of
mutations in the genetic material of bacteria. These mutations can occur spontaneously, be inherited or simply be
transmitted between bacteria, spreading very easily. Moreover, because a gene that provides resistance to one type of antibiotic is
often located right next to another gene that provides resistance to a different type of antibiotic, the result is often multidrug
resistance. The rise of multidrug resistance has been documented in a study of incoming patients to a Boston hospital from 1998 to
2003, which showed that the likelihood of multidrug resistance in E. coli increased from two to almost 20 percent during the study
period.5 Repeated and improper use of antibiotics appears to be the main cause of the increase in
antibiotic-resistant bacteria. In general, low doses of antibiotics for long durations are more likely to cause resistance.6
Antibiotic-resistant genes can also be acquired through our food supply: bacteria present in food-producing animals may be
resistant, and humans can acquire these bacteria when they eat meat from these animals or do not use proper hygiene techniques
during food preparation.7 Farm
workers also are at risk of exposure to drug-resistant bacteria and can
transfer resistant infections to the broader public if they become ill.8 Lastly, antibiotic-resistant bacteria
can reach the human community through surface and groundwater that has been contaminated by farm animal waste.9 Antibiotic
Use and Resistance in Humans Versus Farm Animals In humans, antibiotic use is generally confined to treatment of illness. In
contrast, antibiotics are used in cattle, poultry and swine not only for disease treatment, but
also for disease prevention and growth promotion. In fact, many estimates suggest that
nontherapeutic (i.e., not to treat disease) agricultural use of antibiotics and related drugs accounts for approximately 70
percent of all antibiotic use in the U.S.10 While treatment and prevention usually involve high doses of antibiotics for short periods
of time, antibiotics used for animal growth enhancement are generally given in low doses for long periods of time. Compounding the
problem is that antibiotics are generally distributed via feed or water to entire herds or flocks, including animals that are not ill.
Many antibiotics that are used in food animal production belong to the same classes that are used to treat humans. These include
tetracyclines, penicillins, cephalosporins and macrolides, among others.11 The similarity between human and animal drugs
frequently means that bacteria resistant to antibiotics used in animals also are likely to be resistant to those used in humans.
Impacts on Public Health The public health implications of antibiotic-resistant bacteria go far beyond the immediate threat of
infection. Because
the infection lingers while an effective antibiotic is identified, the potential for
more severe illnesses, and transmission to others, are greatly increased. This is troubling for public health
and our health care system on several different levels. Contagious infection risk is multiplied, as an infected person may spread the
illness before finding an effective antibiotic. More severe illnesses result in both higher frequency and longer duration of
hospitalizations, raising the cost of health care. Researchers with the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics and Cook County
Hospital in Chicago estimate the extra costs to the U.S. health care system due to antibiotic-resistant infections range from $16.6
billion to $26 billion per year.12 There
is an overall higher risk of complications and death as there are
fewer effective drugs available to treat serious infections. One study estimates that in 2005 MRSA infections
(methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), a severe bacterial infection that is resistant to antibiotics, caused over 18,000 deaths
in the United States13—a mortality level greater than that of AIDS.14 Children, the elderly and individuals with cancer and other
immune-compromising illnesses face the greatest risk of acquiring an antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection. According to the
Infectious Disease Society of America, 90,000 people die each year of a hospital-acquired infectious disease. Of these individuals, an
estimated 70 percent have infections that are resistant to at least one antibiotic drug.15 Urgent action is needed to address
antibiotic resistance. Individuals can improve resistance to infections through good hygiene and avoiding taking prescription
antibiotics unnecessarily. Antibiotic resistance in bacteria should continue to be monitored, and data collection should be improved
regarding antibiotic use. However,
the most critical step to ensure the availability and efficacy of
antibiotic drugs is to create policies that drastically reduce their use where they are being
applied most inappropriately and in the greatest numbers: in the production of our food supply.
Labor camp conditions facilitate pesticide poisonings and infectious diseases.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12739296)
*MSFWs = migrant and seasonal farmworkers*

Socioeconomic conditions According to the Economic Research Institute of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. agricultural
industry’s net farm income during the 1990s was $45.5 billion per year.7 Agricultural workers cultivate and/or hand- harvest up to
85 percent of fruits and vegetables produced by this industry.8 One-half of all individual farmworkers earns less
than $7,500 per year, and one-half of all farmworker families earns less than $10,000 per year.4
Conse- quently, 61 percent of all individual farmworkers, and 50 percent of those with three to
five family members, have incomes below federal poverty levels (individual: $8,860/year, three to five family
members: $15,020 to $21,180/ year).9 While some employers provide labor camps for MSFWs, attempts
to enforce housing standards by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA) have created a trend toward dis- continuing this practice.10 Many employers
are unable or unwilling to pay for the construction and maintenance of standard-meeting labor camps. Those farmworkers
unable to find employer-provided housing units use local pri-vate housing that is not subject to
federal regulation. Private housing tends to be substandard and expensive.10 Since units are
rarely equipped with laundry facilities, pesticide- contaminated clothing may be washed in the
same sink in which food is prepared or in the bathtub in which children are bathed. Housing
camps may also be located next to pesticide-treated fields, resulting in persistent pesticide
exposure via drift or even direct spray. Although some housing is well kept, many camps are
overcrowded, with poor ventilation and inadequate, faulty, or even nonexistent plumbing. In
this environment, infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, spread easily. Garbage heaps and
stagnant water breed rodents and insects, which can further harbor and transmit zoonotic
diseases such as tularemia, anthrax, or rickettsial infections. Unfortunately, some MSFWs do not have access
to or cannot afford housing; they may be forced to sleep in tents, vans, cars, or even ditches or open fields.10,11 Migrant camps are
not easy for the public or government to find, especially when they are privately owned. One of the many barns seen from a
distance while driving on a rural road might, in fact, be a labor camp (Figure 1).
Farming Creates the Conditions for the spread of antimicrobial-resistant

bacteria to the rest of the US
Fitch, Hricko, and Martin 17[Claire, Director of Outreach at Farm Forward and a Masters of
Science in Public Health, Carolyn, a research program manger with the Food System Policy
The adverse health effects and risks associated with working in U.S. food production and
processing systems may follow workers to their homes and communities. The majority of
undocumented farmworkers are married and have children (though their family members may
not live with them or in the U.S.), and 49% live in households with children under the age of 18.7
Moreover, the majority of migrant, seasonal, and immigrant farmworkers stay or live
immediately within agricultural areas, either in on-farm dwellings or labor camps, or in private
market single-family houses or apartments.12 While the risk of workplace injury may not transfer to the families or
peers of agricultural and meat processing workers, these populations
may face other health hazards related to
the agriculture industry, including pesticide exposure, poor air quality, contaminated water, and
increased pathogen presence. Children living in agricultural communities are especially
susceptible to pesticide exposure and have an increased risk of exposure to environmental
contaminants, as compared to adults, due to their physiology and behavior (e.g. crawling and
putting objects in the mouth).125-127 Multiple studies, conducted across various U.S.
agricultural regions, have detected pesticide metabolites in the urine of children of farmworker
households.126-130 Exposure to organophosphorus pesticides—detected in the urine of pregnant
women and children living in agricultural communities130—has been associated with decreased
mental development and attention deficits.131,132 A 2012 study found an inverse association between birth weight
and the number 21 of pesticides detected in cord blood, leading to calls for more research on the effects of exposure to mixtures of
multiple pesticides in addition to individual pesticides.133 Residents
of agricultural areas may also be exposed
to air and water contaminated by agricultural inputs and wastes. Just as workers may be exposed to
particulate matter, gases, VOCs, pathogens, and pesticides via air, people living near farms and/or animal production operations are
also exposed to agricultural air pollution and may experience health impacts similar to those observed among workers.62,134-136
Odor from animal production operations has been found to induce eye, nose, and throat
irritation, trigger nausea, vomiting, headaches, stress, and negative mood, and disrupt nearby
residents’ daily activities.136 Often, animal production is concentrated in rural, low-income areas; swine feeding
operations, for example, are located disproportionately in low-income communities of color,137 and researchers have
predicted that a fear of reprisals—in areas where employment options are limited—may
discourage residents from reporting malodor or related health concerns to their representative
officials.138 Harmful nutrients, drug residues, pathogens, and other contaminants from crop fields and animal operations can run
off into surface water or leach into groundwater,139 putting those who rely on those water sources at risk. Environmental
inequities have been observed in drinking water quality, with higher nitrate levels found in
community water systems that serve areas in which a larger percentage of the population is
Latino and homeownership rates are lower.140 Residents of agricultural areas and workers presumably face a
similar level of risk associated with water contamination by manure and agricultural wastes, since exposure to
contaminated drinking and/or recreational water often happens near the farm, though workers may
face less or varying exposure depending on whether they live near the farm and if they are traveling from farm to farm. Families
and nearby residents of agricultural workers may also face a greater risk of contracting an
antimicrobial-resistant infection, as workers in animal production have been found to have a
greater risk of carrying antimicrobial-resistant bacteria than the general population,70 and
studies have suggested that workers may transport resistant bacteria out of the workplace to
their families and communities.70,141 There has been a documented shift in farm labor housing in recent years, with
fewer employers offering on-farm housing or labor camps and more workers seeking private market housing, which is not subject to
federal regulation.12 Poor housing conditions in agricultural areas may place children and families HEALTH IMPACTS EXTEND 22 of
farmworkers at increased risk of certain health problems, and the housing environments in which people live early in life may have
long-term negative health effects.142 Many
farmworker households are located near agricultural fields,
and pesticide drift and residues have been documented in these homes; since children live in
the majority of these households, they are thought to be at risk of pesticide-related illness and
developmental disorders.127,130 Crowded living conditions have also been found to increase
residents’ exposure to environmental toxicants and communicable disease.143 The California
Agricultural Workers Health Study found that overcrowding is common in farm labor housing
and that extremely overcrowded conditions are prevalent when multiple families share an
apartment or house (41% of male participants and 31% of female participants in the survey
reported sharing housing with unrelated persons).144 While the majority of participants reported renting, 11%
lived in informal dwellings—a place of residence not recognized by the U.S. Postal Service or county tax assessors—including mobile
homes, garages, sheds, abandoned equipment or animal facilities, or cars.145 As the authors of a review of housing characteristics
of farmworker families in North Carolina concluded, “Farmworker housing is generally characterized as crowded, in disrepair, lacking
basic facilities (e.g., indoor plumbing) and appliances (e.g., washing machines, fully functioning stovetops), located near fields in
which pesticides are applied, and costly.”145 Sanitation issues have been documented in both employer-provided and private
housing. In
many cases, there are no laundry facilities, ventilation is poor, and plumbing is
inadequate or nonexistent.44 This means that contaminated clothing worn at work may be
washed in the same sink or basin in which food is prepared, or in the bathtub where children are
bathed.44 And when agricultural workers cannot find or afford housing, they may resort to sleeping outdoors or in tents or
cars.44 These private housing situations may be hidden from public view or government officials, so it is difficult to assess the
sanitation risks facing workers and their families. Aware of these issues, the Department of Labor announced in July 2016 that it
would provide $81 million in grants through the National Farmworker Jobs Program to assist migrant and seasonal farmworkers with
training, employment, and housing.146 Poor worker health and hygiene are frequently linked to foodborne outbreaks, as reflected
in food safety policy and discussions. But worker health and hygiene are also subject to social determinants of health and influenced
by workers’ limited economic resources, which may lead to increased vulnerability to disease.147 Recent
research has
called for a shift in the food safety 23 narrative to address the broader social and structural
factors influencing worker health and hygiene.147 Efforts to address food safety through
improved worker health must not only focus on increasing workers’ education of health and
hygiene practices, but must also confront the socioeconomic factors and poor and unsafe
working and housing conditions that may lead to food safety concerns in the workplace.
Migrant conditions put workers at higher risk for viral infection

Although MSFWs and their families suffer from the same health problems found in the general
population, the occupational hazards, poverty, substandard living conditions, migrancy, and
language and cultural barriers that they face result in unique health hazards as well. As a result, the
average life expectancy of MSFWs is 49 years, compared with the national average of 75 years.15 Various categories of health
problems faced by MSFWs are discussed below. Infectious disease. Migrant
workers are at increased risk for
contracting a variety of viral, bacterial, fungal, and parasitic infections.13,15-19 They are
approximately 6 times more likely to have tuberculosis than the general population; up to 44
percent of migrants have positive purified protein derivative of tuberculin skin tests.13 Parasitic
infection rates are 11 to 59 times higher than in the general population.15 Untreated parasitic
conditions can lead to chronic anemia or malnutrition. There is a high incidence of sexually
transmitted diseases, primarily among young, single men in labor camps, who face social
isolation and have limited recreational facilities. While the national seroprevalence rate of HIV infection is 0.4
percent, HIV seroprevalence rates among migrant workers are 2.6 to 13 percent.17-19 Migrant women are at particular risk of
contracting HIV because of boyfriends or husbands visiting prostitutes; variable cultural beliefs about the use of contraceptive
methods such as condoms; and a lack of access to educational, counseling, and preventive services.18 Migrant
workers are
also at increased risk for urinary tract infections, partly as a result of a lack of toilets at the
workplace and stringent working conditions that promote chronic urine retention.10,20 Urinary
retention in turn encourages bacterial growth and stretches and weakens the bladder wall; this
in turn promotes chronic infections or colonization.
Antibiotic Resistance Impact
Antibiotic-resistant Diseases pose apocalyptic threat
Sample 13 [Ian, science correspondent at the guardian, 1/23/13, “Antibiotic-resistant disease
pose ‘apocalyptic’ threat top expert says,”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jan/23/antibiotic-resistant-diseases-apocalyptic-
threat]ZZ
Britain's most senior medical adviser has warned MPs that the rise in drug-resistant diseases
could trigger a national emergency comparable to a catastrophic terrorist attack, pandemic flu
or major coastal flooding. Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, said the threat from infections
that are resistant to frontline antibiotics was so serious that the issue should be added to the
government's national risk register of civil emergencies. She described what she called an "apocalyptic
scenario" where people going for simple operations in 20 years' time die of routine infections
"because we have run out of antibiotics". The register was established in 2008 to advise the public and businesses on
national emergencies that Britain could face in the next five years. The highest priority risks on the latest register include a deadly flu
outbreak, catastrophic terrorist attacks, and major flooding on the scale of 1953, the last occasion on which a national emergency
was declared in the UK. Speaking
to MPs on the Commons science and technology committee, Davies
said she would ask the Cabinet Office to add antibiotic resistance to the national risk register in
the light of an annual report on infectious disease she will publish in March. Davies declined to
elaborate on the report, but said its publication would coincide with a government strategy to promote more responsible use of
antibiotics among doctors and the clinical professions. "We need to get our act together in this country," she told the committee.
She told the Guardian: ""There are few public health issues of potentially greater importance for society than antibiotic resistance. It
means we are at increasing risk of developing infections that cannot be treated – but resistance can be managed. "That is why we
will be publishing a new cross-government strategy and action plan to tackle this issue in early spring." The
issue of drug
resistance is as old as antibiotics themselves, and arises when drugs knock out susceptible
infections, leaving hardier, resilient strains behind. The survivors then multiply, and over time
can become unstoppable with frontline medicines. Some of the best known are so-called
hospital superbugs such as MRSA that are at the root of outbreaks among patients. "In the past,
most people haven't worried because we've always had new antibiotics to turn to," said Alan
Johnson, consultant clinical scientist at the Health Protection Agency. "What has changed is that
the development pipeline is running dry. We don't have new antibiotics that we can rely on in
the immediate future or in the longer term." Changes in modern medicine have exacerbated the
problem by making patients more susceptible to infections. For example, cancer treatments
weaken the immune system, and the use of catheters increases the chances of bugs entering
the bloodstream. "We are becoming increasingly reliant on antibiotics in a whole range of areas of medicine. If we don't have
new antibiotics to deal with the problems of resistance we see, we are going to be in serious trouble," Johnson added. The supply of
new antibiotics has dried up for several reasons, but a major one is that drugs companies see greater profits in medicines that treat
chronic conditions, such as heart disease, which patients must take for years or even decades. "There is a broken market model for
making new antibiotics," Davies told the MPs. Davies has met senior officials at the World Health Organisation and her counterparts
in other countries to develop a strategy to tackle antibiotic resistance globally. Drug
resistance is emerging in diseases
across the board. Davies said 80% of gonorrhea was now resistant to the frontline antibiotic
tetracycline, and infections were rising in young and middle-aged people. Multi-drug resistant
TB was also a major threat, she said. Another worrying trend is the rise in infections that are
resistant to powerful antibiotics called carbapenems, which doctors rely on to tackle the most
serious infections. Resistant bugs carry a gene variant that allows them to destroy the drug.
What concerns some scientists is that the gene variant can spread freely between different
kinds of bacteria, said Johnson. Bacteria resistant to carbapenems were first detected in the UK in 2003, when three
cases were reported. The numbers remained low until 2007, but have since leapt to 333 in 2010, with 217 cases in the first six
months of 2011, according to the latest figures from the HPA.
The threat of ABRs is on the rise says WHO

Knapton 17 [Sarah, science editor at the Telegraph, 2/27/17, “Superbugs which pose greatest
threat to humanity identified by World Health Organization,”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/02/27/a/]ZZ
Superbugs which cause sepsis, pneumonia, and salmonella will soon be resistant to antibiotics,
the World Health Organisation has warned as it called on governments to stop relying on
pharmaceutical companies to solve the crisis. Health officials have drawn up a list of 12 types of
bacteria which pose the "greatest threat to human health" because soon no drugs will be able
to fight them off. Experts have previously warned that resistance to the drugs that are used to
fight infections could cause a bigger threat to mankind than cancer. If antibiotics lose their effectiveness,
key medical procedures - including organ transplantation, Caesarean sections, joint replacements and chemotherapy - could become
too dangerous to perform. Around
700,000 people around the world die annually due to drug-resistant
infections and, if no action is taken, it has been estimated that such infections will kill 10 million
people a year by 2050. Now, the WHO has come up with a list of antibiotic-resistant "priority pathogens" - 12 families of
bacteria that pose the greatest threat to human health. Medical research charity the Wellcome Trust said that the list was important
to steer research into new antibiotics. Even minor
infections could kill of bugs become resistant to
antibiotics The bacteria on this list can cause severe and often deadly infections such as
bloodstream infections and pneumonia and the most critical group includes multi-drug resistant
bacteria that pose a particular threat in hospitals and nursing homes. Other increasingly drug-resistant
bacteria, which are deemed 'high' and medium' priority, cause more common diseases such as gonorrhoea and food poisoning
caused by salmonella. "Antibiotic resistance is growing and we are fast running out of treatment options," said Dr Marie-Paule Kieny,
WHO's assistant director-general for health systems and innovation. "If we leave it to market forces alone, the new antibiotics we
most urgently need are not going to be developed in time." The WHO said that it hoped the list would spur governments to put in
place policies to incentivise the development of new drugs. Experts came up with the list by examining a number of criteria,
including how deadly the infections the bacteria cause are and whether new antibiotics to treat them are already in the pipeline.
Commenting on the publication of the list, Tim Jinks, head of drug resistant infections at Wellcome Trust, said:
"This priority
pathogens list, developed with input from across our community, is important to steer research
in the race against drug resistant infection - one of the greatest threats to modern health.
"Without effective drugs, doctors cannot treat patients. "Within a generation, without new
antibiotics, deaths from drug resistant infection could reach 10 million a year. "Without new
medicines to treat deadly infection, lifesaving treatments like chemotherapy and organ
transplant, and routine operations like caesareans and hip replacements will be potentially fatal.
"Wellcome is committed to helping tackle this growing problem, guided by WHO priorities." Here
is the full list of the bacteria, broken down according to the urgency of need for new antibiotics. These are considered to
be of "critical" priority. Acinetobacter baumannii, carbapenem-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa,
carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, carbapenem-resistant, ESBL-producing The following are considered
to be of "high" priority. Enterococcus faecium, vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, methicillin-
resistant, vancomycin-intermediate and resistant Helicobacter pylori, clarithromycin-resistant Campylobacter spp.,
fluoroquinolone-resistant Salmonellae, fluoroquinolone-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae, cephalosporin-resistant,
fluoroquinolone-resistant The final three are deemed to be of "medium" priority. Streptococcus
pneumoniae, penicillin-non-susceptible Haemophilus influenzae, ampicillin-resistant Shigella spp.,
Sexual Violence
Immigrant farmworkers reluctant to report sexual violence among other
abuses—dependency, deportation, faulty U visa allocation, unreliable
enforcement.
HRW 12 (Human Rights Watch, nonprofit, nongovernmental human rights organization, “US:
Sexual Violence, Harassment of Immigrant Farmworkers,” Human Rights Watch, 05/15/12,
https://www.hrw.org/news/2012/05/15/us-sexual-violence-harassment-immigrant-
farmworkers)
(New York) – Hundreds of thousands of immigrant farmworker women and girls in the United States
face a high risk of sexual violence and sexual harassment in their workplaces because US
authorities and employers fail to protect them adequately, Human Rights Watch said in a report released
today. The current US Senate bill reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) would go some way toward fixing the
problem and should be enacted, but much more needs to be done, Human Rights Watch said. The 95-page report,
“Cultivating Fear: The Vulnerability of Immigrant Farmworkers in the US to Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment,” describes
rape, stalking, unwanted touching, exhibitionism, or vulgar and obscene language by
supervisors, employers, and others in positions of power. Most farmworkers interviewed said
they had experienced such treatment or knew others who had. And most said they had not reported
these or other workplace abuses, fearing reprisals. Those who had filed sexual harassment claims or reported
sexual assault to the police had done so with the encouragement and assistance of survivor advocates or attorneys in the face of
difficult challenges. “Rape, groping, and obscene language by abusive supervisors should not be part of the hard labor conditions
that immigrant farmworkers endure while producing the nation’s food,” said Grace Meng, researcher in the US Program at Human
Rights Watch and author of the report. “Instead of being valued for their contributions, immigrant farmworkers are subject to a
dysfunctional immigration system and labor laws that exclude them from basic protections most workers take for granted.” The
report is based on interviews with over 160 farmworkers, attorneys, members of the agricultural industry, service providers, police,
and other experts across the country. More than 50 women were interviewed who work with a variety of crops in California, North
Carolina, and New York. Farmworkers described experiences such as the following: A woman in California reported that a supervisor
at a lettuce company raped her and later told her that she “should remember it’s because of him that [she has] this job.” A
woman in New York said that a supervisor, when she picked potatoes and onions, would touch women’s
breasts and buttocks. If they tried to resist, he would threaten to call immigration or fire them.
Four women who had worked together packing cauliflower in California said a supervisor would regularly expose himself and make
comments like, “[That woman] needs to be fucked!” When they tried to defend one young woman whom he singled out for
particular abuse, he fired all of them.. The
abusers are well aware of the relative power they have over
their victims and so certain groups seem to be particularly vulnerable, Human Rights Watch found.
These include girls and young women, recent immigrants, single women, and indigenous
women, especially those with limited ability to speak Spanish or English. “Farmworker women
can feel utterly powerless in the face of abusive supervisors or employers, and with good reason,” Meng
said. “The abusers often repeat their actions over long periods of time, even after some workers
complain.” Farmworker victims of sexual abuse face significant hurdles to obtaining justice. At least 50 percent of the
agricultural workforce consists of unauthorized immigrants, who fear being deported if they
complain. One farmworker told Human Rights Watch that she had been deported while her
sexual harassment lawsuit was pending. When another unauthorized immigrant overcame her fear of the police to
report her rape to them, her supervisor was arrested. But rather than being charged and prosecuted, he was deported, and she had
heard reports that he planned to come back. Even
the small proportion of immigrant farmworkers working
with guest worker visas are vulnerable because they are dependent on their employers to
remain in legal status, and thus are often just as reluctant to report workplace abuses. The few
victims who do report the abuse face lengthy and difficult legal processes that are sometimes
impossible to access for migratory, low-income workers with limited English proficiency.
Furthermore, the increased involvement of local law enforcement in immigration enforcement
through programs like Secure Communities and state laws like Arizona’s SB 1070 and Alabama’s HB 56 have fueled fears of
the police and other governmental authorities in rural immigrant communities. US law does provide
one limited but important protection for some immigrant farmworkers who are survivors of sexual violence, Human Rights Watch
said. The
U visa provides temporary legal status to victims of certain serious crimes if they have
suffered substantial physical or mental abuse and if they cooperate with the investigation. The visa
thus encourages unauthorized immigrants to report crimes to the police. Yet even this limited protection could soon be eviscerated.
As Congress debates the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, proposed provisions to strengthen the U visa have
come under attack, while some versions of the bill in the House have imposed arbitrary and unreasonable barriers to survivors
applying for the U visa. “Every day that it fails to enact immigration reform, Congress puts more farmworker women at risk for
sexual abuse,” Meng said. “The least Congress can do now is to reauthorize VAWA with stronger protections for immigrant women.”
As important as they are, the proposed provisions strengthening the U visa would not overcome all the
barriers that farmworkers face to seeking remedies for sexual abuse, Human Rights Watch said. To
apply for a U visa the victim must get a certification that he or she cooperated with a law
enforcement investigation. But law enforcement officials vary widely in their willingness to
certify victims, due to a mistaken belief that they are helping unauthorized immigrants “get green cards.” Farmworkers
are also excluded from basic worker protection laws that apply to nearly every other worker in
the US, including prohibitions against child labor and protection of the right to collective
bargaining. The laws that do apply are not adequately enforced, and many farmworkers who spoke
to Human Rights Watch reported experiencing or witnessing other workplace violations, such as wage
theft, pesticide exposure, and child labor. In such an environment, farmworkers are unlikely to
have faith in the ability of employers and authorities to rectify abuses, including sexual abuses.
Finally, like other victims of sexual assault in the US, farmworker survivors often encounter law enforcement agencies that do not
vigorously investigate complaints. Both
international law and US law recognize that all workers, including
unauthorized immigrant workers, are entitled to the same workplace protections as US workers.
These provisions exist to minimize employers’ incentives to hire an easily exploitable workforce.
Farm workers face legal slavery and sexual abuse

Fitch, Hricko, and Martin 17 [Claire, Director of Outreach at Farm Forward and a Masters
of Science in Public Health, Carolyn, a research program manger with the Food System Policy
Poor working and living conditions for undocumented, immigrant agricultural workers have been found to cross the line into slavery
Investigations by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) have found
and human trafficking.
workers in conditions that meet the definition of slavery under federal law; workers have
reportedly been forced to live in box trucks, have been found with their arms chained, and have
shown signs of physical abuse.148 The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice has invoked the Victims of
Trafficking and Violence Protection Act to prosecute employers for recruiting, harboring, transporting, or obtaining a worker for
labor through the use of force, fraud, or coercion.148 While
not all poor working and living conditions
constitute a violation of human rights, it is important to recognize the occurrence of such
violations in the U.S. and to employ the necessary preventive and judicial measures to protect
workers’ rights and safety. U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents, foreign nationals with
temporary work visas and undocumented immigrants are all vulnerable to labor trafficking in
the agricultural sector,149,150 but a report prepared for the National Institute of Justice found
that a worker’s lack of legal status has been identified as the strongest and most consistent
predictor of experiencing trafficking and other violations.151 Labor exploitation and abuse, while a frequent
and significant problem for agricultural and meat processing workers, does not always represent a case of human trafficking.152 It is
only when employers exert control over workers through coercion, fraud, and force—convincing workers that they are bound to
their situation without means of escape or the ability to choose other options—that human trafficking is established.149,152
Agricultural workers are particularly vulnerable to labor trafficking and exploitation due to the
isolated conditions of agricultural work, and the exclusion of migrant and seasonal workers from
labor laws.149,150,152 In addition, the seasonality and temporary nature of farm labor results in a high turnover of workers,
leading agricultural workers to frequently move between jobs and thereby increasing their exposure to traffickers.149 Isolated,
temporary labor situations also prevent agricultural workers from assimilating into local
communities, limiting their access to social services and support networks, and their
understanding of local laws and labor rights.152 24 Some of the coercive tactics used in human trafficking include
threatening the victim and their family members with harm, trapping victims through debt bondage, and confiscation of passports
and visas.149 Employers
may also purposely deceive workers and lie about the conditions of the
work and their intentions. They may also redefine the terms of contracts, withhold wages, and
charge extortionate recruitment fees for what turns out to be low wage or unpaid work.149,150
Employers often exert control over victims by prohibiting the movement of farmworkers and their communication with the outside
world, which is very effective given the isolated nature of rural farm work.149,150 In
addition, workers who are
undocumented or have temporary immigration status are less likely to report abuses and
trafficking activities to law enforcement, and less likely to seek out and utilize assistance
programs.150 Physical and/or sexual abuse is also frequently used as a tactic to force workers to
comply with the employer demands.149 One study found that more than 60% of surveyed female
farmworkers had experienced sexual harassment.153 The New York Times reported that an immigrant
farmworker in Iowa told her lawyer, “We though it was normal in the United States that in
order to keep your job, you had to have sex.”154 Several barriers prevent sexually harassed farmworkers from
filing complaints, including a lack of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission offices in rural areas (and limited hours and
Spanish-speaking staff in these offices), a requirement by government agencies that complaints must be filed online, and
discouragement from the fact that sexual harassment investigations can last for months or years.154
Fear of deportation deters guestworkers from reporting sexual harassment.

SPLC 13 (Southern Poverty Law Center, nonprofit civil rights organization, “CLOSE TO SLAVERY:
Guestworker Programs in the United States,” 2013,
https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/d6_legacy_files/downloads/publication/SPLC-
Close-to-Slavery-2013.pdf)
sexUaL harassMenT women are particularly vulnerable to discrimination. numerous women have reported con-
cerns about severe sexual harassment on the job. There have been no studies that quantify this problem among
guestworkers. however, in a 1993 survey of farmworker women in California, more than 90% reported
that sexual harassment was a major problem on the job.84 In 1995, eeoC representatives met with
farmworkers in Fresno, Calif., as part of an effort to develop a more vigorous enforcement program in the agricultural industry.
william r. Tamayo, regional attorney for the eeoC in San Francisco, said, “we were told that hundreds,
if not thousands, of
women had to have sex with supervisors to get or keep jobs and/or put up with a constant
barrage of grabbing and touching and propositions for sex by supervisors.”85 The farmworkers, in fact,
referred to one company’s field as the “ fil de calzon,” or “ field of panties,” because so many women had been raped by supervisors
there.86 More recently, a study published in 2010 found that among 150 Mexican women and women
of Mexican descent who were working the fields of California’s Central valley, 80% said they had
experienced some form of sexual harassment.87 That same year, the SPLC conducted in- depth
interviews with approximately 150 immigrant women working in the u.S. food industry who
were either undocumented or had spent time in the united States as undocumented workers.
virtually all of the women said sexual harassment was a serious problem, and a majority had personally experienced
some form of it while working in the fields, packinghouses or processing plants. “Many, however, were
not even familiar with the concept,” the SPLC report, Injustice on Our Plates, says, “As less acculturated immigrant women, they
struggled to understand the notion of sexual harassment, let alone grasp the means and methods of reporting an incident. Indeed,
many were not aware of their rights and seemed to regard incidents of sexual harassment and
sexual violence as yet another unpleasant aspect of their job that they had no choice but to
endure.” The report told the story of one Mexican women who was brutally raped by a
supervisor after her shift at a meatpacking plant but refused to report the attack to police
because of her fear of both the police and the rapist. her complaint to the company was met with
indifference.88 Given the acute vulnerability of guestworkers in general, one can extrapolate that women
guestworkers are extraordinarily defenseless in the face of sexual harassment. Indeed, given the
power imbalance between employers and their guestworkers, it is hard to imagine how a guest-
worker facing harassment on the job could alleviate her situation. Assuming that she, like most
workers, had taken out substantial debt to obtain the job and given that she would not be per-
mitted to work for any employer other than the offender, her options would be severely limited.
Martina*, a guestworker from Mexico, has first-hand experience with gender discrimination and sexual harassment. She came to the
united States with an h-2B visa to process crabs. She knew from past work that men always process oysters and women always
process crabs. And the men are paid higher wages than the women. one year Martina was brought in to work during oyster season.
when she arrived at the airport, she was met by the plant manager who made it clear that she had been hired to be his mistress. The
DoL has approved h-2B visas for this plant for years.89 It is no coincidence that these forms of discrimination exist in guestworker
programs; many of the recruiting agencies tout the great benefits of hiring workers from one country or another. employers
can even shop for guestworkers over the Internet at websites such as www.labor- mex.com, www.maslabor.com,
www.mexicanworkers.biz, or www.mexican-workers.com. one website advertises its Mexican recruits like human
commodities, touting Mexican guestworkers as people with “a good old fashioned work ethic” who are “very friendly and easy
to work with.”90 when employers are permitted to shop for workers as though they were ordering from a catalog, discrimination is
the likely, perhaps inevitable result.
Immigrant farmworkers reluctant to report sexual violence among other

abuses—dependency, deportation, faulty U visa allocation, unreliable
enforcement.
HRW 12 (Human Rights Watch, nonprofit, nongovernmental human rights organization, “US:
Sexual Violence, Harassment of Immigrant Farmworkers,” Human Rights Watch, 05/15/12,
https://www.hrw.org/news/2012/05/15/us-sexual-violence-harassment-immigrant-
farmworkers)
(New York) – Hundreds of thousands of immigrant farmworker women and girls in the United States
face a high risk of sexual violence and sexual harassment in their workplaces because US
authorities and employers fail to protect them adequately, Human Rights Watch said in a report released
today. The current US Senate bill reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) would go some way toward fixing the
problem and should be enacted, but much more needs to be done, Human Rights Watch said. The 95-page report,
“Cultivating Fear: The Vulnerability of Immigrant Farmworkers in the US to Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment,” describes
rape, stalking, unwanted touching, exhibitionism, or vulgar and obscene language by
supervisors, employers, and others in positions of power. Most farmworkers interviewed said
they had experienced such treatment or knew others who had. And most said they had not reported
these or other workplace abuses, fearing reprisals. Those who had filed sexual harassment claims or reported
sexual assault to the police had done so with the encouragement and assistance of survivor advocates or attorneys in the face of
difficult challenges. “Rape, groping, and obscene language by abusive supervisors should not be part of the hard labor conditions
that immigrant farmworkers endure while producing the nation’s food,” said Grace Meng, researcher in the US Program at Human
Rights Watch and author of the report. “Instead of being valued for their contributions, immigrant farmworkers are subject to a
dysfunctional immigration system and labor laws that exclude them from basic protections most workers take for granted.” The
report is based on interviews with over 160 farmworkers, attorneys, members of the agricultural industry, service providers, police,
and other experts across the country. More than 50 women were interviewed who work with a variety of crops in California, North
Carolina, and New York. Farmworkers described experiences such as the following: A woman in California reported that a supervisor
at a lettuce company raped her and later told her that she “should remember it’s because of him that [she has] this job.” A
woman in New York said that a supervisor, when she picked potatoes and onions, would touch women’s
breasts and buttocks. If they tried to resist, he would threaten to call immigration or fire them.
Four women who had worked together packing cauliflower in California said a supervisor would regularly expose himself and make
comments like, “[That woman] needs to be fucked!” When they tried to defend one young woman whom he singled out for
particular abuse, he fired all of them.. The
abusers are well aware of the relative power they have over
their victims and so certain groups seem to be particularly vulnerable, Human Rights Watch found.
These include girls and young women, recent immigrants, single women, and indigenous
women, especially those with limited ability to speak Spanish or English. “Farmworker women
can feel utterly powerless in the face of abusive supervisors or employers, and with good reason,” Meng
said. “The abusers often repeat their actions over long periods of time, even after some workers
complain.” Farmworker victims of sexual abuse face significant hurdles to obtaining justice. At least 50 percent of the
agricultural workforce consists of unauthorized immigrants, who fear being deported if they
complain. One farmworker told Human Rights Watch that she had been deported while her
sexual harassment lawsuit was pending. When another unauthorized immigrant overcame her fear of the police to
report her rape to them, her supervisor was arrested. But rather than being charged and prosecuted, he was deported, and she had
heard reports that he planned to come back. Even the small proportion of immigrant farmworkers working
with guest worker visas are vulnerable because they are dependent on their employers to
remain in legal status, and thus are often just as reluctant to report workplace abuses. The few
victims who do report the abuse face lengthy and difficult legal processes that are sometimes
impossible to access for migratory, low-income workers with limited English proficiency.
Furthermore, the increased involvement of local law enforcement in immigration enforcement
through programs like Secure Communities and state laws like Arizona’s SB 1070 and Alabama’s HB 56 have fueled fears of
the police and other governmental authorities in rural immigrant communities. US law does provide
one limited but important protection for some immigrant farmworkers who are survivors of sexual violence, Human Rights Watch
said. The
U visa provides temporary legal status to victims of certain serious crimes if they have
suffered substantial physical or mental abuse and if they cooperate with the investigation. The visa
thus encourages unauthorized immigrants to report crimes to the police. Yet even this limited protection could soon be eviscerated.
As Congress debates the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, proposed provisions to strengthen the U visa have
come under attack, while some versions of the bill in the House have imposed arbitrary and unreasonable barriers to survivors
applying for the U visa. “Every day that it fails to enact immigration reform, Congress puts more farmworker women at risk for
sexual abuse,” Meng said. “The least Congress can do now is to reauthorize VAWA with stronger protections for immigrant women.”
As important as they are, the proposed provisions strengthening the U visa would not overcome all the
barriers that farmworkers face to seeking remedies for sexual abuse, Human Rights Watch said. To
apply for a U visa the victim must get a certification that he or she cooperated with a law
enforcement investigation. But law enforcement officials vary widely in their willingness to
certify victims, due to a mistaken belief that they are helping unauthorized immigrants “get green cards.” Farmworkers
are also excluded from basic worker protection laws that apply to nearly every other worker in
the US, including prohibitions against child labor and protection of the right to collective
bargaining. The laws that do apply are not adequately enforced, and many farmworkers who spoke
to Human Rights Watch reported experiencing or witnessing other workplace violations, such as wage
theft, pesticide exposure, and child labor. In such an environment, farmworkers are unlikely to
have faith in the ability of employers and authorities to rectify abuses, including sexual abuses.
Finally, like other victims of sexual assault in the US, farmworker survivors often encounter law enforcement agencies that do not
vigorously investigate complaints. Both
international law and US law recognize that all workers, including
unauthorized immigrant workers, are entitled to the same workplace protections as US workers.
These provisions exist to minimize employers’ incentives to hire an easily exploitable workforce.
***Solvency
Permanent Status Solves
Giving unauthorized farmworkers a pathway to legal immigration would solve
labor shortages and exploitation of H-2A visa workers
Daniel Costa 2017, is the former director of Economic Policy Institute’s Immigration Law and
Policy Research, “Proposal to change the H-2A program via appropriations would allow
agribusiness to fill hundreds of thousands of permanent, year-round jobs with temporary
guestworkers”, October 25, 2017, https://www.epi.org/blog/proposal-to-change-the-h-2a-
program-via-appropriations-would-allow-agribusiness-to-fill-hundreds-of-thousands-of-
permanent-year-round-jobs-with-temporary-guestworkers/
It’s become a time-honored tradition. Every year for almost a decade, members of Congress—spurred by
corporate lobbyists who can’t gather enough support from their fellow colleagues for an immigration
policy that will lower wages and degrade working conditions for migrant and American
workers—use the appropriations process to get what they want. Few people pay close attention to the
deliberations about how to fund the government, so members of Congress can quietly tack their bad idea as a
“rider” onto an appropriations bill that is folded into an “omnibus” appropriations bill to keep
the government running. If the president vetoes the omnibus budget, the government may shut
down. This makes a veto unlikely, which allows riders to become law without facing a debate
and vote on the merits of it in the House and Senate. Appropriations riders have become
common in U.S. labor migration policy. President Obama’s attempts to improve wages and
working conditions for American and migrant workers in the H-2B guestworker program—for jobs in
landscaping, forestry, construction and seafood processing, for example—were thwarted again and again through appropriations
riders that lowered minimum wage rates for workers and prohibited the Labor Department
from enforcing key rules. Senators Grassley (R-IA) and Feinstein (D-CA) took a bipartisan stand against the practice when it happened
again this year. This time around, the rules in the H-2A program—which allows agricultural employers and
farmers to hire workers from abroad to fill temporary or seasonal jobs lasting for less than one
year—may also be modified via an appropriations rider. There is no annual limit on the number of H-2A workers that
can be hired, and H-2A is the fastest-growing U.S. guestworker program, more than doubling over the past decade, with over 200,000 farm jobs
The vast majority of H-2A workers are employed on crop farms, picking fruits and
certified in in 2017.
vegetables. The House appropriations committee in charge of funding the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) has now added a rider that would allow H-2A guestworkers to be employed in year-round
jobs, thus drastically expanding the scope of this program. By allowing year-round employment,
employers could seek to bring in guestworkers for jobs on dairy, livestock, and poultry and egg
farms, as well as in nurseries and greenhouses and other non-seasonal agricultural occupations.
Next week, the Senate appropriations committee is expected to consider its DHS appropriations bill. If this year-round rider becomes
law, there would be a major change in immigration policy, converting the H-2A program from a
safety valve for farmers who cannot find enough seasonal workers into a program admitting
guestworkers to do year-round, permanent jobs. The H-2A program could radically change in
purpose and size without ever being debated in either the House or Senate Judiciary
Committees which are responsible for crafting immigration legislation. This is troubling because H-2A is a
guestworker program that has facilitated the exploitation of migrant workers and even human
trafficking; so much that it has been dubbed “Close to Slavery” and “The New American
Slavery.” Many H-2A workers arrive in debt to labor recruiters who in effect sell them their
temporary jobs. They cannot change employers, and become deportable if they are fired by their
employers, which keeps them from complaining about unpaid wages and other workplace
violations. The title of a recent government audit reflected this reality: “H-2A and H-2B Visa Programs: Increased Protections Needed for Foreign
Workers.” It’s also difficult for H-2A workers to bring their families with them and they have no path
to permanent residence and citizenship. The terms and conditions of the program give employers an
inordinate amount of power over their workers, as well as other benefits, like being exempt
from paying payroll taxes on H-2A workers and the ability to hand-pick workers from abroad by
age and gender without being subject to U.S. anti-discrimination laws. Those are major reasons why employers
prefer to hire H-2A workers instead of U.S. workers. We know that this is the case because occasionally they get caught discriminating against American
workers in favor of H-2A workers. Despite its poor track record and the repeated warnings of farmworker advocates, the H-2A program has earned
bipartisan support in Congress, including from lawmakers who have voiced support for allowing dairies to hire year-round workers via the H-2A
program—a long-time goal of dairy farmers—who claim they cannot find enough U.S. workers willing to work on dairies. Many of the
current employees on dairies are unauthorized immigrants: the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and
HuffPost called unauthorized immigrants the “Backbone of Dairies .” The combination of a largely undocumented
workforce with the Trump administration’s increasing number of arrests of unauthorized

immigrants have left dairy farmers seeking an insurance policy against losing their workforce.
That’s understandable, but what about the current workforce employed on dairies? The year-round rider will push
unauthorized workers into the informal labor market, which will push down wages and labor
standards in agriculture. And, of course, making H-2A year-round won’t improve the few
protections for migrant workers in the H-2A program, which some members of Congress like Rep. Goodlatte are trying to
eliminate through other legislative measures. The H-2A year-round rider raises two key questions: (1) How many permanent, year-round jobs might be
impacted and (2) does it make sense to fill permanent jobs with temporary-and-virtually-indentured guestworkers? First, most
of the year-
round agricultural jobs that would be eligible for the H-2A program are in “animal production”,
industry code NAICS 112, which includes jobs in cattle ranching and farming, hog and pig farming, dairies, poultry and egg production, sheep and goat
farming, and animal aquaculture. (Although there are a handful of other job categories that might be eligible as well). Nearly 260,000 persons were
employed in animal production in 2016, an increase of 20 percent from 2006 (see Table 1), including 40 percent who worked in “dairy cattle and milk
production” (NAICS 11212), where employment increased by nearly one-third, from 78,618 to 104,377. [table omitted] Source: Quarterly Census of
Employment and Wages; all employees in privately-owned establishments. Series Ids: ENUUS000105112 and ENUUS 000105111212 Share Tweet
Embed Download image If the year-round rider becomes law, ag employers and especially dairy farmers
will have a strong incentive to begin replacing their unauthorized workers with H-2A workers
because H-2A workers can’t change employers if a competing farm offers a higher wage and
they’re safe from deportation by virtue of their nonimmigrant visa. Unfortunately for U.S. workers and other
authorized immigrants, ag employers also like the H-2A program because it insulates them from free
market forces that would lead them to improve wages and working conditions in order to
attract U.S. workers. If the year-round rider is renewed every year, as may happen if it becomes
law this year, ag employers may eventually fill many of the 260,000 jobs in animal production
(plus any other eligible job categories) with H-2A workers, increasing the H-2A program to
460,000, approximately the same number of workers admitted through the Bracero guestworker program during its peak in the mid 1950s. The
second question is whether the U.S. government should fill permanent jobs with guestworkers. The seasonal nature of farm jobs is
what arguably makes it more difficult to find and retain local workers, but the same argument
cannot be made for stable, year-round jobs. That’s why allowing employers to fill permanent
jobs in agriculture with guestworkers who have few rights is particularly repugnant. To the
extent a bona fide labor shortage exists, employers should first try expanding their search for
workers nationwide, and offer higher wages and better working conditions and benefits. The
recent publicized reports of dairy workers dying in manure ponds in Iowa serve as a stark
reminder that conditions on many farms and dairies are substandard and too often deadly. But
there must also be a recognition that there are already people doing this valuable work, and that many of them are unauthorized immigrants. Rather
than seeking to displace these experienced workers with new H-2A workers, Congress
should pass legislation giving
unauthorized workers the opportunity to earn legal status and continue working without fear
of deportation. The Agricultural Worker Program Act, introduced by Sens. Feinstein and Leahy (D-VT), proposes to
do just that. If the dairy industry truly needs immigrants to save it, as so many assert, then dairy
farmers should support this proposal and let Congress know about it. If—after legalizing the
current workforce—a bona fide labor shortage in agriculture still exists, then why not recruit
and hire permanent immigrants rather than guestworkers to fill those jobs? Migrant workers in
the United States who fill labor shortages should have an opportunity to fully integrate and
become citizens. It’s the bare minimum the country owes them for their contributions to the
American labor market. Rather than looking for ways to expand the H-2A program through
arcane and unethical parliamentary tactics, Congress should explore how to reform the H-2A
program so that it gives migrant workers equal rights and an eventual path to permanent
residence and citizenship.
Only a congressionally authorized permanent visa resolves the labor shortage.

Bronars ‘15
Analyzing a variety of federal data sources, this study demonstrates the real and pressing labor
problem that confronts U.S. growers of fresh produce. Between 2002 and 2014, the supply of
field and crop workers in the United States available to farmers dropped by more than a fifth.
This has placed extreme pressure on farms from one end of the country to another. In
California, growers already worried about drought or other challenges saw their supply of labor
drop by almost 40 percent. In Florida and the Southeastern parts of the United States, roughly
17,800 full-time equivalent field and crop workers essentially vanished from the workforce—a
painful blow for almost any industry. In this report, we demonstrate that immigration played an
inescapable role in this decline. Between 2002 and 2014, the number of very recent immigrant
field and crop workers in the United States, or those who had arrived within the last five years,
dropped by as much as 190,000 people. Although older farmworkers and a small number of
U.S.-born workers stepped in to slightly offset the decline, growers in the United States were
still left short as many as 167,000 field and crop workers. This left huge holes in entry-level
positions such as hand harvesting and hoeing, and also made it increasingly difficult for farmers
to find migrant farmworkers. Given the labor situation growers have faced in recent years, many
in the industry say it is more important than ever that our country provide a workable visa for
temporary farm laborers. The H-2A program for agricultural workers that exists now is
expensive and burdensome.55 Farmers frequently complain that workers arrive too late,
shaving weeks off their harvest. The visa’s lack of portability also means that growers must often
commit to pay workers for a longer period than they actually need them. As recently as 2012,
just 5 percent of farmworkers in the country were on the H-2A program.56 In recent years,
however, as the labor situation has worsened, more growers have turned to the H-2A program
as a last resort: Between 2010 and 2014, the number of H-2A positions certified by the
Department of Labor swelled by almost 38,000, growing the number of new H-2A workers by 50
percent.57 Entering the H-2A program, however, will not be a long- term solution for many
farms. The costs alone threaten some smaller growers. And for the large share of farms outside
the program, the labor issue itself further straps many operations, raising costs and making it
more difficult for them to reliably get the labor they need to succeed at arguably their core
task—the harvesting of crops. This report shows that the labor shortage farmers have described
in recent years is a real and pressing concern, and one that has not improved as wages have
risen, providing a potential incentive to American unemployed workers to join the industry.
Congress should not wait for this situation to deteriorate further to take action to protect U.S.
farms. Our report shows that inaction on this issue is already costing American businesses
roughly $3.1 billion in non-farm income and more than 41,000 potential new non-farm jobs
each year. Fixing the farm labor shortage would provide a valuable boost to our broader
economy, and ensure that America’s growers can expand—and feed the evolving needs of
consumers—in the years ahead.
A path to citizenship for illegal farmworkers is key to address labor shortage

Amy Wu 17, is an award-winning investigative journalist. She has covered agriculture, agtech,
and government and is the senior reporter for The Salinas Californian, August 10, 2017,
“IMMIGRATION, LABOR SHORTAGE AMONG AGRICULTURE INDUSTRY'S TOP CONCERNS”,
https://panetta.house.gov/media/in-the-news/immigration-labor-shortage-among-agriculture-
industrys-top-concerns
A continued and growing labor shortage, immigration reform, nutrition and research funding are
some of the top priorities and concerns of the agriculture industry here in the Salinas Valley. With the
national Farm Bill on the legislative horizon in 2018, Congressman Jimmy Panetta of the 20th District spearheaded an agricultural
roundtable on Thursday to gather the key priorities and concerns of the industry and local leaders. Alongside Panetta were
Congressman Collin Petersen a member of Minnesota's seventh congressional district and Jim Costa of California’s 16th
congressional district, both members of the House Committee on Agriculture. Although the House Committee on Agriculture has
held other roundtables and listening sessions across the country, this is the first time Panetta has held such a session in Salinas. The
information will be collected and taken back to Washington D.C. as legislators seek to reauthorize the Farm Bill and consider other
food policies down the road. The Farm Bill provides significant federal funding for an extensive series of food-related programs.
Funding for the current Farm Bill expires on Sept. 30, 2018. “You go to other hearings around this nation and you
won’t hear as much on specialty crops, immigration, but those are very important to this area
(Salinas Valley), as well as research and nutrition,” said Panetta. “It’s important we were able to
listen to people, gather that evidence and bring it back to Washington D.C., and continue to
fight for those topics that are important to the Central Coast, California and ultimately
important to this nation.” Workers pause for a break and are greeted with a surprise Workers pause for a break and are
greeted with a surprise breakfast and gift cards (Photo: Amy Wu) Agriculture is the key economic driver here in
Monterey County with crop production - roughly 150 crops - valued at $449 million in 2016 -
according to the Monterey County Agricultural Commissioner's office. Agriculture is a $9 billion
industry in the Salinas Valley and approximately 80 percent of the country’s leafy greens –
commonly found in supermarkets and restaurants across the country - are produced in Salinas.
Thursday’s standing-room only audience - including growers, trade industry leaders, academics, community advocates - packed
Hartnell College’s Steinbeck Hall to share their wish lists with the congressmen. Notable attendees included former Congressman
Sam Farr and Monterey County Supervisor Luis Alejo. Labor shortage An audience packed with growers, local leaders and An
audience packed with growers, local leaders and members of the agriculture industry packed the Agriculture Roundtable led by
Congressman Jimmy Panetta at Hartnell College on Thursday. (Photo: Amy Wu / The Californian) The
shortage of harvest
workers was on top of the list of concern and frustration for local agriculture companies. “There
is no challenge for the specialty crop industry greater than finding adequate labor, to do the
difficult job of harvesting and processing specialty crops for the market place,” said Lorri Koster,
Chairman and CEO of Mann Packing, addressing the congressmen. Mann, a Salinas-based company that is
one of the largest fresh cut produce packagers in the country, employs nearly 1,000. “Americans will not do this job
which means we must to rely on foreign born labor. And it is a constant struggle to try to find
workers. Our nation’s dysfunctional immigration policies make the struggle even harder.”
Industry heads concurred with Koster with many pointing out that immigration reform – and a way
to lead illegal workers on a path to citizenship – is important in helping solve the shortage. Left,
Congressmen Collin Petersen, Jimmy Panetta and Left, Congressmen Collin Petersen, Jimmy Panetta and Jim Costa are all members
of the U.S. House of Representatives Agriculture Committee. (Photo: Amy Wu / The Californian) Feeding communities The local
industry echoed the greater concern of the global agriculture industry, which is taxed with
finding ways to feed a growing world population; by 2050 the world’s population is estimated to
reach 9.1 billion, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Many
industry players praised the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP, a United States Department of
Agriculture program that feeds poor and underserved families, and supported continued and additional funding for it. Cheryl
Camany, the homeless liaison for the Salinas City Elementary School District, said hunger is a significant problem among children
here in the city of Salinas alone. The Naval Postgraduate School recently conducted a study on a Salinas elementary school where
roughly 50 percent of the children are homeless and found that attendance fell on Mondays and in the third and fourth weeks of the
month following a cycle of when families received welfare checks and food stamps. An estimated 3,235 or 36 percent of the
students in the district are homeless. “It all relates back to hunger,” said Camany, noting that attendance drops if children are
“hungry or unfed or they have to wait until lunch until they wait to be fed.” Melissa Kendrick, executive director of the Food Bank of
Monterey County, said: “We feed the world but the irony is 36 percent of people in the county go hungry.” Javier Zamora a grower
and owner of JSM Organics in Javier Zamora a grower and owner of JSM Organics in Royal Oaks, Calif. shares his concerns about the
severe labor shortage. (Photo: Amy Wu / The Californian) Other areas highlighted at the forum A need for research funding
particularly for organic produce and specialty crops. Norm Groot, executive director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau, pushed
for additional funding for diseases and pests for specialty crops. Additional funding for nutrition programs, consumer outreach, and
food safety. A representative for Tanimura & Antle, one of the largest growers based in the Salinas Valley, suggested a food research
station located in Salinas. Passing the Farm Bill to continue funding programs that support future farmers. California FarmLink, a
nonprofit and a lender that funds small farms, made 203 loans worth $7.3 million out of which $3.2 million was in Monterey County.
The growth in organic A large contingent of growers and ag leaders from organic farms also attended Thursday’s forum and pushed
for more organic-centered research and more overall funding. Laura
Batcha, executive director of the Organic
Trade Association, called Thursday’s robust turnout from organic farmers a “reflection of how
important it is in the country.” Batcha said it is nearly a $50 billion industry nationally. Grant
Brians, an independent grower and owner of Heirloom Organic Gardens in San Benito County,
said the labor shortage is a “larger issue for organics” than non-organic farmers. Taylor Farms
contracts farm workers for the fall harvest Taylor Farms contracts farm workers for the fall harvest 2016 (Photo: Amy Wu) “We don’t
have rescue chemistry and we have to have laborers at the right time,” said Brians. While he has hired roughly a dozen laborers he is
also looking into automation and other efficiencies. “Without
the people who work on the farms, you can’t
produce food,” Brians said matter-of-factly. Final word “One of my highest priorities this Congress is
reauthorizing the Farm Bill. This has traditionally been a bipartisan effort in the House
Agriculture Committee. It was great to hear our local agriculture leaders and nutrition groups
this morning let us know what their priorities are, and I look forward to listening to local voices
throughout the region in the roundtables and listening sessions we will be holding in the near
future,” said Congressman Costa.
The blue card system would give hardworking farmworkers a path to

citizenship while solving the labor shortage crisis
Roy 17 - Maurer, Roy is a journalist for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM),
"Bill to Legalize Undocumented Farmworkers Introduced." HRNews, May 16, 2017. ProQuest,
http://proxy.lib.umich.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/2022190973?accountid=14667.
A group of Democratic senators recently filed legislation that would protect the country's undocumented farmworkers from
deportation and put them on a path to citizenship. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., introduced the Agricultural
Worker Program Act, which would provide a "blue card" to undocumented farmworkers who
have worked in agriculture for at least 100 days over the past two years, shielding them from
deportation. The bill would then permit those blue card holders to apply for a green card once
they work in agriculture for either 100 days per year for the next five years or 150 days per year
for the next three years. After five years with a green card, they would be eligible to apply for
citizenship. Feinstein's proposal is similar to legislation she has championed in the past, including for provisions in the
comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed the Senate in 2013. It's estimated that 90 percent of agriculture
workers in California are foreign-born, and that up to 70 percent are undocumented. "Everywhere I
travel in California, I hear from farmers, growers and producers from all industries that there aren't
enough workers," Feinstein said. "Farm labor is performed almost exclusively by undocumented
immigrants—a fact that should surprise no one. By protecting farmworkers from deportation,
our bill achieves two goals—ensuring that hardworking immigrants don't live in fear and
California's agriculture industry has the workforce it needs to thrive." Senate Judiciary Committee
Chairman Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, agreed in a statement that "insufficient farm labor is a legitimate issue
that deserves further review" but cautioned that "any authorization for foreign agricultural workers must be structured in
a way that protects American workers. It must also ensure that American workers are not displaced by foreign counterparts."
Democrats plan to introduce companion legislation in the House, and Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., signaled that he is currently
working on legislation to overhaul the H-2A agricultural guest worker visa program. He has proposed changes to the program during
past sessions of Congress. The California Farm Bureau Federation, which promotes the interests of family farms and ranches, said it
is encouraged by Feinstein's bill but that more needs to be done to address future workflow through a temporary worker visa
program and H-2A reform. "The Farm Bureau encourages President [Donald] Trump and congressional leaders from both parties to
enact immigration legislation that addresses farmers' need for a legal, stable workforce," said federation president Paul Wenger in a
statement. The
United Farm Workers also supports the Agricultural Worker Program Act.
"Overwhelmingly, farmworkers do the hard, brutal work of feeding all of us—it is long past time
that the law should allow professional farmworkers the chance to earn legal status," said Arturo
Rodriguez, president of United Farm Workers.
Immigrant workers key to economy and path to citizenship is the only way to
solve
Oates 8/17/18; Bryce Oates: previous farm owner, writer and reporter for civil eats covering agriculture, ecology, politics, and
the relationship between the economy and the landscape, http://www.dailyyonder.com/immigration-proposal-nothing-address-ag-
worker-shortage/2017/08/08/20745/, immigration proposal does nothing to solve ag-worker shortage
The Trump Administration’s latest dive into the immigration debate leaves farmers without
needed laborers while farmworker groups call for a permanent path to citizenship as a solution
to the agricultural labor crisis. To fill the labor need, farmers have turned to two controversial
sources of labor for supporting the nation’s vast vegetable, fruit, nut and livestock operations:
hiring illegal immigrants and utilizing a “guestworker” visa program that allows immigrants to
work for a specific farm for up to 10 months before returning home. “This is a nation of
immigrants, not of guestworkers,” said said Bruce Goldstein, president of Farmworker Justice.
“We have to address the reality that more than half of farmworkers today are undocumented,
that they live in constant fear for deportation, of being removed from their jobs and their
families. “Goldstein said the worker shortage is well documented. “There’s a story in a major
newspaper, across the media every day about the lack of agricultural workers in the labor
force,” he said. “This is difficult and productive work, work that’s the backbone of the food
these jobs. “The Agriculture Workforce Coalition is a network of farmers that is urging the
Trump Administration to help solve the farm labor shortage. The coalition says the problem with
an inadequate labor supply affects both farmers and rural America in general. The economic
health of food and fiber producers, and the rural communities in which they live, is threatened
by the lack of a reliable, stable and legal workforce. Our farmers face growing shortages of
legally authorized and experienced workers each year. Jobs in agriculture are physically
demanding, conducted in all seasons and are often transitory. This shortage of labor negatively
impacts our economic competitiveness, local economies, and jobs. Reforms are necessary to
address the agricultural labor shortage. For farmers looking to hire additional workers, and for
farmworkers looking for jobs, one of the critical programs is the H2A Program. Administered by
the Department of Labor, the H2A program provides temporary visas to immigrant farm
laborers as “guest workers,” usually for periods of 10-months or less. H2A visas tie a worker to a
specific farm or labor organization for the season, and then workers return to their native
country, usually Mexico. “The H2A program is expanding, period,” said Dr. Philip
Martin, Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis.
He edits Rural Migration News, has served on several federal commissions, and testifies
frequently before Congress. “H2A will continue to grow just like it has in the past
decade.”Martin says that the number of H2A workers has increased to replace geographically
settled workers who have long-term, on-farm jobs. “Farmworkers don’t move much,” he said.
“Only 2% of farmworkers follow the harvest, as a lot of people assume they do. They pretty
much stay where they settle.”President Trump announced last week that he is supporting
legislation that slashes the number of permanent legal immigrants allowed into the nation from
1 million per year to 500,000. The legislation, proposed by Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR) and
David Perdue (R-GA), would change immigration rules to a “merit-based system” that favors
English speakers, the highly educated, and those with job skills that are in high demand.
Farmworker Justice, using USDA and Department of Labor Statistics, estimates that there are 2.5
million farmworkers laboring on our nation’s farms and ranches. Though the data is imperfect
due to the difficulty of collecting information from undocumented immigrants, the organization
estimates that roughly 1.2 million to 1.75 million farmworkers are undocumented and
approximately 750,000 to 1.3 million farmworkers are United States citizens or lawful
immigrants. The National Agriculture Worker Survey finds that about 33% of farmworkers are
United States citizens, 18% are lawful permanent residents and another 1% have other work
authorization. The economic consequences of the agriculture labor gap are huge, according to
economists. Dr. Stephen G. Bronars, of Edgeworth Economics, has studied the economic impact
of the farm labor shortage. His report, A Vanishing Breed: How the Decline in U.S. Farm Laborers
Over the Last Decade Has Hurt the U.S. Economy and Slowed Production on American Farms,
finds that the farm labor shortage costs $3.1 billion a year in direct economic activity. Bronars
writes, “given that farm revenues often trickle down to other industries in our economy, that
$3.1 billion in additional farm production would have led to almost $2.8 billion in added
spending on non-farm services like transportation, manufacturing, and irrigation each year. That
spending would have created more than 41,000 additional non-farm jobs in our economy
annually.” The H2A guestworker system is not a good solution to the farm labor shortage,
according to both the farmers and farmworkers who testified at a House Judiciary Committee
Hearing on the issue in July. Farmers said that program is overly bureaucratic, and the
administrative burden can lead to workers arriving too late for their seasonal labor needs.
Livestock producers, whose animals require daily labor rather than seasonal demands, criticize
the program for not allowing a year-round labor option. Farmworker groups don’t believe that
H2A system adequately protects worker rights, and that H2A workers are burdened with
excessive fees and predatory debts for navigating the guestworker visa paperwork and
transportation process. They are collaborating with House and Senate Democrats to propose a
different immigration process for needed agricultural laborers, the Agricultural Worker Program
Act. “The core issue, the solution to the long-term issue of agricultural
employment, is establishing a path to citizenship for farm workers,” said
Farmworker Justice President Goldstein. “
Legalization and management change attracts workers- Farm owners willing to

comply
Martin 17 [PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1975. His research focuses on:
immigration, farm labor, and economic development. Editor of Migration News and Rural
Migration News at USC Davis, Chair of UC Comparative Immigration & Integration Program at
USC, Davis, “Immigration Policy and Agriculture: Possible Directions for the Future.” Web.
Retrieved from http://proxy.lib.umich.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/1886918586?accountid=14667, accessed 7/11/2018]
US agriculture employs a higher share of unauthorized workers than any other industry. Current
farmworkers are aging and settling, increasing worries about who will replace those who find
nonfarm jobs. Agriculture may serve as the canary in the coal mine to indicate how industries
reliant on unauthorized workers adjust to fewer newcomers and higher wages. Farmers are
responding to fewer unauthorized newcomers with 4-S strategies: satisfy, stretch, substitute,
and supplement. By satisfying current workers, employers hope to retain them longer. Most
farmers believe that the supply of labor inside US borders is fixed or inelastic, so that higher
wages will not attract more farmworkers and instead will move them from lower to higher wage
farms. Some are offering benefits such as low-cost health care to employees and their families
or end-of-season bonuses to increase the loyalty of current workers. Some are improving the
training of first-level supervisors to reduce favoritism and harassment.
The second strategy is to stretch the current work force with mechanical aids and management
changes that increase worker productivity and make farm work easier. Most fruits and
vegetables are over 90 percent water, and hand harvesters spend much of their time carrying
harvested produce down ladders to bins or to the end of rows to receive credit for their work.
Planting dwarf trees means smaller or no ladders and faster picking, and hydraulic platforms
reduce the need to fill 50 to 60 pound bags of apples and oranges from ladders. Slow-moving
conveyor belts that travel ahead of workers who harvest berries, broccoli, and other vegetables
reduce the need to carry harvested produce, making workers more productive and harvesting
jobs more appealing to older workers and women (Calvin and Martin 2010).
A path to citizenship is key to solving—the guest-worker, H2A system fails; A
permanent citizenship is needed to ensure workers’ rights and economic
competitiveness
Oates, ’17: (Bryce Oates is a writer covering agriculture, conservation, ecology, politics and the
complicated relationship between human communities and the landscape,
http://www.dailyyonder.com/immigration-proposal-nothing-address-ag-worker-
shortage/2017/08/08/20745/, “IMMIGRATION PROPOSAL DOES NOTHING TO ADDRESS AG-
WORKER SHORTAGE”, August 8th, 2017) WM
While the Trump administration is getting behind a bill to limit immigration to highly skilled workers, farmers and worker groups
alike say what the
nation needs is a more reliable supply of agricultural workers. A path to citizenship
is key, say worker advocates. The Trump Administration’s latest dive into the immigration debate leaves
farmers without needed laborers while farmworker groups call for a permanent path to
citizenship as a solution to the agricultural labor crisis. To fill the labor need, farmers have turned to two
controversial sources of labor for supporting the nation’s vast vegetable, fruit, nut and livestock operations: hiring illegal immigrants
and utilizing a “guestworker” visa program that allows immigrants to work for a specific farm for up to 10 months before returning
home. “This is a nation of immigrants, not of guestworkers,” said said Bruce Goldstein, president
of Farmworker Justice. “We have to address the reality that more than half of farmworkers today
are undocumented, that they live in constant fear for deportation, of being removed from their
jobs and their families.” Goldstein said the worker shortage is well documented. “There’s a story
in a major newspaper, across the media every day about the lack of agricultural workers in the
labor force,” he said. “This is difficult and productive work, work that’s the backbone of the food
these jobs.” The Agriculture Workforce Coalition is a network of farmers that is urging the Trump Administration to help solve
the farm labor shortage. The coalition says the problem with an inadequate labor supply affects both
farmers and rural America in general. The economic health of food and fiber producers, and the rural
communities in which they live, is threatened by the lack of a reliable, stable and legal workforce. Our
farmers face growing shortages of legally authorized and experienced workers each year. Jobs in
agriculture are physically demanding, conducted in all seasons and are often transitory. This
shortage of labor negatively impacts our economic competitiveness , local economies, and
jobs. Reforms are necessary to address the agricultural labor shortage. For farmers looking to hire
additional workers, and for farmworkers looking for jobs, one of the critical programs is the H2A Program. Administered by the
Department of Labor, the H2A program provides temporary visas to immigrant farm laborers as “guest workers,” usually for periods
of 10-months or less. H2A visas tie a worker to a specific farm or labor organization for the season, and then workers return to their
native country, usually Mexico. “The H2A program is expanding, period,” said Dr. Philip Martin, Professor of Agricultural and
Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis. He edits Rural Migration News, has served on several federal commissions,
and testifies frequently before Congress. “H2A will continue to grow just like it has in the past decade.” Graph via the Economic
Policy Institute Martin says that the number of H2A workers has increased to replace geographically settled workers who have long-
term, on-farm jobs. “Farmworkers don’t move much,” he said. “Only 2% of farmworkers follow the harvest, as a lot of people
assume they do. They pretty much stay where they settle.” President Trump announced last week that he is supporting legislation
that slashes the number of permanent legal immigrants allowed into the nation from 1 million per year to 500,000. The legislation,
proposed by Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR) and David Perdue (R-GA), would change immigration rules to a “merit-based system” that
favors English speakers, the highly educated, and those with job skills that are in high demand. Farmworker Justice, using USDA and
Department of Labor Statistics, estimates that there are 2.5 million farmworkers laboring on our nation’s farms and ranches. Though
the data is imperfect due to the difficulty of collecting information from undocumented immigrants, the organization estimates that
roughly 1.2 million to 1.75 million farmworkers are undocumented and approximately 750,000 to 1.3 million farmworkers are
United States citizens or lawful immigrants. The National Agriculture Worker Survey finds that about 33% of farmworkers are United
States citizens, 18% are lawful permanent residents and another 1% have other work authorization. The economic
consequences of the agriculture labor gap are huge, according to economists. Dr. Stephen G. Bronars,
of Edgeworth Economics, has studied the economic impact of the farm labor shortage. His
report, A Vanishing Breed: How the Decline in U.S. Farm Laborers Over the Last Decade Has Hurt
the U.S. Economy and Slowed Production on American Farms, finds that the farm labor shortage
costs $3.1 billion a year in direct economic activity. : Bronars writes, “given that farm revenues often
trickle down to other industries in our economy, that $3.1 billion in additional farm
production would have led to almost $2.8 billion in added spending on non-farm services like
transportation, manufacturing, and irrigation each year. That spending would have created
more than 41,000 additional non-farm jobs in our economy annually.” The H2A guestworker
system is not a good solution to the farm labor shortage, according to both the farmers and farmworkers who
testified at a House Judiciary Committee Hearing on the issue in July. Farmers said that program is overly bureaucratic, and the
administrative burden can lead to workers arriving too late for their seasonal labor needs. Livestock producers, whose animals
require daily labor rather than seasonal demands, criticize the program for not allowing a year-round labor option. Farmworker
groups don’t believe that H2A system adequately protects worker rights, and that H2A workers are
burdened with excessive fees and predatory debts for navigating the guestworker visa
paperwork and transportation process. They are collaborating with House and Senate
Democrats to propose a different immigration process for needed agricultural laborers, the
Agricultural Worker Program Act. “The core issue, the solution to the long-term issue of agricultural employment,
is establishing a path to citizenship for farm workers,” said Farmworker Justice President Goldstein. “The
Agricultural Worker Program Act accomplishes this goal and H2A doesn’t. This is fundamentally an issue of economic freedom, of
democratic rights, and of addressing the reality of the food system’s labor needs in a fair way.” The Agricultural Worker Program Act
is being proposed both in the House and Senate. Supporters include the United Farmworkers of America, Farmworker Justice, the
Southern Poverty Law Center, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Farm Labor Organizing Committee of the AFL-CIO, National
Council of La Raza, and many other groups.
A pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers is necessary to meet the

current demand for farm labor—Trump’s crackdown has hampered the nation’s
productivity
SIRIPURAPU, ’17: (Anshu Siripurapu is an Associate Editor/Reporter, Inside U.S. Trade at
Inside Washington Publishers, https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-
government/article162548048.html, “Should foreign farm workers be allowed to become
citizens? GOP, Democrats disagree”, July 19th, 2017)WM
The last time foreign farm workers got amnesty to stay in this country, many left the farms for better paying jobs. So as the agriculture community
pushes for a way to get more farm workers into the United States, it’s finding not only the political obstacle — Republican lawmakers are reluctant to
do much for undocumented immigrants — but also an historic one, a memory of a Reagan administration amnesty policy. “Isn’t it the case that if
Congress were to again grant a special pathway to citizenship to illegal immigrant farm workers that growers would soon be left in the lurch?” asked
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Robert Goodlatte, R-Va. Democrats are pushing for a program that would help such workers get a path to
citizenship. “Let’s stop saying, ‘Oh, we can’t do this program because then people are going to want to do better for themselves.’ That’s America. They
should be able to do better for themselves,” said Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill. The dispute is another chapter in the ongoing Washington debate about
immigration policy, a battle that shows no signs of ebbing – or finding common ground. Conservative Republicans insist no overhaul of the immigration
system can proceed without strong border security as the first priority. While Democrats don’t disagree, they also maintain a
path to
citizenship and security can be achieved at the same time. Farmers say they need more
workers to help bring in the harvest and there aren’t enough Americans willing to do the job. They want more
foreign workers. According to data from the State Department, more than 134,000 temporary visas were issued to
agricultural workers in the 2016 fiscal year, a number that has more than doubled since 2011, illustrating of
the growing demand from farmers for foreign workers. A House subcommittee Wednesday heard both sides of this debate. “We
must repair the system, both for the current workforce and in order to ensure our agricultural communities
have access to the workers they desperately need for years to come," Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif., a dairy farmer, told
the House subcommittee on immigration and border security. Sarah Frey, president and chief executive officer of Frey
Farms in Keenes, Illinois said the current H-2A visa program, which allows agricultural workers to enter the country on
temporary visas, is “expensive and laden with bureaucratic inefficiency .” But she said it is still the only way her farm
can get the workers they need. Frey said many of the foreign-born farm workers do not have proper work authorization and the current
crackdown on undocumented immigrants hurts the nation’s farmers. Goodlatte is pushing a plan replace the
H-2A program with a more streamlined guest worker program. He said undocumented workers currently in the U.S. would be eligible for his program
but would not be given a pathway to citizenship. They could be hired alongside other foreign workers, but they would have to abide by the same rules,
including returning periodically to their former home countries. Jon Wyss, government affairs director for Gebbers Farms in Brewster, Washington, said
even though his business pays higher than minimum wage, many Americans still prefer to work other jobs like retail rather than on the farm. Alex
Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst with the conservative Cato Institute, said the benefits of having more guest workers outweigh the costs.
“More workers here from abroad mean more products for Americans to consume at a lower price, and more
jobs for Americans at different stages of production,” he said. But Democrats want that pathway to citizenship. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif. cited a
Department of Labor report that said at least half of all farm workers in the U.S. are undocumented and said that many had been in the U.S. for more
than 15 years. “These workers came to fill critical needs and many of our constituents are still in business because those workers came,” she said.
“There is no acceptable solution that fails to deal with this reality.” Lofgren and Gutierrez are pushing a bill that would allow farm workers to apply for a
“Blue Card” that would give them legal status and work authorization. They would have to pay a fine and pass a background check, but the program
would also create a three to five-year pathway to citizenship.
Millions of immigrants want permanent citizenship in the US but are dissuaded

due to fears of deportation and work intensities—the plan solves by making
that process easier
Runyon, ’17: (Luke Runyon is a reporter with NPR station KUNC,
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/04/21/524559590/immigrants-make-this-farm-
town-work-now-theyre-applying-for-citizenship, “Immigrants Make This Farm Town Work. Now
They're Applying For Citizenship”, April 21st, 2017) WM
At the public library in the rural Morgan County town of Brush, Colo., Marissa Velazquez welcomes her students to class. It's a sunny
Saturday morning, and the day marks the halfway point in Velazquez's class, a 10-week crash course on American history, civics and
English. Nearly all of the students work in either meatpacking or dairying. Everyone in it has the same goal: become an American
citizen. In two hours, Velazquez runs through voting rights, the legislative process and some grammar tips. Pop quiz: When do we
celebrate the venerable American holiday of Flag Day? Answer: June. Despite the fact that many natural-born Americans probably
don't know the answer, Flag Day is a potential topic on the test for U.S. citizenship. While Velazquez runs through the history of
voting rights in the U.S., she asks the students if any of them would have been able to vote in the mid-1800s. The answer is no. No
student would have been able to vote in America's early years. The class includes middle-aged women and young men of Mexican
and Central American descent, and men from war-torn African countries. Velazquez teaches prospective naturalized citizens about
U.S. civics and history. Luke Runyon/Harvest Public Media MorganCounty has anchored its local economy to
agriculture. A meatpacking plant, cheese factory, sugar beet processing plant and large dairy
farms provide plentiful yet grueling jobs that require little proficiency in English, just hard
manual labor. That has made the rural county a magnet for migrating immigrants and refugees.
It now holds sizable Somali, Mexican, Ethiopian, El Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Honduran
populations. "We have students from Mexico, from Guatemala, El Salvador and from Ethiopia,"
says Velazquez, who came to Morgan County from Mexico as a child. "Some are refugees, and
some, like me, were brought here by their family." Deportation Fears Prompt Immigrants To Cancel Food Stamps
THE SALT Deportation Fears Prompt Immigrants To Cancel Food Stamps Like many immigrants in the U.S., those in
Morgan County are worried that changes to immigration policy pushed by the Trump administration
could impact their families. Panic has swept through communities of immigrants all over the
country, in highly visible places like Los Angeles and New York. But in some smaller towns with less visible
immigrant communities, that same fear has spurred some to take steps to go from green card holders to fully fledged citizens. The
number of people who applied for U.S. citizenship rose across the country in 2016. And while there are no definitive
data for the first part of 2017, there are small indications that the same trend could be continuing this
year. To become naturalized, applicants are tested with a series of questions about the U.S. They are given a dictation exam and an
interview, most often in English. "That's why we get to practice listening skills, writing skills, reading, so that they're ready for when
they go in for their interview to become a citizen," Velazquez says. "I never thought I would teach the class, because I took this class
as a student," says Velazquez, who became a naturalized citizen in 2016. Citizenship classes are pretty standard in some parts of the
country, often offered by nonprofit groups and immigration law firms. What makes this one unique is its size. In 2015, 10 people
finished it. In 2016, just five. This year, Velazquez has a class of 21 students. In a rural area like Morgan County, that is huge. A
student uses notecards to learn facts about American government during a class at the public library in Brush, Colo. Luke
Runyon/Harvest Public Media Since the 2016 presidential election, a renewed focus on immigration has left more immigrants feeling
uncertain, even those with legal, permanent status. That keeps Lisa Pray, the only immigration attorney in Morgan County, busy.
Pray says she has noticed more of her clients asking about the citizenship process. Pray says she is hearing
from longer-term residents — people who've been in town for more than a decade. "There's
a lot of fear in the
community," Pray says. "Usually people who'd been here a long time, they decided to get their citizenship when they had some
relative they wanted to bring over. "Now, what I'm hearing from people is, 'I just want to make sure I get to stay.' " When President
Trump began signing executive orders expanding the immigrants eligible for deportation and restricting international travel from
some Muslim-majority countries, Pray says, Morgan County's sizable immigrant population was shaken. But the fear has also acted
as a motivator. "It has spurred a lot of people who are permanent [residents] to apply, or decide to get their citizenship," she says.
The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Immigration Statistics holds official records for the number of people who become
naturalized citizens each year. It's too early to put a definitive number on whether this surge of interest turns into an increase in the
number of new citizens. Immigrants choose to go through the naturalization process for many reasons, including gaining the right to
vote, to freely travel and to rest easy about immigration status. Will Trump's Tough Talk On Immigration Cause A Farm Labor
Shortage? THE SALT Will Trump's Tough Talk On Immigration Cause A Farm Labor Shortage? "This is one of the big benefits
associated with becoming a U.S. citizen: You can't be deported," says Mark Hugo-Lopez, director of Hispanic research at the Pew
Research Center. The number of people seeking citizenship tends to ebb and flow, often peaking when the application fee is set to
rise or during an election year. Roughly 1 million people applied to be naturalized citizens in 2016, the highest number in nearly a
decade. A previous record was set in fiscal year 2007 when, ahead of an increase in the application fee, nearly 1.4 million people
applied to be naturalized. Hugo-Lopez, though, says there are still millions of eligible immigrants not seeking
citizenship. "Many of them, when you ask them, will say they want to become one, but they will also cite
reasons like the cost and language being potential barriers," he says. "They will also say, for example, they're busy, they're
working, they don't have the time, they haven't even thought about it." As the class wraps up in Brush, the students file
out. This week's homework is to study up on amendments to the Constitution — all 27 of them. The citizenship test preparation
class in Brush, Colo., has 21 students this year. Luke Runyon/Harvest Public Media Student Kibrom Baraki, a refugee from Eritrea,
works at the nearby meatpacking plant, hanging cow heads for hours each workday. "I didn't have freedom [in Eritrea], and
everything is bad. That's why I escaped from my country," Baraki says. "After that, the American government is helping me come
here." In a few months he'll be eligible to take the test, having been in the U.S. for five years. "That is why I take a class. I take my
citizenship [test]," he says. "I get a great job, and a good life."
Reforming the immigration system by allowing a freer pathway to citizenship

for undocumented farmworker is key to sustain the future of agriculture.
Grossman, ’17: (Elizabeth Grossman was a senior reporter for Civil Eats from 2014 to 2017,
where she focused on environmental and science issues,
https://www.eater.com/2017/5/23/15681840/blue-card-farmworkers-legal-citizenship-
proposal, “A New Proposal Could Protect Farmworkers From Deportation”, May 23rd, 2017) WM
Undocumented farmworkers are the backbone of the United States’ agriculture industry, a
situation that has long posed numerous challenges for these workers, their families, and
employers. But the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies and aggressive
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) action — which has detained farm workers in New York,
Oregon, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere — has created a climate of fear among workers. And that’s already
resulting in labor shortages that are prompting some growers to curtail harvest plans. On call with
reporters, Monterey Mushrooms president and owner Shah Kazemi confirmed the labor
situation. “We’re currently short hundreds of workers,” he said. “We have been forced to cut
back our production because people are not showing up to work out of fear. “If we don’t have a
way to fix our broken immigration system, I don’t think agriculture can survive in this
country,” said Kazemi. “The people who feed us should have an opportunity to work here
legally.” To help protect these farmworkers, Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris of California, Michael Bennet of Colorado,
Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, and Patrick Leahy of Vermont have introduced the Agricultural Worker Program Act of 2017 (S. 1034). The bill would protect
undocumented immigrants with a history of work in U.S. agriculture from deportation and provide them with a path to long-term legal residence and
citizenship. “Wherever I go in California,” and talk to famers, said Senator Feinstein on a call with reporters, “they tell me they can’t find workers —
that workers are scared, afraid they will be picked up and deported. They have disappeared.” “The people who feed
us should have an opportunity to work here legally,” she continued. “That’s what we do in this bill we are proposing.” The program proposed in the bill
would work like this: Farmworkers who can prove at least 100 days of employment in U.S. agriculture over the last two years could apply for a “blue
card” granting temporary residency and authorization to work, subject to security, law enforcement, and other conditions. A blue-card worker’s spouse
and children would also be eligible for blue-card status — subject to residency and other requirements — but not the work requirements. A blue card
holder who works in agriculture for 100 days a year for each of the next five years or 150 days for each of the next three years would be eligible to earn
a green card or permanent legal resident status. Those who have held green cards for five years and meet other requirements would be eligible to
apply for full citizenship. “Although the bill is mostly focused on the field workers, it incorporates definitions of agricultural employment that are
actually broader, so undocumented poultry and meat processing plant workers would be included,” explained Farmworker Justice president Bruce
Goldstein. A farm’s packing-house workers would also be covered by the bill. The bill would operate separately from the H-2A agricultural guest-worker
visa program, and provide people with more freedom. The H-2A program enables farms to hire foreign workers seasonally, but only allows them to be
employed by the farm sponsoring their visa — and provides no path to ongoing legal work status, residency, or citizenship. Support from Both Growers
and Farmworker Advocates While it’s still early days for the proposed legislation, growers and farm labor advocates alike are intensely interested in
solving what has become an increasingly pressing problem under the Trump administration.. Western Growers, which represents farmers in Arizona,
California, Colorado, and New Mexico who together grow more than half the country’s fresh produce, has not taken a position on the bill, but
“supports the blue card concept,” spokesperson Stephanie Thara told Civil Eats via email. “This is a program that Tom Nassif, Western Growers
president and CEO, pushed for in the 2013 Immigration Reform bill that did not pass. However, we
would like to see an
immigration bill that takes care of existing farmworkers and creates a workable program to
enable the future flow of labor to American farms,” she explained. “If you want sustainable
agriculture that means sustainable immigrant and refugee communities.” More than two dozen Western
Growers members were on Capitol Hill earlier this month, said Thara, meeting with legislators from the House and Senate (both Democrats and
Republicans), cabinet officers, and officials at the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies. “We are hopeful that those members
of the legislature who are working on agricultural immigration legislation accelerate the process because time is definitely of the essence and our labor
situation has reached a critical stage,” said Nassif in a statement. The American Farm Bureau Federation’s environment and energy policy director Paul
Schlegel, offered somewhat less enthusiastic support. “We haven’t opposed the blue card idea in the past,” said Schlegel, noting the bill’s similarity to
legislation introduced in 2013 and previous measures dating back to the 1990s. “We welcome any senators trying to work with ag to solve our
problems,” he said. “Anything we can do to get Congress to enact a bill that addresses these issues” — including stability in the agricultural workforce
and ensuring an ongoing flow of farmworkers. For a blue card program to gain Republican support, Schlegel suggested, it would need to be considered
along with the H-2A worker program. In the past, he added, Republicans “have been pretty clear” about accompanying a blue card program with
“increases in enforcement” — verifying workers’ legal status when hiring and border enforcement. “I think it’s a great starting point,” said National
Sustainable Agricultural Coalition (NSAC) senior policy specialist Paul Wolfe. “It
starts the conversation and could bring
parties to the table to talk about a comprehensive package. We’ve been hearing pretty terrible
and scary things from our members about what’s going on in agricultural and migrant
communities.” “Our interest is in ensuring a fair and just and equitable system that allows for a documented and legal workforce for
agriculture,” said Wolfe. “This bill does part of that.” And, he explained, “If you want sustainable agriculture that means sustainable rural communities,
including immigrant, refugee communities. Immigrant and minority farmers are the fastest growing portion of farmers.” While he’s guardedly
optimistic that broad and intense interest from U.S. growers in immigration reform could move the issue forward, Wolfe is also concerned about anti-
immigrant voices the Trump administration has “emboldened” who may fight “any efforts to reform immigration.” “Dozens of labor, immigrant, and
farmworker advocacy groups are supporting the bill.” Dozens of labor, immigrant, and farmworker advocacy groups are supporting the bill, including
United Farm Workers, Farm Worker Justice, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Farm Worker Association of Florida, Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del
Noroeste (PCUN), the AFL-CIO’s Farm Labor Organizing Committee, and the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs. Representative Luis
Gutiérrez (D-Illinois) plans to introduce a House version of the bill. Meanwhile, in the past week, the Senate bill has gained additional co-sponsors:
Democrats Kirsten Gillibrand (New York), Tom Udall (New Mexico), and Al Franken (Minnesota). At the same time, the fear recent ICE policies has
created continues to take its toll on agricultural workers, their families, and their wider communities. “Our agricultural industry and our agricultural
“It is long past
labor should be on legal footing,” said Gutiérrez. Arturo Rodriquez, United Farm Workers president, took it further, saying:
time that the law should allow these professional farm workers to enjoy the fruits of their
work.”
New comprehensive reform is needed to fill the labor shortage in the
agriculture sector—a speedy way for legal status is key to avoid worker
exploitation and the gap
Werner, ’13: (Erica Werner is a congressional economic policy correspondent for The
Washington Post, http://www.businessinsider.com/immigration-reform-farm-worker-program-
path-citizenship-2013-4, “New Bill Will Address The Desperate Need For Immigrants On
America's Farms”, April 3rd, 2013) WM
WASHINGTON (AP)— Sweeping immigration legislation taking shape in the Senate will aim to overhaul the nation's
agriculture worker program to create a steady supply of labor for farmers and growers, who rely more than any other industry on workers
who have come to the country illegally. Farm workers already here would get a speedier path to legal status than
other immigrants in the country illegally, and a likely new visa program would make it easier for foreign workers
to come to the U.S. Policymakers aim to install such workers in place of the half or more of the nation's farm labor workforce estimated to
be in the country illegally. Negotiators have been working to finalize an agreement in time for the measure to be included in bipartisan legislation
expected to be released next week, but disagreements on wages and numbers of visas are proving tough to solve. Labor groups are accusing growers of
pushing to lower farmworkers' wages, while growers dispute that and say they want to pay a fair wage. Meanwhile, labor is resisting growers' attempts
to increase the potential numbers of new workers who would come in, as growers argue their industry's viability depends on a strong new labor supply.
"It comes down to either we're importing our labor or we're importing our food, and if we don't have access to a legal supply of labor we will start
going offshore," said Kristi Boswell, director of congressional relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation. The issue has gotten little public
attention in an immigration debate focused on securing the border, creating a path to citizenship for the 11 million immigrants living in the country
illegally, and designing a new visa program for low-skilled workers outside of agriculture. But for states from California to Georgia to Florida with
booming agriculture industries, it's a critical part of the puzzle. At least 50 percent and as
much as 70 or 80 percent of the
nation's farm workers arrived illegally, according to labor and industry estimates. Growers say
they need a better way to hire labor legally, and advocates say workers can be exploited and need
better protections and a way to earn permanent residence. "One thing that we know is that there's not an
industry that will benefit more from a new immigration program than agriculture," said Giev
Kashkooli, United Farm Workers vice president. "The problem is industry needs people who are both willing and able to do the work. And it's difficult
work." The reason agriculture uses so much illegal labor has to do with the need for workers, but also the inadequacy of current immigration programs.
There is a 10-month visa program for farm workers, called the H2A visa, but growers argue it's so hard to use that once they've completed the
paperwork whatever crop they needed picked may well have withered. There
were about 55,000 H2A visas issued in
2011, representing a small percentage of the nation's approximately 2 million farm workers.
Part of the solution, growers and unions say, is to create a more permanent agricultural workforce. Senators
would likely accomplish this by giving a new "blue card" visa granting legal status to farm workers who've worked in the industry for at least two years
and intend to remain in it for at least five years more. At that point, potentially, these workers could become eligible for green cards, which allow
permanent residency and eventual citizenship — faster than the 10-year path to a green card that other immigrants in the country illegally are
expected to face under the Senate immigration bill. Separately,
growers are pushing to replace the H2A visa
program with an entirely new program with visas offering multiyear stays. But there is
disagreement over how many such visas would be offered and how much money workers
would make — the same issues that hung up a deal between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO over nonagricultural low-skilled
workers before a resolution was reached over the weekend. The UFW contends that growers are trying to push farm workers below their current
average wage of $10.80 an hour, but growers say that wage is skewed by a small number of high earners and that most farm workers make less. In light
of the dispute, the UFW has begun to argue that a new visa program may not be necessary at all. The two-pronged structure of the emerging deal is
similar to legislation called AgJobs negotiated in years past that never became law. Because of that history, the agriculture issue is being handled
differently from other parts of the Senate immigration bill. It's being negotiated by four senators — Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Orrin Hatch, R-Utah,
Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Michael Bennet, D-Colo. — only two of whom, Rubio and Bennet, are part of the so-called Gang of Eight senators writing the
overall bill. All involved hope for a resolution of an issue that has been in need of one for years, ever since the last major immigration overhaul, in 1986,
failed to establish a workable visa program for farmworkers and others. "We made our bed and have been lying in it ever since so this is a chance to get
it right and not repeat those failures," said Craig J. Regelbrugge, co-chair of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform.
Immigration reform is key to solve—The farming industry independently relies
on undocumented workers and a pathway to citizenship would solve shortages
USIO, ‘13: (US Immigration Software Online, provides general information on some commonly
encountered immigration matters, https://www.us-immigration.com/blog/will-immigration-
reform-benefit-the-agricultural-industry/, “Will Immigration Reform Benefit the Agricultural
Industry?”) WM
According to the White House, immigration reform will benefit America’s agricultural industry and the
rural communities. The country’s agricultural industry is hampered by the country’s broken
immigration system. The US agricultural industry relies on foreign born workers as the Americans are
not willing to take up jobs in the agricultural industry. Due to this reason, farmers are unable to fill
labor shortages. Most of the farmers hire undocumented immigrants as they are unable to find qualified legal workers in
America. Out of the crop workers surveyed between 2007 and 2009, 71 percent were foreign
born. Likewise, most of the farm workers are undocumented. The Senate passed a comprehensive
immigration bill in June and this legislation would strengthen border security apart from providing an earned path
to US citizenship for undocumented immigrants including the farm workers. US farmers who are short
of workers are in favor of the Senate bill that would legalize the farm workers and put them on a
pathway to US citizenship. This Senate bill would give the undocumented farm workers and their
families security. This would also help the US farmers to fill labor shortages. Farm workers are
vital to America’s agricultural industry. If the Senate bill is approved by the House and passed by the US Congress, an
earned path to US citizenship for the undocumented farm workers would be created. This plan would require these workers to pay
fines and taxes. This
legislation would help around 1.5 million agricultural workers and their family
members to obtain legal status. According to the Regional Economic Models, Inc, if the H-2A visa program is expanded,
the country’s GDP would raise by $2 billion in the next year and by $9 billion by 2045. This comprehensive immigration reform bill
that has cleared its way through the US Senate would benefit the local governments, improve job opportunity and boost the
country’s economy, according to the White House.
AT – H2A Visas Solve
H2A visas don’t solve – lack of participation and seasonal only
Steven Zahniser et al 2012, Steven Zhanhiser is an agricultural economist at United States
Department of Agriculture – Economic Research Service, Tom Hertz is an economist in the rural
economy branch of the resource and rural economics division at the USDA-ERS, Peter Dixon is a
dairy foods consultant, and Maureen Rimmer is a professor in the Centre of Policy Studies in
Victoria University, “Immigration Policy and its Possible Effects on U.S. Agriculture and the
Market for Hired Farm Labor: A Simulation Analysis”, January 2012, https://www-jstor-
org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdf/41331278.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A77b5e1d250292f007f1
819b37f2c06ae
The federal government's H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program "establishes a means for agricultural
employers who anticipate a shortage of domestic workers to bring nonimmigrant foreign
workers to the U.S. to perform agricultural labor or services of a temporary or seasonal nature"
(U.S. Department of Labor [USDOL] 2009). Participation in this program is low, however, relative to the size of the unauthorized
workforce. In Fiscal Year 2009, USDOL (2010, p. 30) certified 86,014 positions for the program. The reasons
for the H-2A program's limited use are varied. The program is only for temporary or seasonal
workers, so dairy, livestock, and nursery operations, which tend to need labor year-round, are
largely precluded from participating. In addition, some prospective employers may be
discouraged by some requirements of the program, such as payment to H-2A workers of the
highest of the federal or state minimum wage, the prevailing hourly or piece rate, the agreed-
upon collective bargaining rate, or the adverse effect wage rate, as determined by USDOL.
Labor shortages now - H-2A visa not a long term solution

Christa 6/22 - Christa, Case B. is The Christian Science Monitor's Heartland correspondent,
covering political issues from Appalachia to the Great Plains, "US Farmers, Desperate for Help,
Increasingly Turn to Mexico." The Christian Science Monitor, Jun 22, 2018. ProQuest,
http://proxy.lib.umich.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-
com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/2057990919?accountid=14667.
The apple trees were heavy with fruit, and the rows and rows of tomatoes, squash, and hot
peppers were ripe for picking. But in the end, Gary and Patty Bartley, prizewinning farmers in
western Michigan, had to leave $200,000 to $300,000 worth of their crops to rot in their fields
last year. They couldn’t find enough people to pick everything. That was not for lack of trying. They had
urged their domestic migrant workers to return, but only 12 did – about a third of the crew size
they needed. The Bartleys placed ads in papers out of state and advertised all season with the
Michigan state workforce development agency. Not a single person applied. So this year they did something
their lawyer had told them they should never do: enroll in an expensive and cumbersome visa
program known as H-2A to bring up workers from Mexico. Since the Michigan Farm Bureau set up a for-profit
affiliate four years ago to provide guidance navigating the red tape, the number of Michigan growers using the program has jumped
from four to 50. And the Bartleys’ lawyer, seeing the decline in migrant workers, changed her mind and became the lawyer for the
affiliate, Great Lakes Agricultural Labor Services. The
challenge is that H-2As make a significant dent in
farmers’ profits. The program costs $1,600 to $1,800 per worker in fees, plus the grower must
provide free housing, linens, equipped kitchens, and regular transportation to buy groceries and
other supplies. “Nobody goes into H-2A because it’s fun or it’s cheap or it’s just a good time,”
says Bob Boehm, program manager for Great Lakes Ag. “We’re trying to create an option where
they can keep farming.” The strong economy that has caused labor shortages in many industries
has sharpened an already chronic problem in agriculture that dates back to 9/11, when
heightened security concerns resulted in tighter border control. The domestic migrant
workforce has been thinning out as parents approach retirement age, and their children pursue
more lucrative work opportunities. And since many migrant laborers came to the United States illegally, they’re
worried about crossing state lines and getting caught, especially since some states are more aggressive about cracking down on
undocumented workers. Another challenge: a tax-filing change in 1996, which critics of illegal immigration say has allowed
undocumented immigrants to receive thousands more in tax credits than they pay in taxes each year – at a cost of $1.5 billion
annually. With more benefits, immigrants may be less likely to work. Farmers
are desperate for the labor situation
to be addressed. The H-2A program may be an increasingly popular stop-gap measure, but it’s
not a long-term solution.
H-2A is a program riddled with exploitation, human-trafficking and

enslavement
Newman et. al, ’11: (Etan Newman is a grad @ Brown University, Bruce Goldstein is a
WashingtonU grad, Adrienne DerVartanian is a summa cum laude grad @ U of Georgia School of
Law, Weeun Wang is a contributor to the Farmworker Justice, Virginia Ruiz is the Director of
Occupational & Environmental Health at Farmworker Justice, Jessica Felix-Romero is a grad @
George Mason U,
http://s3.amazonaws.com/migrants_heroku_production/datas/1803/No_Way_To_Treat_A_Gu
est_H-2A_Report_original.pdf?1417533357, “No Way to Treat a Guest: Part II: The Faces of
Abuse”, 2011)WM
Temporary workers from Mexico, Jamaica, or Peru do not just happen to appear by magic in places like Moultrie (GA), Red Creek
(NY), Petoskey (MI), or Yakima (WA) to take jobs in the fields. Rather, nearly all H-2A
employers rely on private
recruiters to find available workers in their home countries and arrange their visas and transportation to the fields. Because
it takes place outside the United States, this recruitment network is unregulated and highly
exploitative. Despite recently revised regulations making growers promise that neither they nor their agents have
received fees from workers to obtain a job, some growers are quite willfully ignorant of what goes on across the border. With many
potential recruits hoping to escape poverty at home, recruiters
have a significant incentive to charge recruiting
fees at great personal profit. Thus, most H-2A workers arrive in the United States with significant debt.
Some have paid as much as $11,000 for the chance at a job. Others have left the deed to their
house or car in the hands of a recruiter as collateral to ensure that they will “comply” with the
terms of their contract. Some fear for their own physical safety or that of their family members if they cannot
repay their debt. Many have been lied to about the conditions of the work, including wages, crops to be
picked, length of their visa, and type of housing. Tied to one employer, workers have no choice but
to work at whatever wage the employer offers. In short, the H-2A program creates conditions ripe
for debt-peonage, not unlike the labor arrangements suffered by many African Americans in the
postCivil War South. This system of debt can lead to forced labor as well. The H-2A recruitment
company Global Horizons Manpower, Inc. faces well-publicized and documented accusations of human trafficking
and enslavement. During 2004-2005, the company allegedly brought more than 400 Thai H-2A
workers to farms in Hawaii and Washington with promises of long-term employment, forced
them into debt with recruiting fees of up to $21,000, and held them in forced labor conditions.
According to an indictment filed by the Department of Justice against the company’s CEO and
other executives, the object of this scheme was …to obtain cheap, compliant labor performed
by Thai H2A guest workers indebted by the defendants’ recruiting fees, and to compel the
workers’ labor and service through threats to have the workers arrested, deported, or sent back
to Thailand, knowing the workers could not pay off their debts if sent home, thus subjecting the
workers to serious economic harm including loss of their family property.21 The Global Horizons scheme
is the largest human trafficking case in U.S. agriculture, but it is by no means a unique case of recruitment abuses. As long as
the H-2A program allows growers to rely on unregulated foreign recruiters, worker debt, fear,
and illegal human trafficking will be the program’s inevitable byproducts.
The H-2A system has led to wage theft—the workers are lacking fundamental
rights to retaliate under the program
George Mason U,
Abuse”, 2011)WM
Foreign workers’ vulnerability and lack of knowledge about their rights make them I’m working, doing my best, feeling the sun on
my back, working hard like a donkey, just so I could give my money to these people? How do you think I feel? You just feel like
crying. —Manuel (Okeechobee, FL) 21 U.S. v. Orian et al., Indictment, No. 1:10-CR-576 (Dist. Hi., filed 1 September 2010), at 4. A
Report By Farmworker Justice 23 24 No Way to Treat a Guest: Why the
H-2A Agricultural Visa Program Fails U.S. and Foreign
Workers particularly susceptible to wage theft and other labor law violations . Employers have
devised many ways of ducking their obligations to pay workers the DOLmandated wage, leading to
lawsuits compelling H-2A employers to pay workers what they are rightfully owed. For example,
in 2007, 80 H-2A workers in Georgia sued their employer for routinely underpaying them and
missing paychecks. The employer had allegedly prepared backdated checks to hide late
payments and false checks to hide non-payments, and had made the workers endorse blank
checks.22 In another class action suit in 2007 in Florida, an H-2A employer was sued for failing to
report all the hours employees had worked, in order to pay them less than required by the
AEWR.23 These are hardly isolated incidents; it is clear that wage theft is rampant throughout
the H-2A program. Some employers pay a piece rate rather than hourly wages. In theory, a piece rate
encourages workers to work faster than they would under an hourly rate and produce more for the employer. But when
employers set the rate low, and workers’ earnings fall below the minimum H-2A rate, H-2A
employers are required to supplement piece-rate earnings with “build up” pay to equal the
AEWR or minimum wage for every hour worked. Often, however, the opposite happens: Employers claim
that employees worked fewer hours than they actually did in order to make it appear that the
workers averaged the minimum wage per hour. Other times workers are forced to “kick back” the make-up pay to
a crew leader, rendering the AEWR meaningless. Growers have also been known to apply productivity standards, requiring workers
to fill a specified number of buckets per hour or day. Often this is another way to weed out American workers; as the productivity
demands get harder without a real pay increase, U.S. workers are less likely to apply for the jobs that desperate guest workers will
reluctantly accept. H-2A workers are dependent on employers for their visas and livelihoods. They are
often fearful that if they demand the wages owed to them they will be fired and deported or refused re-hire next year. But even
when H-2A workers do decide to seek out help to recoup their rightful wages, potential
remedies are limited. H-2A workers are excluded from the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker
Protection Act (AWPA), thechief labor law aimed at protecting farmworkers. H-2A workers are thus
not entitled to sue in federal court for lost wages, housing benefits, transportation reimbursement,
and other requirements of the H-2A contract. H-2A workers often cannot receive back pay for
wage theft because they lack meaningful access to attorneys and the court system. Few private
attorneys accept farmworker cases due to language barriers, the low dollar value of cases even when they are egregious, the slim
chance that losing employers will pay attorneys’ fees (the law usually does not require that they do so), rural isolation of the clients,
conflicts of interests in suing local farmers who they have represented, and the workers’ inability to remain in the local area during
the litigation. Legal aid programs are permitted to represent H-2A workers, but they are underfunded and cannot reach many of the
workers who need help.
The H-2A system is fundamentally xenophobic, anti-family, racist and culturally

discriminatory
George Mason U,
Abuse”, 2011)WM
Though DOL does not publish statistics on age and gender of H-2A workers, it is well known that women
and older adults
are basically absent from the H-2A program. That is because the H-2A program allows agricultural
employers a luxury denied to all other domestic employers: access to a demographically “ideal” workforce.24 Since
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Age Discrimination Employment Act of 1967, employers in
the U.S. have been forbidden to use race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and age as factors
in hiring practices. Yet the government refuses to investigate and curb abuses that occur during
recruitment abroad. Consequently, H-2A employers’ recruiters often search out a very specific
demographic, thought to be perfect for farm work: young single men without family in the United States,
who will devote all day every day to work. Workers who don’t fit into this category have very little
chance of being selected for an H-2A visa. Thus, the H-2A program is fundamentally anti-family. Young men come to
the U.S. without their family members, often for separations of many months, causing stress for spouses and children, as well as
guest workers. Women constitute more than 20% of farmworkers, yet there are very few, if any, in the H-
2A program. Often, women interested in being guest workers are funneled into the H-2B non-agricultural guest worker
program, a program with even fewer protections than H-2A. This systematic gender discrimination came to light
in a class action lawsuit led by Marcela Olvera-Morales, a Mexican farmworker, against
International Labor Management Corporation, Inc. (ILMC), a major labor recruiter connected
with the North Carolina Growers’ Association. Olvera-Morales contended that ILMC had chosen
less-qualified male workers for H-2A jobs, while intentionally sending her and other women to
H-2B jobs, knowing that those jobs were less desirable.25 The culture of discrimination in H-2A
extends to race and national origin as well. Indeed, employers are basically free to act on negative racial and ethnic
stereotypes regarding both U.S. and foreign workers. For example, one H-2A employer from North Carolina has
explained that he hired Asian workers to “try a new breed” because Hispanic workers had
been “Americanizing” and “getting lazy.”26 This kind of explicit racial discrimination, illegal in the rest of the country, seems
commonplace in the fruit and vegetable fields of this country
The H-2A system treats guest workers as disposable commodities—employers
often avoid providing insurance for injury or illness
George Mason U,
Abuse”, 2011)WM
Agriculture is one of the most dangerous industries in the United States. According to the Bureau
of Labor Statistics, crop production workers had a fatal injury rate nearly ten times the average
rate for all industries. Non-fatal injuries are extremely common as well; in 2009, there were 4.9
non-fatal work-related injuries for every 100 full-time crop workers.27 On paper, the H-2A regulations
require employers to provide H-2A workers with workers’ compensation insurance to protect them in case of a work-related injury.
But in reality, complex workers’ compensation rules, which vary from state to state, often prevent H-2A
workers from accessing these benefits, especially after they have returned to their home country, which the program
demands.28 Severely injured workers and their families are thus never compensated for the lost
income from their injury. Employers may also encourage workers not to apply for benefits, may simply return injured workers
to their home countries, or may get injuries taken care of quietly, in order to prevent a hike in insurance premiums. The H-2A
program does not require employers to provide health insurance, and foreign nonimmigrants
are not eligible for Medicaid, so few H-2A workers can access health care for nonwork-related
illnesses or injuries. Though there is no data on the number of H-2A workers with health insurance, a 2003 report
estimated that only 5-11% of all farmworkers had employerprovided insurance.29 Federally funded
community health centers are available to H-2A workers at low cost but often are not located near enough to workplaces. The
experiences of injured or ill workers highlight the status of guest workers as disposable
commodities to be retained only as long as they are useful to an employer. H-2A workers with health
problems are often fired or coerced to sign “voluntary” quit forms in exchange for unenforceable promises that they will be hired
the following year. When
workers return to their home countries, it is often very difficult for them to
pursue their workers’ compensation claim, and frequently comprehensive medical care is
inaccessible.
Current H-2A visa fails – it’s too bureaucratic and only drives more
undocumented immigration
Mcneill 09 [Jean Baker Mcneill;June 30, 2009; Ag JOBs Amnesty: The Wrong Way to Help American Agriculture; Senior Policy
Analyst at the Heritage Foundation and Senior Professional Staff Member at United States Senate;
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2009/06/ag-jobs-amnesty-the-wrong-way-to-help-american-agriculture]
The H-2A visa was designed as temporary, non-immigrant visa to allow foreign nationals to enter the U.S. and work on farms and in
other seasonal jobs in order to fulfill the workforce needs of U.S. agriculture. Currently, however,
only an estimated
75,000 workers are in the H-2A program. The reason: It is simply too bureaucratic and expensive for
employers to use it effectively. The current method by which the Department of Labor calculates wages
is flawed, resulting in inflated wages that are higher for H-2A workers than for American employees. Furthermore,
employers must file paperwork with multiple departments, identify specific workers when filing a
petition with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and then wait for months. This long process often means that
workers are no longer available when the visas are granted. The H-2A program's problems reduce
employers' incentives to hire employees legally. Often employers wind up hiring illegal immigrants as
employees instead--making illegal border crossings all the more attractive, because illegal immigrants know there
will be work whey they get to the United States.
H-2A program fails – can’t compete with undocumented labor, so it’s rarely
used
Semuels 3/30 [Alana Semuels ; March 30, 2013; U.S. farmers, guest workers pay a price to stay legal; Journalist for the LA
times dealing with Latin American policy issues; http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-guest-worker-20130331-
dto,0,5896092.htmlstory]
Although the H-2A program is the only legal way to bring foreign farmworkers to the United
States, most employers don't use it. H-2A workers fill an estimated 6% of U.S. farm jobs, the
majority in states such as North Carolina and Georgia, where employers are hard-pressed to find anyone else willing to do the work.
Undocumented workers fill most of the 1 million or more farm jobs open nationally every year;
California, which hires more farmworkers than any other state, uses H-2A workers less
frequently because its location close to Mexico makes it easier for employers to find
undocumented workers. Barr says it's easy to understand why only a handful of employers
bring in guest workers. He spends $1,000 per worker for visas, consulate fees and
transportation to North Carolina. He's required to pay for their housing, and he estimates he
has spent more than $80,000 building a house on his property, plus $36,000 to buy a mobile
home and $5,000 a year to rent an apartment for the 48 workers he employs during the
growing season. The government makes him pay them $9.68 an hour, which is about one-
third higher than the minimum wage in the state, and he spends thousands of dollars on
workers' compensation insurance. Costs aside, the process is a headache of applications and
paperwork required by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Labor.
Barr must go through lengthy steps to make sure no American wants a job before he hires a
Mexican worker. He must place ads around the state and hire any American who wants to
work, even if the job has already been filled by a migrant worker. The chance of violating a
rule, even by mistake, is high, he says — a neighbor had to pay a fine of $80,000 last year.
H-2A is inefficient and costs more than it saves – North Carolina proves
Clemens 13 [Michael A. Clemens; INTERNATIONAL HARVEST: A Case Study of How Foreign Workers Help American Farms
Grow Crops – and the Economy; Clemens has a PHD from Harvard in Economics and is a senior fellow at the Center for Global
Development where he leads the Migration and Development initiative;
http://www.renewoureconomy.org/sites/all/themes/pnae/nc-agr-report-05-2013.pdf; May 2013]
The North Carolina Growers Association’s (NCGA) use of H-2A visas also provides clear evidence that
some of the H-2A program requirements actually cost farmers time and money that could otherwise
be used to create jobs. In 2011, the NCGA spent $54,440 on advertising its jobs in local newspapers, as
compliance with the H-2A program requires, as well as $46,000 in staff time exclusively devoted
to cooperating with the North Carolina Division of Employment Security (DES) recruiting, hiring, and tracking
referrals of US workers to NCGA farms. This $100,440 spent by NCGA does not include the time
and costs shouldered by DES, the US Department of Labor, or the North Carolina Department of
Labor that was spent enforcing H-2A program requirements – each of which devote staff to either ensuring
that unemployed workers are referred to the NCGA or that the NCGA is fulfilling its obligation to extensively recruit native workers.
But in that same year, 2011, only seven unemployed US workers were willing to take seasonal
farm jobs offered through the NCGA and complete the season. Those seven workers
collectively earned approximately $87,300 in wages, meaning the $100,440 spent to comply
with the H-2A program exceeded the total value of the jobs it provided to native workers.
Guestworkers are bound to employers via visas, debt, seizure of documents.

Smith 07 (Rebecca, coordinator of the Immigrant Worker Justice Project at the National
Employment Law Project, “Guest Workers or Forced Labor?” New Labor Forum, Fall 2007,
https://www-jstor-
org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdf/40342715.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A404ad3467e2a5e80ed
077e3d107419bc)
For newly arriving workers, often people of color, guest

worker status can result in bondage-like system
where, by law, the workers cannot change employers, remedies for labor law violations are
limited; and termination of employment subjects them not only to loss of jobs but to de-
portation. Abuses against guest workers (including nonpayment of wages and benefits) have
been chronicled in white papers, books, litigation, and a number of news reports. For the some 120,000 temporary guest
workers who plant and harvest, cook and clean build and landscape, exploitation often begin at home. U.S. companies wishing to
hire guest workers generally subcontract with labor recruiters who operate in the countries of origin. Workers
may arrive in
the United States with debts to labor contractors in amounts ranging; from $500 to $20,000, at
exorbitant interest rates, often signing over the deeds to their homes in exchange for the
chance to work. For many, a false promise of years of work at a good salary makes incurring the debt worth the risk. Upon
arrival in the United States, the true risk becomes apparent: identity documents are frequently confiscated to
ensure they stay put. Jobs turn out to be not as advertised. Injured workers are effectively cut
out of the workers' compensation system by threats of retaliation or by the complexities of
collecting from afar. Workers are left to work off their debt to the con tractor who recruited
them.
U.S. employers leverage debt and stringent labor contracts to suppress dissent.
u.S. employers almost universally rely on private individuals or agencies to find and recruit
guestworkers in their home countries, mostly in Mexico and Central America.24 These labor recruiters
usually charge fees to the worker — sometimes thousands of dollars — to cover travel, visas and
other costs, including profit for the recruiters. The workers, most of whom live in poverty,
frequently must obtain high-interest loans to come up with the money to pay the fees. In addition,
recruiters sometimes require them to leave collateral, such as the deed to their house or car, to ensure that they fulfill the terms of
their individual labor contract. The largely unregulated recruiting business can be quite lucrative. with more than 106,000 such
workers recruited in 2011 alone, tens of millions of dollars in recruiting fees are at stake. This financial bonanza provides a powerful
incentive for recruiters and agencies to import as many workers as possible — with little or no regard to the impact on individual
workers and their families. Workers sTarT off DeePLy in DeBT overwhelming debt is a chronic problem for guestworkers. Typically,
guestworkers arriving in the united States face a fee-related debt ranging from $500 to well
over $10,000. Many pay exorbitant interest rates on that debt. when that’s the case, they have
virtually no possibility of repaying the debt by performing the work offered by the employer
during the term of the contract. Although u.S. laws do provide some obligation for employers to reimburse workers for
their travel and visa costs,25 in practice it is rare that guestworkers are fully reimbursed.26 Most struggle to repay their debt, while
interest accrues. These obstacles are compounded when employers fail to offer as many hours of work as promised — a common
occurrence. over the past decade, the SPLC has represented Guatemalan guestworkers who are recruited to work in the forestry and
pine straw industries. These workers have been routinely subjected to exploitative recruitment tactics, often by the same recruiters
who have consistently escaped liability for their actions. This is true despite the Department of Labor’s recent efforts to better
regulate the h-2 program, including enacting regulations that prevent employers from knowingly engaging recruiters who charge
fees to workers. In reality, these incremental regulatory changes have not stopped recruitment abuse in guestworker programs.27
Guestworkers from Guatemala generally pay at least $2,000 in travel, visa and hiring fees to obtain forestry jobs in the united
States. Guatemalans are recruited largely from huehuetenango, an extremely poor region where many indigenous people live. often
illiterate, many speak Spanish as their second language, with varying degrees of pro- ciency. They generally work as subsistence
farmers and have virtually no opportunity to earn wages in rural Guatemala. Thus, their only realistic option for raising the funds
needed to secure h-2 jobs in the united States is to visit a loan shark, who will likely charge exorbitant interest rates. Given that the
season for forestry work is generally three months long and workers often earn so little, they have little hope of repaying the debt
doing the work for which they were hired. In addition, the majority of Guatemalan forestry workers interviewed by the SPLC were
required to leave some form of collateral, generally a property deed, with an agent in Guatemala to ensure that the worker will
“comply” with the terms of his contract. If
a worker violates the contract — as determined by the recruiter
— that worker will be fined or threatened. This tactic is enormously effective at suppressing
complaints about pay, working conditions or housing. u.S.-based companies deny knowledge of
the abuse, but there is little doubt that they derive substantial benefit from their agents’ actions. It is
almost inconceivable that a worker would complain in any substantial way while a company
agent holds the deed to the home where his wife and children reside. In 2012, Guatemalan guestworkers
recruited to collect pine straw and harvest blueberries in the southeastern united States sought assistance from the SPLC in escaping
an exploitative labor situation. The workers had borrowed large amounts of money at monthly interest rates of between 5 and 10%
(well over 60% annually) to cover recruitment fees in addition to other pre-employment costs. Several of the workers offered the
deeds to their homes as collateral. As one worker explained, “The recruiter told me that I would make $8.30 an hour and would
never run out of work to do. I didn’t realize that I would also have to pay so much money each month for rent, transportation and
work supplies. he made it sound like we would earn lots of money, but I wasn’t even able to pay off my debt.” The workers were
never reimbursed for their travel and visa expenses. After receiving meager wages and languishing for weeks without work, many of
the workers left their jobs in even greater debt as interest on their loans continued to accrue. The workers
feared that they
would lose their homes, bring shame to their families, or put their lives in danger if they
returned to Guatemala without having paid off their debts. These tactics are not limited to any particular
industry or country. SPLC clients from countries across the globe who work in a variety of industries, including hospitality and
welding, have reported similar abusive recruitment tactics. In one SPLC case involving h-2B guestworkers from India, David v. Signal
International, LLC, the recruiter threatened to cancel visas or tear up passports to keep job applicants in the recruitment pipeline.
one worker described watching when two workers who had been recruited to work at Signal sought to withdraw from the
recruitment process and asked to be refunded the approximately $10,000 they had each paid. he described how the recruiter
refused to refund their fees and drew a big “X” across the visas in their passports. other witnesses have described how this recruiter
threatened to tear up the passports of workers who asked for refunds. other advocacy organizations have thoroughly documented
deceptive and abusive recruitment activities in a variety of h-2 occupations, including the seafood, 28 herder,29 and agriculture30
industries, among others. Many of the workers interviewed by the SPLC know they are taking a risk by entering into deep debt in
exchange for employment in the united States. This raises the question: why do workers choose to come to the united States under
these terms? The simple fact is that workers from Mexico, Guatemala and many other countries often have very few economic
opportunities. In recent years, rural Mexicans have had an increasingly dif cult time making a living at subsistence farming, and in
some regions there are virtually no wage-paying jobs. where jobs exist, the pay is extremely low; unskilled laborers can earn 10
times as much, or more, in the united States as they can at home. Most perceive the guestworker program as their best chance to
get to the united States and provide a better life for their families.31 recruiters often exploit workers’ desperate economic situation
by deceptively promising them lucrative job opportunities and even green cards or visa extensions. These
abuses are
exacerbated by the inherently disempowering structure of the h-2 program. The program
requires that guestworkers work only for the employer who sponsored their visa and that they
leave the country when their visa expires. Therefore, once the workers arrive in the united
States and the recruiter’s deception unravels, they face a tough decision: They can remain in an
abusive situation, return to their home country where they have little chance of earning enough
money to repay their debt, or leave their employer and become undocumented, risking their
ability to return to the united States in the future to work. Tethered to a single employer and
often unable to return home due to crushing debt, guestworkers are extremely susceptible to
debt servitude and human trafficking.32 After weeks of scarce work and abusive treatment, Guatemalan workers
recruited to work in pine straw and blueberries in 2012 saw no recourse other than to abandon their employer, risking retaliation,
blacklisting, and loss of legal status. “I wanted to return home but couldn’t afford a plane ticket,” said one worker. “I
was really
worried about being in the united States illegally and ruining my chances of getting a visa
again, but I felt I had no choice. I couldn’t stay at the farm any longer.” workers who remain with abusive
employers often find themselves in a similar situation when their contract is up. It is not uncommon for workers,
desperate to pay off their debt before returning home, to overstay their visas or pay
contractors, employers or even immigration attorneys for fraudulent visa extensions. regulations
prohibiting employers from using recruiters who charge fees do exist, but they are rarely enforced.33 This is likely because holding
international recruiters accountable is nearly impossible when they can easily conceal their overseas activities from government
monitoring. For example, two consulates in Latin America routinely asked prospective h-2 workers how much they had paid in
recruitment fees, apparently out of concern that a high level of indebtedness would cause workers to overstay their visas in order to
repay the debt. workers were told by their recruiters what the “correct” — that is, false — answer should be, and workers dutifully
under- stated the fees that they have paid.34 In reality, this system is so flawed that small regulatory changes simply have not — and
will not — go far enough to put a stop to the lucrative recruitment game. empowering
guestworkers with the ability
to switch employers and, eventually, to become full members of our society through a pathway
to citizenship will go far toward reducing the control that unscrupulous recruiters and employers
exert over guestworkers in the united States. These are basic rights to which guestworkers —
who are simply seeking to better their lives by lawfully obtaining employment in the united
States — should be entitled.
Unequal power arrangements tether fearful employees to employers.

The most fundamental problem with guestworker programs, both historically and currently, is
that the employer — not the worker — decides whether a worker can come to the United States
and whether he can stay. Because of this arrangement, the balance of power between employer
and worker is skewed so disproportionately in favor of the employer that, for all practical
purposes, the worker’s rights are nullified. At any moment, the employer can fire the worker,
call the government and declare the worker to be “illegal.” otto rafael Boton-Gonzalez, an h-2B forestry
worker from Guatemala, has seen first-hand how this works. “when the supervisor would see that a person was ready to leave the
job because the pay was so bad, he would take our papers from us. he would rip up our visa and say, ‘you don’t want to work? Get
out of here then. you don’t want to work? right now I will call immigration to take your papers and deport you.’” Many abuses,
perhaps most abuses of guestworkers, flow from the fact that the employer literally holds the deportation card. one
of the
most chronic abuses reported by guestworkers concerns the seizure of identity documents — in
particular passports and Social Security cards.35 In many instances, workers are told that the
documents are being taken in order to ensure that they do not leave in the middle of the
contract. The SPLC has received dozens of reports of this practice and has, in the course of its legal representation of workers,
confirmed that it is routine.36 while some employers state that they hold the documents for the purpose of “safekeeping,” many
have been quite candid in explaining that there is a great risk that workers will flee if the documents are not held. one employer
sued by the SPLC stated in her deposition that the company kept workers’ Social Security cards in the office because “if they have
their Social Security card, they’ll leave.”37 one SPLC client, an h-2 worker recruited to work in the southeastern united States,
reported, “our employers immediately confiscated our passports. They told us they were going to apply for our
visa extensions and Social Security cards. The employers held onto our documents for months, even after telling us
that our extensions had been granted. The grower threatened to report us to Immigration if we continued
to ask for our passports back.” without possession of their documents, the workers were fearful of leaving the farm. The
worker continued, “Since I couldn’t prove that I was in the country legally, I was nervous to even go
out to the store for fear that I would be stopped by the police.” The employers played on the
workers’ fears, telling them that they were at risk of getting detained and deported if they went
out into the community without documents. There is no realistic mechanism for workers to recover their identity
documents. numerous employers have refused to return these documents even when the worker simply wanted to return to his
home country. The SPLC also has encountered numerous incidents where employers destroyed passports or visas in order to take
away workers’ proof of legal status. when this happens, there is little likelihood of a worker obtaining assistance from local law
enforcement of cials. In many jurisdictions, lawyers
representing workers advise them to avoid calling police
because they are more likely to take action against complaining workers than against the
employer. Living in fear In other instances, employers have quite explicitly used the threat of calling
u.S. Immigration and Customs enforcement as a means of asserting control over workers. For
example, in one case where workers refused to work until they received their pay after not having been paid in several weeks, the
employer responded by threatening to call Immigration and declare that the workers had “abandoned” their work and were thus
“illegal” workers. Such threats are common and are made possible by a system under which visas are issued solely for employment
with the petitioning employer.38 In the Signal case, when workers organized to demand better conditions, Signal called a meeting of
all the guestworkers. As one worker put it, “one of the company officials said that Signal was meeting all of our needs and that if we
continued complaining, they would send us back to India.” At around 5 a.m. the next morning, Signal employees and security
guards grabbed four people, including two workers identified as leaders of the organizing efforts. Signal’s senior vice president said
in a deposition that the plan was, “don’t give them any advance notice, take them all out of the line on the way to work, get their
personal belongings, get them in a van and get their tickets and get them to the airport and send them back to India.” one of the
security guards stated in a document provided during the discovery process that Signal’s goal was to make an example of these
workers so that guestworkers understood they were not to make trouble. The plan was disrupted only when one of the rounded-up
workers attempted suicide, and the police responded to the ensuing uproar. even when employers do not overtly threaten
deportation, workers live in constant fear that any bad act or complaint on their part will result in their being sent home or not being
rehired. Fear of retaliation is a deeply rooted problem in guestworker programs. In 1964, the Mexican- American labor organizer and
writer ernesto Galarza found that despite the prevalence of workers’ rights violations, only one in every 4,300 braceros
complained.39 In
examining the h-2A program in north Carolina, human rights watch found
“widespread fear and evidence of blacklisting against workers who speak up about conditions,
who seek assistance from Legal Services attorneys, or who become active in [the union].”40 The
north Carolina Growers Association blacklist has been widely publicized. The 1997 blacklist, called the “1997 nCGA Ineligible for
rehire report,” consisted of more than 1,000 names of undesirable former guestworkers.41 After h-2B workers represented by the
SPLC led a class action lawsuit against the u.S. forestry company eller and Sons Trees, Inc. for massive wage violations, the company
took advantage of the workers’ fear of retaliation to coerce them into withdrawing from the case. only days before the deadline for
class members to withdraw, a company agent ew to Guatemala to attend a hiring meeting for prospective workers. At this meeting,
the company agent informed the workers that the lawsuit would hurt both the company and the workers and presented them with
forms to opt out of the case. Fearing that the company would not rehire them if they did not sign, the majority of the workers
complied. As Irlamar Aguilar Martinez, a class member in attendance, testi ed, “the American asked who wanted to sue the eller and
Sons company or who didn’t want the company to come to an end. People voted by raising their hand as the American and [the
Guatemalan recruiter] observed.” never intending to withdraw from the case, Irlamar signed the form because the recruiter told
her: “with this the boss will see that you are in need of a visa.” The court later declared the opt-out forms submitted by workers at
the hiring meeting invalid because they had been improperly obtained. Despite modest reforms to the h-2 program intended to
prevent these tactics in recent years, fear of retaliation among workers is a constant concern — and one that is warranted. As long
as a worker’s visa is tied to a single employer and that employer “holds the deportation card,” guestworkers’ legal rights will, in
practice, exist only on paper.
H-2A visa holders employed in other occupations—enduring unique risks for
lower wages.
Franklin et al. 04/30 (STEPHEN, former labor and workplace reporter for the Chicago
Tribune, KRISTINE SHERRED, JESSICA VILLAGOMEZ and ZHEJUN WANG. graduate students in the
Medill School of Journalism in the social justice and investigation specialization, JOSEPH
BULLINGTON, reporter for Rural America In These Times, KARI LYDERSEN is co-director of the
Social Justice News Nexus, “The Visa Loophole That Big Ag Construction Firms Love To Exploit,”
In These Times, 04/30/18,
http://inthesetimes.com/features/farm_industry_migrant_workers_h2a_visa_exploitation.html)
SPRINGFIELD, ILL.—WORK WAS RAPIDLY VANISHING. Mary Wilson’s construction projects on farms, nearly a third of her business,
had disappeared, and she was not able to hire as many workers. But it was 2009, and she chalked it up to the recession. When the
work had not returned by 2016, Wilson, president of Michel Concrete in Springfield, began searching for an answer. She found that
the farm construction jobs she typically sought were going to a competitor offering lower prices. On federal contractor
websites, she saw that the competitor was using a visa program meant to allow U.S. employers to bring in
foreign workers during a local labor shortage. It’s called the H2A visa, and in central Illinois it pays about
$13 an hour, roughly half of what union construction workers in the area make. Wilson couldn’t understand why it was legal. The
H2A visa program, as she understood it, was meant to provide the agriculture industry with
seasonal farmworkers. Until recently, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL)—which, alongside the State Department,
oversees the visa program—seemed to agree. In 2008, the DOL rejected a request by Alewelt Concrete Inc.
to employ workers on H2A agricultural visas to help build livestock confinement facilities in Iowa.
The DOL explained in a refusal letter, “The requested workers will not be raising, feeding or caring for the livestock in the facilities.”
Alewelt appealed, however, and reached a deal with the DOL to dismiss the case. In
the decade since, Alewelt and
other farm construction companies have brought in hundreds of workers on H2A visas. In These
Times spoke with H2A visa workers doing farm construction in Illinois, consulted legal experts and migrant-worker advocates, and
studied DOL records, and determined that the practice has become widespread—particularly in building the hog
confinement facilities that are mushrooming in the Midwest. • PORK IS A BOOMING INDUSTRY, driven largely by growing exports to
China. Between 2015 and 2016, the profits pork packers earned per head of hog almost doubled, according to the North American
Meat Institute. As profits continue to rise, Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois lead the country in number of hogs slaughtered, and the hog
industry’s infrastructure continues to expand. The
number of “concentrated animal feeding operations,”
known as CAFOs, has quadrupled in Iowa to more than 10,000 since 2001, according to a report by the
Iowa Policy Project. The dramatic increase has raised serious environmental and health concerns for
neighbors who deal with overflowing manure lagoons, overwhelming odors and air pollution
from the facilities. And many workers who staff the CAFOs are themselves immigrants who
endure low pay and dangerous working conditions. The CAFO boom also requires construction
workers, but it’s hard to come by exact figures on how many are on H2A visas. Full of typos and
misspellings, DOL databases tracking H2A workers require much guesswork. Over the years, “construction”
appears and disappears as a database category. Even officials with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which
released a report about the H2A program in 2015 (and updated it in 2017), find the records
difficult to decode. “We were trying [to] answer what [H2A workers] were doing once they were
in the country—but we couldn’t match [the federal records] up with what they were actually
doing,” says Cindy Barnes, director of GAO’s Education, Workforce and Income Security division. Barnes believes the muddled
records are due to a lack of coordination between the DOL and the State Department. Asked by In These Times about the number of
H2A farmworkers doing construction work, DOL officials pointed to a specific category code that has been in use for H2A only since
many companies with names that include “building” or “concrete” filed as if
2015. But even after 2015,
their workers were picking crops or milking cows. Based on the DOL’s category for farm construction jobs, only
36 construction applications for H2A visas were approved in 2015, 2016 and 2017. But when In
These Times searched the database for the word “construction” as a subcategory of “primary
crop,” more than 300 applications were approved over that three-year period. Most of the
applications were for multiple workers. The amount of H2A visas issued for Iowa and Illinois has been climbing
markedly, from 2,071 in 2012 to 3,475 in 2016. Much of the increase can be attributed to one company: Alewelt Concrete. Alewelt
made the DOL’s 2016 list of the top 10 H2A employers in the country, with 1,343 certified H2A workers. Alewelt is the only
construction company on the list. H2A IS NOT THE ONLY GUEST WORKER VISA PROGRAM AVAILABLE TO EMPLOYERS. The
H2B
visa is designed to bring in temporary workers for non-agricultural jobs, including construction.
Each program is supposed to pay the prevailing wage, but H2A’s rates are based on low
farmwork wages rather than higher construction pay. Unlike H2A, H2B mandates overtime pay,
requires that employers pay into Social Security and Medicare, and has annual caps. “Using the H2A
program to hire workers to do construction is, at the very least, a legal gray area,” says Daniel Costa, an attorney and labor and
migration expert with the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington, D.C. “Even if it doesn’t violate the letter of the law, it at
least violates the spirit. I think workers who are doing construction should come under the H2B
program.”
H-2A workers face similar problems; a massive overhaul is needed

Madrid 17 [Mauel, a writing fellow at The American Prospect, 7/20/17, “Can a Revamped
Farmworker Visa System Prevent Abuses,” http://prospect.org/article/can-revamped-
farmworker-visa-system-prevent-abuses]ZZ
Four years is a long time to suffer the indignity of unpaid wages and miserable housing. But
Martin bit his tongue. A Mexican citizen, Martin came to the United States on an H2A temporary
visa for seasonal agricultural workers. Martin’s contract specified that he would be housed and
work on a central Texas cattle ranch for $10 an hour. But when he arrived at his destination,
there was no ranch, no cattle, and no housing. Instead, the company that recruited Martin and
other workers required them to drive out to the mountains near the state’s southwestern
border to build barbed-wire fences for $65 dollars a day. Despite freezing nighttime
temperatures, he had no choice but to sleep in his pickup truck or an open-air shack. But almost
anything was better than working back in Mexico, where the daily minimum wage is 80 pesos (about $4). He didn’t mind the tough work or the harsh
conditions, but as abuses started to pile up, Martin, who took the job to provide for his wife and children back home, decided he couldn’t take it
anymore. In 2015, Martin took his employers to court in Texas seeking damages for fraud and wage theft. His attorney, Jacob Wedemeyer, says
Martin’s case was “particularly egregious,” but seasonal agricultural workers often suffer terrible abuses when they arrive in the United States. Martin
(his attorney asked that The American Prospect not use his last name to protect his future job prospects) is one of the more than 100,000 workers who
enter the country annually under the H2A program, which has been criticized for ignoring the ongoing exploitation of workers. Farmworker
advocates have long complained that employers subject laborers to fraud, rape, physical and
verbal harassment, and ethnic and gender discrimination. Yet citing labor shortages, Democratic
and Republican members of Congress want to see an expansion of the program. But advocates
say that before that can happen, federal officials need to launch a comprehensive overhaul of
the visa system to address worker mistreatment. Of the 2.5 million farmworkers in the United
States, H2A visa holders currently comprise only about 7 percent of the agricultural workforce. In
a sector that relies heavily on undocumented workers (estimates range from 30 percent to 70 percent) the number of H2A visa holders is expected to
increase as the Trump administration continues to step up its harsh immigration enforcement policies. “It’s safe to say that, without any reforms, an
expansion of the H2A program will only lead to the abuse of more workers,” says Bruce Goldstein, president of Farmworker Justice, a Washington, D.C.-
based advocacy group. For
centuries, U.S. farmers have relied on cheap labor provided by temporary
seasonal workers and undocumented people. Established in 1952, the H2A visa program is the
latest incarnation of the federal braceros (“strong-armed” in Spanish) system. During the two
world wars, the federal government allowed Mexican farmworkers to enter the United States to
replace American laborers fighting overseas. The United States recruited nearly 70,000 workers
during World War I and an estimated two million during World War II. Under the braceros system, workers
frequently received only a portion of the wages they were owed. Employers forced people to work in dangerous conditions and to live in unsanitary,
dilapidated housing. Labor
Department official Lee G. Williams, who helped administer the braceros
program during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, described the system as “legalized
slavery.” Legal protections for workers, such as guaranteed access to medical care, adequate
housing, and a minimum wage, existed on paper, but were unevenly enforced, if enforced at all.
Many of those abuses still plague the H2A program. Today, farmers and immigration attorneys say that ramped-up
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) removal activities have scared undocumented immigrants away from the fields, forcing more employers to
use the H2A visa program to hire the workers they need. H2A visa applications spiked in the first few months of the Trump administration. Between
January and March, the Department of Labor approved nearly 70,000 farm-job applications, a 36 percent increase over last year. Annual H2A visa
approvals have more than doubled over the last decade and some labor economists project that they will quadruple by the end of fiscal 2017. “What
we’re seeing is a definite reaction to increased deportations,” says Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, an assistant professor of food studies at Syracuse
University. “Farmers want a situation where what they’re doing is legal; that’s where H2A comes in.” Foreign agricultural workers who apply for visas
often find themselves at the mercy of unscrupulous “labor brokers,” hired by employers to recruit laborers to fill temporary farm jobs. These
middlemen, usually operating as independent contractors, often deceive workers about where they are headed and the jobs they will perform, charge
exorbitant—and illegal— recruitment fees, and engage in human trafficking. The lack of federal oversight allows these “brokers” to fleece incoming
guest workers while insulating the employers who initially contracted them from federal scrutiny. According
to a report by the
Southern Poverty Law Center, some workers arrive owing as much as $10,000 to labor brokers,
only to find they won’t be able to earn enough to pay the money back. When dismissal means
deportation, a worker is far less likely to complain about exploitative work environments.
“Workers are forced to choose between returning home to insurmountable debts or remaining
in an abusive work environment,” says Elizabeth Mauldin, policy director of Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, a migrant-rights
organization headquartered in Mexico. “They’re risking their livelihoods by speaking out.” One key reform that
farmworkers’ advocacy groups have proposed is a type of portable “guest worker” visa, which
allows contract workers to look for other H2A jobs anywhere in the United States. This type of
visa would permit employees to challenge employers without fear of deportation, allowing them
to simply move on to another job if threatened or abused. The World War I braceros program
allowed workers to leave their jobs and search for work with other federally approved
employers. Some agribusinesses have voiced support for this idea. In February, the American
Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), a farmers trade group, proposed an “at-will,” or portable, visa.
(They also suggested that undocumented workers should be offered permanent legal status
after working for a specified period of time in the agriculture sector.) Agribusinesses and local farmers, who
would be the biggest benefactors of an influx of new temporary workers, have called for the H2A program to be streamlined. They argue that current
regulations are too burdensome, requiring employers to conduct surveys to establish the prevailing wages for workers and proving they can’t find U.S.
workers before they look elsewhere. A 2015 Buzzfeed investigation highlighted the extraordinary measures some employers take to hire H2A workers
so they can also avoid payroll and unemployment taxes and other rules. Opponents of the H2A program argue that it displaces local farmworkers and
suppresses wages. Cut off from foreign workers, U.S. farmers would likely have to raise wages that are already at rock bottom, automate their
operations, produce less, or some combination of the three. Even so, many farmers would not be able raise wages enough to attract the numbers of
people they require to do the arduous work. “It’s a largely a matter of standards that surround the job. Workers don’t receive living wages, and these
jobs aren’t easy,” says Minkoff-Zern. “I don’t see U.S. workers getting back to the fields anytime in the near future.” During the July G20 summit in
Germany, President Donald Trump and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto reportedly explored the possibility of creating new avenues for Mexican
agricultural laborers to work in the United States. Trump, who has been a vehement opponent of undocumented immigrants and a vocal supporter of
restricting legal immigration, also appears determined to carve out an exception for temporary workers. In private meetings with farmers, Trump has
assured them that they would have “plenty of access” to foreign workers. “We’re going to have work visas for the farm workers,” he told The
Economist in May. “We like those people a lot and we want them to continue to come in.” But prospects are bleak for H2A reforms. The Labor
Department vets agricultural employers seeking farmworker visas and oversees agricultural working conditions. But Trump’s 2018 budget proposal to
cut almost $2.5 billion from the department’s already barebones operating budget means that there would be little to no funding available for
enhanced enforcement measures, grants for health and safety training, or migrant worker legal services. Increases
in the number of
H2A visa holders combined with decreased Labor Department oversight means that migrant
farmworkers will likely continue to be victimized by abusive employers and shady labor brokers.
Even if Trump meets the demands of the powerful agribusiness sector, his Labor Department officials are unlikely to prioritize enforcing fair working
conditions for laborers or other reforms. Until
Congress takes the necessary steps to protect foreign workers, a
braceros program 2.0 is unlikely to emerge to help people like Martin, who ultimately reached
an out-of-court settlement for an undisclosed sum and has since returned to his home state of
Coahuila in northern Mexico. “He was lucky,” Wedemeyer says. “Many H2A workers arrive indebted because of recruiter fees and are
forced to suffer until they pay everything back—Martin was able to walk away.”
Agricultural guest workers risk greater injury and obstacles to recourse.

Injuries without Effective Recourse Guestworkers

toil in some of the most dangerous occupations in the
United States.61 Fatality rates for the agriculture and forestry industries, both of which employ
large numbers of guestworkers, are seven times the national average.62 Unfortunately, when H-
2 workers suffer injuries on the job, all too often they are denied access to appropriate medical
care and benefits. Those who are seriously injured face enormous, often insurmountable
obstacles to obtaining workers’ compensation benefits. In most instances, guestworkers are entitled to
workers’ compensation benefits — on paper, at least. The reality is that many injured guestworkers are not able to obtain the bene
ts to which they are entitled under this system. only the h-2A program requires employers to provide workers’ compensation
coverage throughout the united States. For h-2B workers, workers’ compensation coverage depends on the laws in the state where
the worker is employed. Because workers’ compensation rules vary by state, some states are more accessible to transnational
workers than others. And workers often lack the knowledge needed to negotiate the complex system in order to have bene ts
continue when they leave the united States. There simply are no clear rules in the h-2 regulations
guaranteeing that workers’ compensation benefits will continue after an injured worker
returns to his home country. Indeed, the insurance carrier of one large company employing
substantial numbers of guestworkers has a policy of affirmatively cutting off workers when they
leave the united States, which they inevitably must do. This inhibits the workers’ ability to gain
access to benefits and provides a financial incentive for employers to rely on guestworkers.63
Some states (for example, new Jersey) mandate that examining physicians be located in the
state where an injury occurred. This means that injured workers have dif culty obtaining ben-
efits while in other states and in their home countries. Some states require workers to appear in
the state for hearings. And most states do not have clear rules permitting workers to participate
by telephone in depositions and hearings before the workers’ compensation body. These rules
put guestworkers at an enormous disadvantage in obtaining benefits to which they are enti-
tled. As a practical matter, workers also have an extremely dif cult time nding a lawyer willing to accept a case for a guestworker
who will be required to return to his or her home country. In 2003, a group of civil rights and immigrant rights groups led an amicus
brief with the Inter-American Court of human rights relating to the treatment of immigrants in the united States. Among their many
complaints: the discrimination against foreign-born workers in the state-by-state workers’ compensation scheme. That brief states:
“workers’ compensation laws in many states bar the non-resident family members of workers killed on the job from receiving full
benefits. In those states, whenever the family member is living outside the united States and is not a united States citizen, the family
members do not receive the full death benefits award. There are several ways in which states limit compensation to nonresident
alien bene ciaries. Some states
limit compensation compared to the bene-fits a lawful resident would
have received, generally 50% (Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina).
Some states restrict the types of non-resident dependents who are eligible to receive benefits as bene ciaries (Arkansas, Delaware,
Florida, Kentucky, Pennsylvania). other states limit coverage based on: The length of time a migrant has been a citizen (washington),
or the cost of living in the alien resident bene ciary’s home country (oregon). Alabama denies bene ts to all foreign bene ciaries.”64
(internal citations omitted) Such policies obviously disproportionately affect the families of guestworkers killed on the job.
Many farmers need year-round farmworkers – H-2A visas don’t provide

immigration reforms that will help create jobs for Americans today, July 7, 2017, “Immigrant
Worker Shortage Devastates U.S. Mushroom Crops”,
https://www.newamericaneconomy.org/feature/immigrant-worker-shortage-devastates-u-s-
mushroom-crops/
It was early January and Jim Angelucci had a problem. His Oxford, Pennsylvania, farm had mushrooms
ready to harvest, but not enough workers. “The worst thing for a grower is to go to work at 4
o’clock in the morning and not have anyone there,” says Angelucci, the general manager of Phillips Mushroom
Farm. “That really hits you in the gut.” Many of the farm’s foreign workers had gone home for the holidays
and hadn’t returned, he explains. As a result, nearly a quarter of the farm’s crop ended up at the
landfill. “Labor is our biggest Achilles heel,” says Angelucci. “I’ve always said: Without our workers, we’re
nothing; we’re out of business.” The labor shortage plaguing Pennsylvania mushroom growers is
only one piece in a larger, national, problem. The number of new immigrants coming to the
United States to work in agriculture has dropped by 75 percent in recent years, leading to labor
shortages that have cost U.S. farms an estimated $3.1 billion a year in fruit and vegetable sales.
Without our workers, we’re nothing; we’re out of business.” Unless deeper systemic issues are addressed,
Angelucci says, more U.S.-grown food will go to waste. When he first started suffering labor
shortages, he was able to raise pay to attract more workers. But by summer of 2017, five of six
Phillips’ farms were short several harvesters — a total shortage of 25 workers — because U.S.-born
workers show little to no interest in farm labor jobs. “While there’s a limit to what we can pay to
harvest the crop, the rate of pay doesn’t matter any longer, there is just no one out there to
hire,” he says. And it’s not as if foreign guest workers are legally available to him. Mushroom
and dairy farms need workers year-round, and the only guest-worker program for agricultural
employers is the H-2A visa, which is for seasonal workers only. “We need major changes in the
guest-worker program. Workers need to be available year-round,” he says. The government
should also create a pathway for critical agricultural workers to legally live and work in the
United States, he says. “The people who have been here and worked hard need to have a way to
remain here and support their families, whether citizenship is a part of that or not,” he says. It’s
not only American farms that need a dependable labor supply, he says; national security is at
stake. “We have the cheapest and safest food supply of any place in the world, and I think that is
in serious jeopardy if our immigration laws don’t change,” he says. If food is imported, it likely
won’t be held to U.S. health and safety standards. “I have no problem with getting rid of
criminals, but there are a lot of good, hardworking people harvesting our crops. They are some
of the most loyal and family-oriented people that I’ve ever met.”
***AT Disads
AT Base DA
Trump’s base supports the plan – only the turn has uniqueness.
Caitlin Dickerson and Jennifer Medina 2017, Caitlin Dickerson is a national immigration
reporter based in New York, Jennifer Medina is a national correspondent based in Los Angeles. A
native of Southern California, she has covered the region for several years, focusing on the
uneven economic recovery, immigration, criminal justice and education, “California Farmers
Backed Trump, but Now Fear Losing Field Workers”, 2/9/2017,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/09/us/california-farmers-backed-trump-but-now-fear-
losing-field-workers.html
MERCED, Calif. — Jeff Marchini and others in the Central Valley here bet their farms on the election of
Donald J. Trump. His message of reducing regulations and taxes appealed to this Republican
stronghold, one of Mr. Trump’s strongest bases of support in the state. As for his promises about
cracking down on illegal immigrants, many assumed Mr. Trump’s pledges were mostly just talk.
But two weeks into his administration, Mr. Trump has signed executive orders that have upended the
country’s immigration laws. Now farmers here are deeply alarmed about what the new policies
could mean for their workers, most of whom are unauthorized, and the businesses that depend
on them. “Everything’s coming so quickly,” Mr. Marchini said. “We’re not loading people into buses or deporting them, that’s not
happening yet.” As he looked out over a crew of workers bent over as they rifled through muddy leaves to find purple heads of
radicchio, he said that asa businessman, Mr. Trump would know that farmers had invested millions of
dollars into produce that is growing right now, and that not being able to pick and sell those
crops would represent huge losses for the state economy. “I’m confident that he can grasp the magnitude and
the anxiety of what’s happening now.” ADVERTISEMENT Mr. Trump’s immigration policies could transform
California’s Central Valley, a stretch of lowlands that extends from Redding to Bakersfield. Approximately 70 percent of all
farmworkers here are living in the United States illegally, according to researchers at University of California, Davis. The
impact could reverberate throughout the valley’s precarious economy, where agriculture is by
far the largest industry. With 6.5 million people living in the valley, the fields in this state bring in
$35 billion a year and provide more of the nation’s food than any other state. The consequences
of a smaller immigrant work force would ripple not just through the orchards and dairies, but
also to locally owned businesses, restaurants, schools and even seemingly unrelated industries,
like the insurance market. Subscribe to The Times Many here feel vindicated by the election, and signs declaring “Vote to
make America great again” still dot the highways. But in conversations with nearly a dozen farmers, most of whom voted for Mr.
Trump, each acknowledged that they relied on workers who provided false documents. And if the administration were
to weed out illegal workers, farmers say their businesses would be crippled. Even Republican
lawmakers from the region have supported plans that would give farmworkers a path to
citizenship. ADVERTISEMENT “If you only have legal labor, certain parts of this industry and this
region will not exist,” said Harold McClarty, a fourth-generation farmer in Kingsburg whose operation grows, packs and ships
peaches, plums and grapes throughout the country. “If we sent all these people back, it would be a total
disaster.” Mr. McClarty is not just concerned about his business, but also about his work force, he said. Many of them have
worked for him year-round for more than a decade, making at least $11 an hour. After immigration officials audited his employee
records a few years ago, he was forced to let go of dozens of employees. “These people had been working for us for a long time, and
we depended on them.” Now he worries that a Trump administration could mandate a Homeland Security Department program
called E-verify, which was aimed at stopping the use of fraudulent documents. In all but a few states, the program is voluntary and
only a small fraction of businesses use it. Image Workers packing a bin at a farm in California’s Central Valley.CreditMax Whittaker
for The New York Times ADVERTISEMENT Farmers
here have faced a persistent labor shortage for years, in
part because of increased policing at the border and the rising prices charged by smugglers who
help people sneak across. The once-steady stream of people coming from rural towns in
southern Mexico has nearly stopped entirely. The existing field workers are aging, and many of
their children find higher-paying jobs outside agriculture. Many growers here and across the country are
hopeful that the new administration will expand and simplify H-2A visas, which allow them to bring in temporary workers from other
countries for agricultural jobs. California farmers have increasingly come to rely on the program in the last few years. But Mr.
McClarty and others say that legalizing the existing work force should be the first priority. While they support
the idea of deporting immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes, they oppose forcing people to leave the country for
minor crimes, like driving without a license. Since the election, they have continued to call their
congressional representatives and lobbied through trade associations, like the Western Growers
Association, whose chief executive is part of Mr. Trump’s agricultural advisory board. Farmers are
also anxiously awaiting the administration’s plans to alter longstanding trade agreements. Mr. Trump has said he will pull
out of the North American Free Trade Agreement if he cannot negotiate better terms for the United
States. Growers would benefit if Mr. Trump negotiated more favorable terms. But backing out of
the agreement entirely could provoke retaliation from Mexico that would hurt California’s
agricultural industry, which earned $21 billion from trade last year. ADVERTISEMENT Yet, many of Mr.
Trump’s supporters say they are counting on him to follow through on his promises. Dan Stein, president of the Federation for
American Immigration Reform, said that limiting the use of foreign labor would push more Americans into jobs that had primarily
been performed by immigrants. Image Sorting radicchio at a packing plant in Central Valley. Some farmers have used the same
undocumented workers for years.CreditMax Whittaker for The New York Times “It doesn’t matter if it’s programming computers or
picking in fields,” he said, “Any time you’re admitting substitutes for American labor you depress wages and working conditions and
deter Americans.” The prospect has business owners in the valley on edge. Patricia Pantoj runs a travel agency in Madera, north of
Fresno, where the city’s approximately 60,000 residents are predominantly Latino and work in the fields. This year, she said, fewer
people than ever before traveled back to their hometowns in Mexico. ADVERTISEMENT “They didn’t want to risk it,” she said.
“Everyone is scared, even if they have papers.” A few doors away from the travel agency, Maria Valero said all the customers at her
gift shop were undocumented. “If they went away, I would be out of business tomorrow,” she said. Jhovani Segura, an insurance
agent in Firebaugh, near the southern end of the valley, said that as much as 80 percent of their new car insurance policies came
from undocumented immigrants who, under a new state law, became eligible for driver’s licenses in 2015. “If there were mass
deportations, we would have to cancel half of our policies,” he said. In Ceres, north of Merced, the
public school district is
the largest employer by a large number, and many of the jobs were created to support the children of
immigrants. Administrators say any crackdown would result in huge job losses and would reduce
funding, which is distributed by the state based on need, for all the children in the district. Image
Sergio Rueda, left, and Lazaro Garcia prune peach trees at an orchard in Kingsburg, Calif.CreditMax Whittaker for The New York
Times ADVERTISEMENT Most of the workers in Mr. McClarty’s vineyards and orchards have well-established lives in the area. Javier
Soto, 46, bought a home for his family of five in Reedley, a city of 25,000 that calls itself “the world’s fruit basket.” He has worked for
Mr. McClarty’s farm for the last six years and his supervisor knows he is here without papers. “It is more scary now that he is really
the president and we see what he is doing,” Mr. Soto said. They are hopeful Mr. Trump will not make good on most of his threats.
“Quien más habla, menos hace,” they tell each other — the more you talk, the less you do. There are too many of them, they
reason, to throw them all out. “We’re just waiting and praying, hoping that somebody can convince them that we are not hurting
anyone by being here,” said Isabel Rios, 49, who has been picking grapes for the last two decades. Like most women in the fields, she
covers her face with a bandanna to protect against the blaring sun, dust and pesticides. Her two children, 9 and 18, are American-
born citizens and she worries what will happen to them if she is sent back to Mexico. “Who will benefit if we are not here?”
ADVERTISEMENT Mr. Marchini, the radicchio farmer, said he felt similarly after seeing generations of workers on his family farm
send their children to college and join the middle class. Mr. Marchini’s family has farmed in the valley for four generations and he
grew up working side by side with Mexican immigrants. He said that no
feasible increase in wages or change in
conditions would be enough to draw native-born Americans back into the fields.
AT Housing DA
Farmworkers build their own homes, or live in government or employer funded
housing
Husted 16 (Kristofor Husted is a health, food and environmental reported at KBIA and Harvest
Public Media ; “Farm workers face shortage of decent, affordable homes” on February 4th, 2016
for Marketplace ; https://www.marketplace.org/2016/01/28/world/tktk )
Today more farm workers are settling down, some in ramshackle housing like this. Indeed, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says
about three-quarters of hired crop workers are settled and work within 75 miles from home. But migrant
workers who pick
crops like cotton and melons in the U.S. can
have a tough time finding a place to live. The rural areas
where they can find work often lack the social services and affordable housing. That means many
farm worker families end up in dilapidated buildings, which can come with health risks. “There is a big need
across the country,” said Tony Hernandez, Administrator of the U.S. Rural Housing Service. “There is probably more need than
money we have.” Generallythere are three types of housing options for farm workers: Private housing
like the trailers Castro lived in, employee housing provided by a boss, and government funded housing.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture lends money through a federal program to build farm
worker housing. Hernandez says it’s critical to provide housing for the people who help get Americans’ food to the
table. “It’s not that long ago farm worker housing was nonexistent in a lot of places,” he said. “This is really an effort to make safe
and decent housing and better working conditions and housing is a big part of that.“ Hernandez said while
creation of farm
worker housing has improved through the program, there is competition for loans and some projects
don’t get funded immediately. The program is dependent on how much money Congress allocates for it, which is in flux.
That leaves some farmers to build their own housing. Peach producer Bill Bader built a handful of single-family
homes and bunkhouses on his property. “They’re not a Holiday Inn, but they’re comfortable with it,” he said. “They’re air
conditioned. They (have) good water.” But farm worker housing is scarce. “Farm
workers don’t make a lot of money.
They don’t have a lot of options. The housing that they are able to find is often substandard,” said Virginia
Ruiz, the director of occupational and environmental health at the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Farmworker Justice. She
says farm workers are often priced out of rural rental markets that lack the resources, infrastructure
or desire to build affordable housing and
end up crammed into rundown trailer parks.
Migrant workers moving around seasonally means they aren’t planning on

buying houses
Fox 13 (Emily Fox was a reporter for Michigan Radio ; “what ‘home’ looks like for a migrant
worker” October 8, 2013 ; http://michiganradio.org/post/what-home-looks-migrant-worker)
When migrant workers travel to multiple states throughout a year, following the crops that are ready to harvest, they never
really have a place to call home. They can’t afford to pay for multiple apartments or houses to only live in
a few months or weeks out of the year, and it’s hard to find hotels to stay in when you are traveling from state to state
usually during peak tourism season. That’s why farms that hire migrant workers often provide housing for very low
prices, or even for free. But as the saying goes, sometimes you get what you pay for. Staying in a dilapidated house Elizalde
Ramirez Vasquez is an undergraduate from MSU. Who says he lived in a horrible house when he harvested tobacco in Kentucky over
winter break. “Our house was not even a house. We live in this raggedy-old place. I don’t know how people can live in it. But it’s our
way of life, we have no other option,” he says. Ramirez Vasquez worked 12 hours or more every day for 3 weeks straight in the
tobacco fields. He cut the tobacco stalks and had to pick each tobacco leaf off the stalk by hand. Harvesting tobacco can be painful,
even dangerous. Ramirez Vasquez gets blisters all over his hands after harvesting and has been hospitalized twice for tobacco
poisoning. Tobacco can get absorbed through your skin, so when you are handling it as many hours as Ramirez Vasquez has, getting
tobacco poisoning isn’t uncommon. And there are other side effects as well. “It’s hell. My face doesn’t stop burning. My eyes don’t
stop stinging,” Ramirez Vasquez says. The work isn’t pretty, and neither was the house where he stayed while he worked the
tobacco fields. It was provided by the farm. When Ramirez Vasquez got back from break, he showed me pictures of the migrant
camp. Broken wires dangle from the ceiling where a light should be, some walls are covered with water damage, others have
insulation sticking out, the floor is covered with dirt and in the dead of winter, the place doesn’t have heat. “I walked in the house, it
was 30-40 degrees outside and it was colder in the house because the house had a cement floor. It was 10 degrees less in the house.
I could see my breath when I walked inside. I could see my breath as I went to my bed,” Ramirez Vasquez says. Ramirez Vasquez
shows me pictures of the bathroom. There aren’t any faucets and there are big buckets in the tub. The shower doesn’t work.
Ramirez Vasquez says back in high school he and his family would just use the lake near the camp to bathe. “So that lake was our
bathing area and the woods was our restroom. And I would go to school and I would see everybody else just walking with expensive
cologne and perfume and I would say these people are so lucky because they had nice showers on a winter night, but not me,”
Ramirez Vasquez says. And remember the Hamilton’s who picked blueberries? Randy Hamilton Jr. and his Dad say they have similar
horror stories. “I mean some of the housing conditions that they provide you with is no good. I mean toilets are broke. . . You touch
the door knobs and the door falls off,” Hamilton Jr. says. Hamilton Sr. adds, “you’ve got a raccoon coming up from the hole of the
sink and you’ve got the door falling off. You got the roof leaking, you got the screens off the windows. That's what we went
through.” Cozy homes But not all migrant housing is terrible. I tagged along on a migrant housing inspection at Uncle
John’s Cider Mill, 30 miles north of Lansing. Mike Beck owns this farm, and migrant camp. “It’s very much like a snowmobile cabin. I
go to up north and use it myself a lot,” Beck says. The place isn’t fancy, but at least it’s homey. There are family pictures
on the refrigerator, the kitchen is decorated with wallpaper and curtains with farm and apple designs on them. There are individual
bedrooms and a living room with furniture and a TV that are a little outdated, but it’s clean.
AT Housing DA
Unionization amongst farmworkers is incredibly low
BLS 1/19 [Bureau of Labor Statistics, division of the United States Department of Labor and is
tasked with fact finding for the department, 1/19/18, “Union Members – 2017,”
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf]ZZ
In 2017, 7.2 million employees in the public sector belonged to a union, compared with 7.6
million workers in the private sector. Although the union membership rate for private-sector workers edged up by 0.1
percentage point in 2017, their unionization rate continued to be substantially lower than that for public-sector workers (6.5 percent
versus 34.4 percent). Within the public sector, the union membership rate was highest in local government (40.1 percent), which
employs many workers in heavily unionized occupations, such as teachers, police officers, and firefighters. Private-sector industries
with high unionization rates included utilities (23.0 percent), transportation and warehousing (17.3 percent), telecommunications
(16.1 percent), and construction (14.0 percent). Low
unionization rates occurred in finance (1.1 percent),
food services and drinking places (1.4 percent), and professional and technical services (1.7
percent). (See table 3.) Among occupational groups, the highest unionization rates in 2017 were
in protective service occupations (34.7 percent) and in education, training, and library
occupations (33.5 percent). The rate for workers in education, training, and library occupations continued to decline in
2017. Unionization rates were lowest in sales and related occupations (3.2 percent); farming,
fishing, and forestry occupations (3.4 percent); food preparation and serving related
occupations (3.8 percent); and in computer and mathematical occupations (3.9 percent). Selected
Characteristics of Union Members In 2017, the union membership rate continued to be higher for men (11.4 percent) than for
women (10.0 percent); over the year, the rate for men edged up, and the rate for women edged down. (See table 1.) However, the
gap between their rates has narrowed considerably since 1983 (the earliest year for which comparable data are available), when
rates for men and women were 24.7 percent and 14.6 percent, respectively. Among
major race and ethnicity
groups, Black workers continued to have a higher union membership rate in 2017 (12.6 percent)
than workers who were White (10.6 percent), Asian (8.9 percent), or Hispanic (9.3 percent). By
age, union membership rates continued to be highest among workers ages 45 to 64. In 2017,
13.2 percent of workers ages 45 to 54 and 13.5 percent of those ages 55 to 64 were union
members. In 2017, the union membership rate for full-time workers was about twice the rate
for part-time workers (11.8 percent versus 5.7 percent).
Farmworkers unions are falling apart.

McPhate 17 [Mike, writer on California at The New York Times, 2/2/17, “California Today: The
collapse of Organized Farm Labor,” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/us/california-today-
farmworker-unions.html]ZZ
More than four decades ago California passed a landmark law protecting the state’s
farmworkers from abuse and helping them to organize. But the recent resignation of the head
of a board that oversees the implementation of the law highlights the extent to which organized
labor among farmworkers has collapsed since the days of the pioneering labor leader Cesar
Chavez. Chavez’s activism was instrumental in the creation of the Agricultural Labor Relations
Act in 1975, the passage of which Gov. Jerry Brown described as a major accomplishment of his first stint as governor. In his
recent resignation letter, the head of the board, William B. Gould IV, described the law as
“irrelevant to farmworkers.” He estimated that less than one percent of the agricultural work force is now represented by
a union. As chairman of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, Mr. Gould was charged with overseeing the certification process of
union elections. Yet Mr. Gould said virtually no workers came to the board during his tenure. “During the entire three
years that I was chairman of the board there was only one petition for representation filed by a
union in the state of California,” he said. Mr. Gould says a major factor for the decline of
organized farm labor is the fear that undocumented workers have of dealing with the
government. Around half of the Californian agricultural work force is in the country illegally.
“There is not only no incentive to complain but there is no incentive to become involved with government in any way,” Mr. Gould
said. California’s
agricultural industry is bigger than ever. It produces roughly a third of all fruits
and vegetables grown in the United States and has about a third of the nation’s farmworkers.
Philip Martin, a specialist on organized farm labor, paints a less stark picture than Mr. Gould of the plight of farmworkers.
Farmworker wages “have gone up significantly,” Mr. Martin said, and some workers have the benefit of voluntary agreements that
growers sometimes enter with their suppliers. The average hourly wage of farmworkers in California is around $12, he said, above
the state’s current minimum wage of $10. Mr. Martin, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, says estimates on
unionization rates among farmworkers in California are not very reliable because there are no government requirements to report
them. But
he says it is undeniable that unionization rates have plummeted from the heyday of
union power in the late 1970s. “There’s not near the union activity that there used to be,” he
said.
Farm working organizations support pathways to citizenship.

HAAS JR. 10 [Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. fund, is an organization that seeks to spread a vision
of society where all people can live with dignity, 12/2/10, “Integrating Undocumented Farm
Workers,” https://www.haasjr.org/resources/preparing-for-the-integration-of-undocumented-
farm-workers]ZZ
San Francisco, December 7 - Eleven organizations, led by United Farm Workers’ Foundation and
Farmworker Justice, are launching new efforts to plan for the integration of more than one
million farm workers and their families once the federal government enacts a pathway to
legalization. “We know that our country’s legal immigration process can be extremely complex and intimidating for most
immigrants,” said Diana Tellefson, executive director of the United Farm Workers Foundation. “We must begin acting now to ensure
a transformative process for farm worker families throughout the country once Congress addresses this glaring need for reform. We
thank the Rosenberg Foundation for championing this collaborative project and all the funders who stepped up to meet the need for
this vital project.” Undocumented workers comprise a majority of the agricultural workforce in the U.S. Nearly 60 percent of the
nation’s more than one million farm workers are concentrated in just five states—California, Texas, Florida, Oregon and
Washington—with 42 percent (approximately 600,000 people) concentrated in California. The
coalition of 11
organizations—which also includes the California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), CRLA
Foundation, Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC), Immigrant Legal Resource Center
(ILRC), National Farm Worker Ministry, La Union Del Pueblo Entero (Texas), Florida Legal
Services, National Farm Worker Service Center, and Willamette Valley Law Project, fiscal
sponsor for Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN)—is preparing for the
implementation of major federal legislation that would provide a pathway for farm workers and
their immediate family members to earn legal immigration status. “This creative collaboration between
farm worker, immigration and legal advocacy organizations will help empower the people who harvest our fruits and vegetables to
build better lives for themselves and their families by participating in the civic life of this nation of immigrants,” said Bruce Goldstein,
executive director of Farmworker Justice. The Agricultural Job Opportunities, Benefits and Security Act ("AgJOBS"), currently pending
in Congress,
represents a unique cooperative effort between the United Farm Workers union and
major agricultural employers to address the agricultural immigration crisis by creating a legal, stable labor source and
ensuring that farm workers are treated fairly. The initial planning effort is supported by grants from six foundations, including
$100,000 from the Rosenberg Foundation; $200,000 from the California Endowment; $50,000 from the Haas, Jr. Fund; $15,000 from
Sierra Health Foundation; $10,000 from the Western Union Foundation; and $5,000 from the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program.
“The Rosenberg Foundation applauds this important collaboration of advocates and funders to
support the basic rights of the workers who put food on our tables across the nation,” said
Timothy Silard, president of the Rosenberg Foundation. “This effort will build the capacity
needed to ensure the full civic and economic integration of hundreds of thousands of farm
worker families once the federal government addresses this critical issue.” The coalition was organized
to prepare strategies to meet the need in California, where the majority of farm workers are located, and is also spearheading
planning efforts in other states with large farm worker populations. The effort includes developing the business model, legal service
delivery systems, training, and communications plans that will lead to an efficient and swift implementation of a farm worker
legalization program once reform is enacted.
AT Horse trading DA
No horse trading – republicans don’t agree with Trump’s demands
SEUNG MIN KIM, Politico, 1-30-18, “Republicans balk at Trump’s cuts to legal immigration”
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/30/trump-legal-immigration-republicans-378041
It’s no surprise that Democrats have panned the White House’s immigration framework. But now Republicans
are
increasingly uncomfortable with President Donald Trump’s proposal to deeply cut legal
immigration in exchange for protecting nearly 2 million Dreamers.
The bare-bones framework released late last week, which Trump promoted during his State of the Union address Tuesday night,
would fundamentally reshape the nation’s immigration system by no longer allowing U.S. citizens to sponsor parents, adult children
and siblings for green cards — amounting to the biggest proposed reduction in legal immigration in decades, experts say.
That idea, at least in concept, isn’t sitting well with many Republicans.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said the overall plan from Trump is “credible” but that he would not
support such significant cuts to the legal immigration side.
“Theidea of cutting legal immigration in half and skewing the green cards to one area of the
economy, I think, is bad for the economy,” Graham said, referring to the administration’s broad pitch to shift to a
merit-based immigration system. “Not a whole lot of support for that. I want more legal immigration, not less.”
On the administration’s proposal to restrict legal immigration, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said: “We can agree to disagree to
begin with, but we still get to write it.”
“Honestly, I think we need legal immigration,” Rounds added. “In the United States today, our
population would not be stable if it was not for legal immigration. I’m in favor of having legal
immigration. I want to eliminate the illegal immigration.”
Moderates and farm state republicans need to get on board for the plan to
happen because of Ryan’s rule – they oppose crackdowns
Melanie Zanona and Scott Wong, The Hill, 02/15/18, “House GOP pushes hard-line
immigration plan as Senate deals fail” http://thehill.com/homenews/house/374145-house-gop-
pushes-hardline-immigration-plan-as-senate-deals-fail
Even if the House could pass the Goodlatte

bill, there are clear signs the legislation would be dead on arrival in the Senate. The
measure is further to the right than a conservative immigration proposal backed by the White
House that overwhelmingly failed in the Senate on Thursday, 39 to 60.
The difficult odds facing the Goodlatte framework underscore the challenge for Republicans as they vow to find a permanent fix for the so-called
Dreamers (young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children) — a complex, emotional and highly personal legislative issue — but have yet to
identify a plan that can pass both the House and the Senate.
“Clearly we’ve got some divides within our conference,” Scalise told The Hill. “With a bill like this, there’s always work to do. And we’re in the process
of doing that.”
But even some conservatives

who say they would ultimately support the hard-line approach
wouldn’t mind if the issue does not end up getting resolved.
“I don’t have a hard and fast view on the Goodlatte bill and whether it should come up for a vote,” said Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), a member of the
conservative House Freedom Caucus. “I’ve got a mild preference because it keeps leadership’s commitment, but if it doesn’t, I’m not disturbed about
it.”
“I think the president should enforce the laws that are on the books and aggressively deport illegal aliens who are here on American soil,” he added.
GOP leaders agreed to start whipping the Goodlatte measure this week amid growing pressure from House conservatives, who were worried about
getting stuck with a bipartisan immigration bill from the Senate that would not be tough enough for their standards.
President Trump is ending the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and gave Congress until March 5 to come up with a
permanent legal fix, but an agreement on how to do that has so far divided Republicans.
Scalise informed the GOP conference during a meeting this week that the whip count on the Goodlatte bill came back below the 218 votes needed,
according to a source in the room.
Leaders are still working to build support for the measure, sending bill sponsors back to the drawing board to explore whether they can make changes
to win over more Republicans.
But some members say the House might not feel as much urgency to act if the Senate can’t get anything over the finish line. They also said that recent
court rulings blocking Trump from ending DACA have taken away some of the pressure to move quickly.
“There’s no question it becomes less immediate,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.).
Ryan and his team have repeatedly emphasized that they are committed to solving DACA, but they have not outlined leadership’s plan for an
immigration bill if the Goodlatte measure can’t get enough GOP support to pass.
Goodlatte’s plan would provide DACA recipients with a temporary, renewable legal status — rather than citizenship — in exchange for authorizing
funding for Trump’s border wall, ending family-based migration and scrapping the diversity visa lottery program.
The Goodlatte plan also includes tough border-enforcement measures: The bill would crack down on so-called sanctuary cities, boost penalties for
deported criminals who try to re-enter the U.S. and require that employers use an electronic verification system known as E-Verify to make sure they
hire legal workers.
But the proposal has run into several pockets of opposition in the GOP conference. Immigration hawks think it doesn’t go far enough, moderates
want a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients and members who represent the agricultural industry worry it
will disrupt the labor force.
Goodlatte already made some tweaks to appease the agricultural industry's concerns over the guest worker program that is established by the
legislation.
But lawmakers from agricultural regions say the changes aren’t enough. Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.), who represents the Golden
State’s agriculture-heavy Central Valley, said he’s still opposed to the bill because the cap on seasonal workers is still too low
and the “touchback” provisions do not provide strong enough guarantees workers will be able to come
back to the U.S. once they return to their home countries.
Ryan’s options on immigration are limited, given that he promised to put an immigration measure on the
floor only if it has a majority of the GOP’s support and only if Trump would sign it.
T
LPR and pathway to citizenship are indistinguishable.
Posner and Cox 6 – Eric A. Posner, American law professor at the University of Chicago Law
School; and Adam B. Cox, Robert A. Kindler Professor of Law at NYU, 2006 (“The Second-Order
Structure of Immigration Law,” University of Chicago Law School’s Chicago Unbound, 2006,
Available Online from
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1571&context=law_and_eco
nomics, Accessed 7-10-2018) ***Italics in Original***
We should be clear that we describe here only the immigrant admission system in the United
States, not the system used to admit nonimmigrants. Nonimmigrants are those noncitizens
admitted for a temporary period, such as tourists or employees who receive temporary
authorization to work in the country.36 Immigrants, by contrast, are admitted to permanent
residence in the country—residence that is not contingent on retaining employment, learning
English, and so forth—and are on a path to eventual citizenship. (For that reason admitted
immigrants are typically referred to as “lawful permanent residents”). We focus on the structure
of the immigrant system, because our interest here is in the system that the state uses to select
those in the immigrant pool whom it considers desirable to add to the country’s population and
eventually to the citizenry.37 As we explain below, however, a state might choose to use a
temporary immigration system—such as a guest worker program—as a screening mechanism
for potential permanent immigrants.38
AT Neolib K
The plan’s liberal conception of citizenship eliminates the problems with the
neoliberal nature of status quo immigration policy
Muneer I. Ahmad. Clinical Professor of Law, Yale Law School. 7-17, “Beyond Earned
Citizenship” http://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Ahmad.pdf
As the previous discussion illustrates, the strategies of moral differentiation and selective incorporation of
earnings requirements, mitigate the asymmetry between earned and unearned citizenship, but at significant risk of unfounded
moralizing and racial contempt of immigrants. A third approach would reduce the corrosive
effect on unearned citizenship by liberal- izing the earnings requirements for legalization, thereby
ameliorating the corrosive effect on unearned citizenship. Such an approach might abandon the
language and structure of earning entirely, so as to avoid the morally uncomfortable and normatively unjustifiable
distinction between earned and unearned citizenship, as well as the pernicious tendencies that
frequently characterize defenses of unearned citizenship. While one might expect different bases for citizenship acquisition
as between those territorially present at birth and other citizens on the one hand, and immigrants on the other, 211 a leveling up approach
would interro- gate and minimize those differences; the acquisition of citizenship, and not just the terms of citizenship once
obtained, should be subject to moral inquiry. 212 If “the idea of citizenship is ‘isonomy’ ” 213 — that is, equal rights achieved through symmetric
application of law 214 — then this same principle should apply to citizenship acquisition. There may be good and practical reasons that identical rules
cannot apply as between citizenship-at-birth and subsequently acquired citizenship, but incongruity in citizenship acquisition may taint the equality of
citizenship once acquired. This is especially true where, as in the case of earned citizenship, the path to citizenship features a long, probationary period
during which lawful status is precarious. For this reason, such dissonance should be minimized wherever possible. The asymmetric application of an
earnings regime in the context of legalization runs counter to this goal of equal citizenship. Moreover, a
more expansive legalization
program is consistent with the Arendtian view of citizenship as a prerequisite for securing
basic rights. 215 A requirement to demonstrate one’s worthiness for rights protection is incom-
patible with the human rights understandings of citizenship. While the existence of jus soli and jus sanguinis regimes
of citizenship obviously cannot preclude rules for naturalization, 216 an understanding of citizenship as the essential prerequisite of equality counsels
that the barriers to citizenship for those who are members of the society be kept low. Rather than relegating immigrants to an uncertain fate for a
decade or more, such
a citizenship approach would accelerate the full incorporation of immigrants
into the polity so as to reduce social stigma, economic vulnerability, and insecurity as to
residence, while promoting full and meaningful social and political participation. A rapid and
unencumbered path to citizenship is, then, a path to equal citizenship. 217
***Farmworkers Neg
***AT Labor Shortage Adv
1NC – Labor shortages
Pathway to citizenship doesn’t solve for shortages – labor pool is shrinking too
fast
Charlton and Taylor 13 (Diane Charlton and J. Edward Taylor; Diane Charlton is a Ph.D.
student and J. Edward Taylor is a professor, both in the Agricultural and Resource Economics
department at UC Davis; “Mexicans Are Leaving Farm Work: What Does It Mean for U.S.
Agriculture and Immigration Policy?;” Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics; April 2013;
Accessed 7-12-2018, https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/State_Board/pdfs/AREupdate_CharltonTaylor_4-
2013.pdf |RYD)
There are many reasons why legalization is a good idea, but ensuring an
Is Legalization the Solution?
abundant farm labor supply is not one of them. Legalization increases workers’ economic
options in the United States, and this makes farm workers more mobile. Farm work traditionally has been a
first stop for new immigrants, who move on to non-farm jobs when they are able. Legalization under
the Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) program in the 1987 Immigration Reform and Control Act
(IRCA) stimulated the movement of immigrant workers out of farm work. Legalization
conditional upon doing several years of additional farm work might contribute slightly towards
stabilizing the farm workforce in the short run. However, with a backdrop of diminishing farm
labor, research findings suggest it may do the opposite in the long run. A New Farm Labor Dynamic In
the past, when legalized SAWs left agriculture, they left behind a vacuum that was quickly filled
by newcomers. That is why the current share of illegal immigrants in the U.S. farm workforce is higher than it was before the
1986 legalization program. This constant replenishing of the farm workforce with new immigrants is
changing. The U.S. Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Worker Survey (NAWS) found
that foreignborn newcomers (first-time arrivals who had been in the United States for less than a year at the time of
interview) comprised nearly a quarter (23%) of all crop workers in 1998–2000, but fell to just 9% in 2007–2009.
Turn: Legal status causes shortages – farmers leave their jobs

O’Brien et al 14 (Patrick O’Brien, Principal with the World Agricultural Economic and
Environmental Services and former director at ERS/USDA for the Commodity Economics
Division, Et. Al. (John Kruse, Adjunct Professor, Agricultural Economics, University of Missouri-
Columbia, Darlene Kruse, worked for the Legislative Fiscal Bureau for the State of Iowa as a
legislative analyst), February 2014, “Gauging the Farm Sector’s Sensitivity to Immigration
Reform via Changes in Labor Costs and Availability”
https://www.fb.org/files/AFBF_LaborStudy_Feb2014.pdf)
For a number of reasons, agriculture

serves as the bottom rung on the undocumented labor ladder. Many
undocumented workers start working in agriculture but move on from agriculture as quickly as
possible—particularly if/when changes in their legal status gives them entry into the labor
market outside agriculture. This love-hate relationship is reflected in the survey interviews identified
in Appendix 3 and more anecdotal sources. A closer look at the composition of agriculture’s undocumented
work force provides insight into why, and the extent to which, this phenomenon is at work. As the NAWS and Pew surveys
indicate, the undocumented workers employed in agriculture are typically younger, less educated,
less fluent in English, and have fewer job skills than the general undocumented population. They
typically have little or no previous work experience. Turnover in agricultural employment is high, with
roughly 15% of undocumented workers in agriculture describing themselves as newcomers to
the sector—with less than 3 years in the U.S.— and with no plans to stay in the sector. This profile fits well with
the minimal skills and manual nature of farm work, farmers’ interest in keeping wages low to protect their 8
profits and competitiveness, and the willingness of this newcomer population to accept relatively low wages
and physically demanding jobs to get started. Hence, agriculture has considerable appeal for undocumented workers as an
entry point into the U.S. labor market. However, undocumented workers also leave agriculture as soon as possible
for many of the same reasons. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of undocumented workers’ preference to get
into agriculture initially but to move out as soon as possible is the change in the farm labor force following The
Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. The law legalized roughly 1 million undocumented workers,
many working in agriculture. Had that labor force been willing to stay in agriculture where they started, the sector would have been able to
meet its hired labor needs without reverting within a few years to the large-scale hiring of undocumented workers. However, the majority of
those legalized Seasonal Agricultural Workers (SAW) quickly moved on to employment

elsewhere in the economy once their undocumented status had been resolved. Farm
employers soon had to return to hiring a large number of undocumented workers as these SAW
workers moved on to different careers. Appendix 1 indicates that the share of undocumented workers in
the hired farm labor force dropped to 14% over 1989-91 immediately after reform but rose back
to pre-1986 levels (37%) by 1992-94, rose to 47% by 1995-97, and rose to 50% by 1998-2000 as
farm employers had to replace exiting undocumented workers legalized by the 1986
legislation with new undocumented workers.
No deportations - Trump’s agriculture interests will keep him from deporting

illegal laborers
Wilkinson 17 (Francis Wilkinson: Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and U.S.
domestic policy for Bloomberg View. He was executive editor of the Week. He was previously a
national affairs writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media
strategist. “Is Immigrant Farm Labor 'Deport Proof'?” 5/17/2017,
https://www.agweb.com/article/is-immigrant-farm-labor-deport-proof-blmg/ - DCS)
Big agriculture is big business in America -- as long as it has access to a big supply of immigrant labor. Agriculture
is
significantly more dependent on illegal labor than any other segment of the economy. According to
the Pew Research Center, undocumented immigrants made up about 5 percent of the total U.S. workforce in 2014, but about 26
percent of farm labor. When Georgia and Alabama cracked down on undocumented immigrants in
2011, crops rotted. President Donald Trump's vow to rid the land of undocumented immigrants is naturally a threat to
agriculture. Or is it? Reuters reported this week on an April 25 meeting between Trump and agriculture interests. President
Donald Trump said he would seek to keep his tough immigration enforcement policies from
harming the U.S. farm industry and its largely immigrant workforce, according to farmers and officials who
met with him. At a roundtable on farm labor at the White House last month, Trump said he did not want to create
labor problems for farmers and would look into improving a program that brings in temporary
agricultural workers on legal visas. "He assured us we would have plenty of access to workers," said Zippy Duvall,
president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, one of 14 participants at the April 25 meeting with Trump and Agriculture
Secretary Sonny Perdue. Because Trump is Trump, his assurances to a griculture interests may be true, false or something he said
just because. Enforcing
immigration laws, however, is an exercise in setting priorities. Like his
predecessor, Trump has said that criminals are his priority for deportation. That may not be panning out in
practice. The Washington Post reported last month that arrests of undocumented immigrants without criminal records spiked in the
first few months of the Trump administration. The administration may be genuinely targeting criminals through the federal
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, but if it is, it's picking up plenty of others along the way. "Not being a priority is not
the same as being immune from deportation," emailed immigration expert Stuart Anderson of the National Foundation for American
Policy. "Even though raids on farms may not be imminent, it doesn’t mean farm workers won’t be deported when ICE agents find
and detain them." Still, farms have typically received lenient treatment from immigration agents, and
farms would certainly like that to continue. "Every administration tells agriculture that it's not the intention to deny workers" to
farms, said William Stock, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "Everyone acknowledges that American
agriculture is highly dependent on immigrant labor." A Democratic staff member who works on immigration issues in Congress
emailed that Trump might be discovering that some powerful Republican business interests have no use for his signature domestic
policy. But, of course, Trump is famous for telling his audiences whatever he thinks they want to hear. (“Don’t worry, we’re going to
have the wall,” Trump assured a crowd of supporters in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania last month.) If
Trump's assurances are
worth anything -- and agriculture interests seem to believe they are -- it does suggest that some
undocumented immigrants may be more equal than others. It's hard to square that with the
aggressive crackdown that Trump has promised to deliver to his base. Perhaps the Trump administration
intends to dispense fear in waves, working first in densely populated areas before dispatching agents to the countryside. Or perhaps
Trump is scamming either his base or the farmers. They would each be wise to assume so. This column does not necessarily reflect
the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Shortage inevitable –migration has stalled as wages and education levels in

Mexico rise
Martin and Taylor 2013 (Phillip and J. Edward; Philip Martin, PhD is the chairman of the
Comparative Immigration and Integration Program and Professor of Agricultural and Resource
Economics at UC Davis, J Edward Taylor is a Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at
UC Davis and Director of the Center on Rural Economies of the Americas and Pacific Rim; “RIPE
WITH CHANGE: Evolving Farm Labor Markets in the United States, Mexico, and Central
America;” Migration Policy Institute, February 2013, Accessed 7-11-2018,
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/RMSG-Agriculture.pdf|RYD)
Both farm labor supply and demand in Mexico are key to maintaining an abundant supply of low-
wage labor to US farms. However, on the supply side, workforces are becoming less agricultural
throughout the region. The share of the total workforce employed in agriculture is high in Mexico
and Central America relative to the United States, but it is falling fast. Across Mexico and Central America, educational
attainment is increasing and incomes are rising, though these advances and demographic trends are evolving at
different speeds in each country. Mexico and El Salvador are seeing their populations age and total population growth slowdown.24
In contrast, birth rates remain high in Guatemala and Honduras, with rapid population growth. As young
people in these
countries attain higher levels of education, they increasingly seek employment opportunities
beyond domestic agricultural work, migrating away from rural areas and, within rural areas,
leaving farm jobs for jobs in the services sector. Figure 5a shows changes in per capita income and the farm
workforce share for Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and the United States. The origin of each ray in this figure shows per
capita income and the farm workforce share in 1998; the tip of the ray shows the same in 2006. Both the slope and positions of the
rays reveal that the share of the workforce in agriculture falls precipitously as incomes rise. The only exception to this is the ray
corresponding to Honduras, which is very short and indicates a slight increase in the farm workforce share. Nevertheless, its position
at the top of the workforce transition curve reaffirms the negative correlation between per capita income and workforce share.
[Graph Omitted] Recent data from Mexico offer more direct evidence of a shrinking farm workforce.
Between 2002 and 2007, US farms relied on migrant networks to reach into new source areas —
for example, villages in southern Mexico — to supply workers to US farms.25 A study by Steve
Boucher et al. documented a downward trend in the supply of rural Mexican labor to US farms
using retrospective data from the 2003 round of the Mexico National Rural Household (Spanish
acronym: ENHRUM) survey.26 New research using matched data on individuals and households in rural Mexico finds that,
contrary to expectations, the supply of rural Mexican labor to US farms fell disproportionately during
the 2008 Great Recession compared to the supply to nonfarm jobs.27 Although some individual workers
shifted from US nonfarm to farm work after 2008, more workers shifted from farm to nonfarm (see Figure 6). Analysis of the
ENHRUM data suggests that the observed decrease in US farm labor is the consequence of long-
term structural changes in the supply of Mexican labor rather than a temporary response to the
US recession. The overall trend in agricultural labor supply from rural Mexico over the years covered by
the ENHRUM data (1990 through 2010) is flat or negative, while the expansion of nonfarm migration
networks has a significant negative effect on the farm labor supply. The relevant impacts of immigration
enforcement and drug-related violence along the border appear to be small compared to the overall trend and network effects.
[Graph Omitted] The shrinking of
the domestic farm workforce in Mexico is also a result of a shift
away from owner-operated small farms, subsistence farming, and unpaid family workers, meaning that the share of
hired (rather than family) farm labor has gained importance in agricultural production. This shift has led average farm worker
productivity in Mexico to rise dramatically in recent years, quadrupling from 1995 to 2009 (see Figure 7). [Graph Omitted] This
increased productivity means that Mexican farm workers have a higher agricultural reservation
wage, and may be opting to stay at home rather than emigrate to work in agriculture abroad.
Adjusted for inflation, the average daily wage in the Mexican agricultural sector rose nearly 14 percent
from 2000 to 2007.28 Meanwhile, real hourly wages rose by just over 3 percent for newly arrived,
foreign-born farm workers in the United States over approximately the same period (though the average number
of farm days worked increased from 76 to 90, or by more than 18 percent).29 At the same time, Mexico continues to rely on
Guatemalan farm labor. In recent years, approximately 28,000 Guatemalans annually, the vast majority of them farm workers, have
been issued multiple-entry, year-long border worker cards.30 It is difficult to estimate how many Guatemalans are employed in
agriculture in Mexico overall, as the border between the two countries is porous, undocumented entry and employment are
widespread, and work is seasonal and often short term, leading to multiple entries. A survey of Central American migrants crossing
the Mexico-Guatemala border estimated 153,000 border crossings on average per quarter by Guatemalans going to work in Mexico,
from the second quarter of 2011 through the first quarter of 2012. Forty-eight percent to 58 percent of migrants returning to
Guatemala after working in Mexico during this time period had been working in agriculture, depending on the quarter; upwards of
79 percent of them were unauthorized.31 Taken together, these
data suggest an incipient tension between
agricultural labor and demand in the region. On one hand, labor-intensive FVH production is
expanding in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. On the other hand, as incomes increase, the
workforce shifts out of agriculture. The pattern in this regard is not unlike what one finds in virtually every other
country in the world (see Figure 5b). The United States marks the extreme of the downward trend in
domestic farm labor supply: in 2010 only 1.6 percent of the US workforce was employed in agriculture, and a significant
majority of farm workers were Mexican.
--xt Legalization causes shortages
Undocumented farm workers empirically leave farm jobs after legalization
Martin 12 (Phillip Martin; Philip Martin is a professor in the Department of Agricultural and
Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis, and Chair of the University of
California's Comparative Immigration & Integration Program; “HIRED FARM WORKERS;” Choices
magazine (a publication of the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association); 2nd Quarter 2012
(April – June issue);
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/129107/2/cmsarticle_233.pdf|RYD)
Some 1.1 million unauthorized farm workers were legalized in 1987-88 under the Special Agricultural Workers
(SAW) program, and there were four SAWs for each unauthorized worker in the first NAWS survey in 1989 (see Figure 1). By 1991
the declining share of SAWs among hired farm workers was matched by the rising share of unauthorized workers, and by
the
mid-1990s there were almost four unauthorized workers for each legalized SAW worker.
Unauthorized workers have continued to be about half of crop workers, but the share of SAWs has declined to less
than 10 percent. These data suggest that, if there were to be another legalization of unauthorized
workers, most would leave farm work within five years.
A path to legal permanent residence magnifies shortages – empirics

Smith 14 (Scott Smith, correspondent for the Associated Presss, Dec 28, 2014,
“Farmers brace for labor shortage under new policy”
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/28/farmers-brace-for-labor-shortage-
under-new-policy/ kq
Farmers already scrambling to find workers in California — the leading U.S. grower of fruits, vegetables and nuts — fear an
even greater labor shortage under President Barack Obama's executive action to block some 5 million people
from deportation. Thousands of the state's farmworkers, who make up a significant portion of those who will benefit,
may choose to leave the uncertainty of their seasonal jobs for steady, year-around work building
homes, cooking in restaurants and cleaning hotel rooms. "This action isn't going to bring new
workers to agriculture," said Jason Resnick, vice president and general counsel of the powerful trade association
Western Growers. "It's possible that because of this action, agriculture will lose workers without any
mechanism to bring in new workers." Although details of the president's immigration policy have yet to be worked out,
Resnick said the agricultural workforce has been declining for a decade. Today, the association estimates there is a 15 to 20 percent
shortage of farmworkers, which is driving the industry to call for substantial immigration reform from Congress, such as a sound
guest worker program. "Hopefully there will be the opportunity for comprehensive immigration reform," said Karen Ross, secretary
of the California Department of Food and Agriculture. "That's the right thing to do for this country." California's 330,000
farmworkers account for the largest share of the 2.1 million nationwide, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Texas
comes in a distant second with less than half of California's farmworkers. Once Obama's executive action starts going into effect next
year, it will protect the parents of legal U.S. residents from deportation and expand a 2012 program that shields from deportation
people brought into the U.S. illegally as children. Manuel Cunha, president of the Fresno-based Nisei Farmers League, estimates that
85 percent of California's agricultural workers are using false documents to obtain work. Cunha,
who has advised the Obama administration on immigration policy, figures that 50,000 of the state's farmworkers who
may benefit from the president's executive action could leave the fields and packing houses in California's $46.4
billion agricultural industry. "How do I replace that?" he said. "I think we're going to have a problem." Many farmworkers are
paid above minimum wage, earning more hourly than they will in other industries, but he said
that workers that leave will gain year-around jobs and regular paychecks, rather than seasonal
employment.
Farm workers leave agriculture after legalization
Charles 15(Dan; NPR's food and agriculture correspondent; "Farmers Fear Legal Status For
Workers Would Lead Them Off The Farm", NPR.org, 2-26-2015, accessed 7-12-2018,
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/02/26/387698016/do-your-veggies-depend-on-
workers-who-lack-legal-rights|RYD)
He says that giving more legal rights to those workers is probably bad for his business. He believes that
some of these workers are in the Central Valley, working in agriculture, because it's a good place to hide from the authorities. If
those workers gain legal status, "that pressure is off. Now they can go to the cities and look for
construction jobs, or manufacturing jobs," he says. In the late 1980s, millions of immigrants
gained legal status. Patricio believes that as a result, many left agriculture. But back then, employers had
an alternative. The border was more porous than it is now, and employers were able turn to a fresh wave of immigrants. That
flow has now slowed to a trickle, and Patricio says this has created a real shortage of
farmworkers. Traveling around the Central Valley, I heard same argument from several different employers. Among the most
vocal was Manuel Cunha Jr., who is president of the Nisei Farmers League, based in Fresno. Many workers who get legal
protections "are going to go find full-time jobs, because now they're safe," Cunha said. "And I have nothing
to replace them with. Nothing!"
--xt No deportation
Trump is not deporting agricultural workers
Rosenberg and Cooke 17 (Mica Rosenberg, Kristina Cooke: Both are columnists for Rueters,
5/15/2017, “Trump reassures farmers immigration crackdown not aimed at their workers”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-farmers-trump/trump-reassures-farmers-
immigration-crackdown-not-aimed-at-their-workers-idUSKCN18B1BB - DCS)
President Donald Trump said he would seek to keep his tough immigration enforcement policies
from harming the U.S. farm industry and its largely immigrant workforce, according to farmers and
officials who met with him. Migrant farmworkers with H-2A visas walk to take a break after harvesting romaine lettuce in King City,
California, U.S., April 17, 2017. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson At a roundtable on farm labor at the White House last month, Trump
said he did not want to create labor problems for farmers and would look into improving a
program that brings in temporary agricultural workers on legal visas. “He assured us we would have
plenty of access to workers,” said Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, one of 14 participants at the
April 25 meeting with Trump and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue. During the roundtable conversation about agriculture,
farmers and representatives of the sector brought up labor and immigration, the details of which have
not been previously reported. Some farmers told Trump they often cannot find Americans willing to do the difficult farm jobs,
They said they were worried about stricter
according to interviews with nine of the 14 participants.
immigration enforcement and described frustrations with the H-2A visa program, the one legal way to
bring in temporary seasonal agricultural workers. The White House declined to comment on the specifics of the discussion, but
described the meeting as “very productive.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture did not respond to a request for comment on the
April meeting. About half of U.S. crop workers are in the country illegally and more than two-thirds are foreign born, according to
the most recent figures from the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Agriculture Workers’ Survey. A migrant farmworker with an H-
2A visa harvests romaine lettuce in King City, California, U.S., April 17, 2017. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson During the roundtable, Luke
Brubaker,
a dairy farmer from Pennsylvania, described how immigration agents had recently picked up
half a dozen chicken catchers working for a poultry transportation company in his county. The
employer tried to replace them with local hires, but within three hours all but one had quit,
Brubaker told the gathering at the White House. Trump said he wanted to help and asked Secretary Perdue to look into the issues
and come back with recommendations, according to the accounts. While other issues such as trade, infrastructure and technology
were also discussed, participants were more positive after the meeting about the conversation on
foreign labor “than about anything else we talked about,” said Bill Northey, a farmer and Iowa’s secretary of agriculture. RED
TAPE Tom Demaline, president of Willoway Nurseries in Ohio, said he told the president about his struggles with the H-2A
guestworker program, which he has used for 18 years. He told Trump the program works in concept, but not in practice. “I brought
up the bureaucracy and red tape,” he said. “If the guys show up a week or two late, it puts crops in jeopardy. You are on pins and
needles all year to make sure you get the workers and do everything right.” While use of the program has steadily increased over
the past decade, it still accounts for only about 10 percent of the estimated 1.3 million farmworkers in the country, according to
government data. In 2016, the government granted 134,000 H-2A visas Slideshow (2 Images) Employers who import workers with
H-2A visas must provide free transportation to and from the United States as well as housing and food for workers once they arrive.
Wage minimums are set by the government and are often higher than farmers are used to paying. Steve Scaroni, whose company
Fresh Harvest brings in thousands of foreign H-2A workers for growers in California’s Central valley, says, however, that he could find
Trump
work for even more people if he had more places to house them. For a related photo essay click on: reut.rs/2qdtfnb
recently signed another executive order titled “Buy American, Hire American,” calling for
changes to a program granting temporary visas for the tech industry, but not to visas used by
farmers and other seasonal businesses, including Trump’s own resorts. FARMER CONCERNS Trump also
signed two executive orders, just days after taking office, focused on border security that called for arresting more people in the
United States illegally and speeding up deportations. Roundtable participants said that many farmers have worried about the effect
of the stepped up enforcement on their workforce, but Trump told them his administration was focused on
deporting criminals, not farmworkers. “He has a much better understanding about this than some of the rhetoric we
The farmers
have seen,” said meeting attendee Steve Troxler, North Carolina’s agriculture commissioner and a farmer himself.
at the meeting said they stressed to the president the need for both short-term and permanent workers. They said there
should be a program to help long-time farmworkers without criminal records, but who are in the
country illegally, to become legal residents. Last Tuesday, Democrats in the House and Senate said they would
introduce a bill to give farmworkers who have worked illegally in the country for two consecutive years a “blue card” to protect
them from deportation. Brubaker, the Pennsylvania farmer, said he liked what he had heard about the bill and hoped it would get
the president’s support to maske it a bipartisan effort. “The administration has got something started here,” he said of the meeting
with farm leaders. “It’s about time something happens.”
--xt Shortages inevitable
****Note when prepping file – these cards advocate for the Mechanization CP
Alt causes – Immigration alone is not enough to solve shortages, but
automation solves shortages and living conditions
Taylor and Charlton 13 (J. Edward Taylor, Affiliate in Agricultural and Resource Economics
UC Davis, and Diane Charlton, Assistant Professor in the Agricultural Economics & Economics
Department at Montana State, 2013, “U.S. Farms and the Dwindling Labor Supply from Mexico”
https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/policy-brief/us-farms-and-dwindling-labor-supply-mexico kq)
The U.S. farming sector lost 38% of international migrant workers from 2007-10, compared to non-farm sector
losses of 22%. The combined shares of the workforce migrating to agriculture in either Mexico or the U.S. decreased between 2007-
10. The decline in farm workers from Mexico is a consequence of structural changes in Mexico’s
labor supply rather than the U.S. economic recession or increased border enforcement. Farmer complaints about
labor shortages are increasing. The US Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Worker Survey confirms a sharp
decline in the share of newcomers among foreign-born workers. Border enforcement and drug-related
border violence may deter migrants, but this study suggests that for U.S. farms these only reinforce a negative
trend in rural Mexicans’ willingness to do hired farm work both in the U.S. and in Mexico. If this is
correct, the obvious policy implication is that immigration reform will not solve U.S. farm labor
shortages in the long- or even short-term. This shift in labor from farm to non-farm work within Mexico
is consistent with global trends: as incomes have risen, the share of workers in agriculture has
decreased. In Mexico, economic growth has increased demand for both farm and nonfarm
workers, while education and demographics have cut the overall number of unskilled workers in
rural Mexico. This decline, combined with competition from farms in Mexico, raises the minimum
wage needed to induce new workers northward seeking jobs on U.S. farms. These issues raise questions
of how U.S. farmers will adjust to a much less plentiful farm labor supply. Perceived labor shortages and
rising real farm wages create incentives to change both crop choices and production and
management methods which are prerequisites for the higher wages that would enable farm
worker families to live above the poverty line. The number of internal and international migrants from rural Mexico
who worked in both farm and non-farm sectors in the U.S. and Mexico during each survey round. The number of internal and
international migrants from rural Mexico who worked in both farm and non-farm sectors in the U.S. and Mexico during each survey
round. Migration and Worker Data This study
examines shifts in Mexico’s migrant labor force over time
using panel data from the Mexico National Rural Household Survey (ENHRUM). ENHRUM is unique in providing
both retrospective and panel data on migration to both the United States and to destinations within Mexico. The
panel data for this study come from three survey rounds: 2003, 2008 and 2011. Each round collected information on migration
destinations, whether migrants worked in agricultural or non-agricultural sectors, and employment status (wage earner or self-
employed) for all family members. The final two survey rounds of data made it possible to compare migration patterns before and
after the onset of the 2008 economic recession. A Shift Away from Farming Between 2008-09, employment in non-farm sectors of
the U.S. economy in which Mexican immigrant workers concentrate, particularly in housing construction, decreased sharply without
reducing demand for farm labor. In that time, the number of U.S. farming jobs held steady at between 2.1 to 2.3 million. However,
rather than leading to greater competition for those available farming jobs, the number of rural Mexican workers in the U.S. farm
sector decreased substantially. In fact, in the period from 2007-10, which includes whole of the recent U.S. economic recession, U.S.
non-farm sectors lost 22 percent of their rural Mexican workforce, compared to the U.S. farm sector’s loss of 38 percent. There is no
evidence that a significant number of non-farm workers shifted to farm work when the recession hit, despite the relatively constant
number of U.S. farm jobs. While some individual workers did shift from U.S. non-farm to farm work after 2008, more
shifted from farm to non-farm work or else returned to Mexico. Changes within Mexico This study finds that
rather than a temporary response to the U.S. economic recession, this decline in rural farm workers from Mexico
is the consequence of long-term structural changes in the supply of Mexican labor. According to
ENHRUM data, the number of people leaving rural Mexico to find work abroad increased between 2002-07. However, 2007-10 saw a
sharp decrease in those numbers. During that period many
who had previously worked in the U.S. found work
within Mexico instead. While the overall number of rural Mexicans migrating within Mexico for farm
jobs has grown, the combined shares of the workforce doing farm work in either Mexico or the
U.S. decreased from 2007-10. By contrast, the percentage of Mexico’s rural workforce migrating
internally to non-farm work grew steadily. Even with a larger workforce overall, today fewer and fewer rural
Mexicans are working in agriculture. Responses As household and community regional networks increasingly lead to non-farm jobs
both domestically and abroad, the overall farm labor supply continues to diminish. Consequently, the shift this study has identified
likely represents a continued downward trend in the number ofMexico-to-U.S. farm migrants in coming years. In the past, U.S.
agriculture has relied on seeking out new supplies of farm labor to relieve shortages and to limit increases in farming wages. Since
the days of the Bracero Program (1942-64), immigration policy has facilitated farmers’ access to foreign workers, who in the past
half-century have overwhelmingly come from rural Mexico. However, thereare limits to the effectiveness of
immigration policy in an era when the number of available farm workers is in decline. In the
resources world, the alternative to exploration and development is conservation. The same is true for farm
labor. Farm labor conservation involves shifting to less labor intensive crops and increasing worker productivity
through mechanization and improved management. Both of these would keep down the costs of
farming, and would provide a level of wages that would enable farm workers and their families to live
above the poverty line.
The labor shortage is coming even if undocumented workers aren’t deported -

technology is the only way to solve
Smith 11 (Ron Smith; Ron Smith has spent more than 40 years covering agriculture;
“Agriculture Moving from Surplus to Shortage”, Western Farm Press; 12-9-11; accessed 7-13-17;
https://search-proquest-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/909886719?pq-
origsite=summon&accountid=14667|RYD)
For decades U.S. farmers produced in times of surplus and typically sold for relatively low prices. That situation seems to be
changing, says Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples. Staples, speaking at the Texas Plant Protection Association annual
conference Monday said U.S. and world agriculture may be heading into a time of shortage. "For
all my life agriculture has
produced more than we needed," he said. "Now, we are moving from surplus to shortage." That
change comes with significant challenges, Staples said. For one, farmers "will be racing to follow $2 cotton or to higher priced corn."
And agricultural production will need balance to meet U.S. and international needs. "We
now add one million people to
the globe every five days," he said. Farmers have to provide food and fiber for that growing
population. "Agriculture is the keystone for our country," he said. To achieve production goals for the next few
decades, Staples said farmers and ranchers will turn to technology, research and science to
produce more on fewer acres. "Research is why U. S. agriculture is so productive," he said.
"Science, research and agriculture come together to produce the safest, cheapest and most
dependable food supply in the world." He said U.S. farm policymakers must keep that in mind as
they craft ag legislation. "We don't like being dependent on foreign oil," he said. "We can't be dependent on
foreign food. Food security and national security go hand in hand." The commissioner said agriculture also
must work to keep young people on the farm. "The average age of Texas farmers is now 59 years," he said. "That represents a lot of
life and a lot of wisdom." But he also noted that agriculture needs the next generations to carry on the traditions of hard work and
productivity. And the obstacles they face become more challenging. "Agriculture is a capital intensive profession," he said. "And
farmers can fight drought, insects and disease pests. But now they also have to deal with political dynamics worldwide." He said
economic uncertainty in Italy or Greece affects markets for U.S. farmers. Staples said the 2011 drought took a toll on Texas farmers
and ranchers. Texas agriculture lost billions of dollars from the worst drought in history and "28,000 wildfires burned almost 4
million acres. And some predictions indicate that (a persistent) La Nina may mean more of the same for 2012." He said livestock
producers have culled herds but have also looked for more creative ways to feed and water their cattle. "In a drought, cattlemen can
do additional feeding over a short time to get by," he said. "But they can't haul enough water." He said some ranchers moved "cows
and cowboys to other states where they leased land to get cattle through the drought." He said one rancher indicated that the
drought might have been "a growth opportunity. He said leasing acreage may give him the incentive to maintain those new leases
and expand." Crop farmers are looking for better ways to manage, too. "We
need drought-tolerant seed, and
improved technology to make irrigation water systems more efficient." Those advancements
come from research, he said. He said Rural America knows how to adopt technology and that farmers know "the game is not
won or lost in one season. Farmers are prepared for the long haul and they have the perseverance to get them there."
Ag strong now
Agricultural industry is booming and will continue for at least 2 more years
Daniels 15 (Jeff Daniels: Jeff Daniels is a reporter for CNBC.com. Previously, he was a
coordinating producer for CNBC, based at the network's Los Angeles Bureau. He joined the
network in 1999. Prior to joining CNBC, Daniels was entertainment editor of financial wire
service Bridge News and business editor of The Hollywood Reporter. He was a news writer for
Financial Network Network, a predecessor to CNBC. Earlier in his career, he was a reporter and ,
5/20/15, Agriculture: Job growth to boom over next five years,
https://www.cnbc.com/2015/05/20/agriculture-fertile-ground-for-job-seekers.html - DCS)
Dire news about drought in the West and avian flu in the Midwest may lead Americans to believe farming is struggling. They'd be
wrong. The industry is thriving—and hiring college grads. A new report finds there's high demand,
at least for the foreseeable future, for college graduates with a degree in agricultural programs.
An average of nearly 60,000 high-skilled ag and related job openings are expected annually in
the United States over the next five years, with only about 35,000 grads in food, ag, renewable
resources or the environment graduating each year to fill them, according to data from the U.S.
Department of Agriculture and Purdue University. The study estimates that demand in agriculture and life
science-related fields will be strongest for plant scientists, water-resource scientists and engineers, farm animal veterinarians, and
precision ag and pest control specialists, among other positions. "There is a tendency to look at agriculture
through a very narrow prism of production agriculture," USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack told CNBC. "It's not
just production agriculture now but this is an expanding, entrepreneurial, creative, opportunistic
aspect of our economy that I think will continue." According to the report, between 2015 and 2020 an
average 26,700 annual jobs openings, or nearly half of the total predicted, will be available in
management and business within the food, ag and related segments. Positions will range from
ag loan officers, farm labor and marketing specialists to land use managers and sales and service
representatives. "Jobs in ag offer fairly stable kinds of opportunities to maintain careers over time," said Allan Goecker,
assistant dean emeritus of Purdue's College of Agriculture and lead author of the report. "People are starting to discover
this is a pretty good industry to be in. They realize that this sector isn't our traditional what we
joke 'cows, plows and sows' industry anymore. It's incredibly diverse." -Mike Gaul, career services
director, Iowa State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences About 15,500 job openings, or 27 percent of the
professional employment opportunities within the food, ag and related space, will be in science,
technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines in the next five years. And about 8,500 jobs
in sustainable food and biomaterials production will make up an estimated 15 percent of the
total, while another 12 percent, or approximately 7,200 job openings, will come from ag and food jobs in
other areas such as education, communication and governmental services.
Alt causes
Agriculture is already crashing – foreclosures and bankruptcy thump aff
solvency
Harvie 17 (Alicia Harvie: Alicia is Farm Aid’s Advocacy & Farmer Services Director and guides
the organization’s advocacy, research, farmer services and policy-related activities. Alicia was
born in Exeter, New Hampshire and grew up in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, with the state’s
beautiful rural landscape at her fingertips. Alicia has a masters degree in Agricultural &
Environmental Science and Policy from the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and
Policy. Her previous work includes research into U.S. farm household economics and a year
spent interviewing farmers across several states for her undergraduate thesis. 4/13/17 “A
Looming Crisis on American Farms” https://www.farmaid.org/issues/farm-economy-in-
crisis/looming-crisis-american-farms/ - DCS)
Farmers are enduring a multiyear slump in crop and livestock prices that is pushing many to the financial brink.
Since 2013,
America’s farmers and ranchers have weathered a 45 percent drop in net farm income, the
largest three-year drop since the start of the Great Depression. The strain in today’s farm economy is no
accident; it’s the result of policies designed to enrich corporations at the expense of farmers and ranchers. If the American family
farmer is to survive, farm policy needs a massive shift in direction – one that delivers fair prices to farmers that allow them to make a
living. FARM ECONOMY HURTING IN 2017 Price crashes for corn, wheat, dairy, beef and other products
have spurred a sharp dip in farm income that is pushing many farmers into debt. Some are
declaring bankruptcy, raising concerns that we are on the cusp of the biggest wave of U.S. farm
foreclosures since the 1980s. Unfortunately, little relief is in sight. Farmers saw a 45% drop in net farm income
between 2013 and 2016 and the U.S. Department of Agriculture expects net farm income to fall by
another 8.7% this year. That’s a 50% drop from 2013’s record high and the lowest level since
2009. With the average farm now losing money, farmers feel increased pressure to secure off-farm income just to keep their farms
afloat. And while production expenses are expected to even off at $350 billion in 2017, a notable drop
from 2014’s record $390 billion, they’re not low enough to offset the income crash. FARM SOLVENCY
WEAKENING In addition to income, several factors influence a farm’s financial health. While conditions are not as
worrisome as in the 1980s, many anticipate a sharp rise in delinquent or defaulted loans, which can
imperil farm viability. The following trends indicate that farmers and ranchers are feeling pressure in a strained farm
economy: The farm sector’s debt-to-income ratio is the highest it’s been in three decades. Farm real
estate values represent a huge portion of farm assets in a given year, and thus are critical to the viability of farms. In 2016, key
regions experienced declines in real estates values, including the Northern Plains and Corn Belt, which declined by
4.3% and 0.9%, respectively. 2017 represents the fifth consecutive year that farm solvency ratios have
weakened, while liquidity ratios and working capital have deteriorated to their weakest levels
since 2002. FARM CREDIT TIGHTENING Farmers rely heavily on credit to buy the seeds, fertilizer, machinery, livestock and other
inputs that keep their farms running. If they can’t secure affordable and timely credit, they face an economic uncertainty that
threatens the survival of their farms. The
downturn in the farm economy has lead to deteriorating credit
conditions. Many banks are increasing their interest rates and collateral requirements, both of which make it more
expensive and risky for farmers to borrow. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City also reports that toward
the end of 2016, bankers reduced the amount of funds available for financing. These conditions are
challenging for all farmers, but beginning farmers, smaller and midsized farmers, and other disadvantaged farmers in particular will
struggle to secure the credit they need. IMPACT ON RURAL AMERICA America’s farmers and ranchers are pillars of their
communities and the foundation of their local economies. When farmers do better we all do better; the opposite is also true. As
farmers are forced into bankruptcy, a ripple effect on farm service providers, input
manufacturers and local purchasers and processors further taxes the economy of rural
communities. As economic conditions worsen, the stress farm families face can have demonstrable impacts on the health of
rural Americans. A 2016 Centers for Disease Control report found national suicide rates for people working in agriculture are more
than 50% higher than they were during the 1980s Farm Crisis. HARDEST HIT While the entire farm economy is facing a tough down
cycle, there are several sectors where conditions are especially bad. WHEAT GROWERS In 2016,
wheat prices continued
to plummet to an average $4.11/bushel, a 46% drop from their high in 2012. As prices fall below
the “break-even” point, farmers in states like Kansas, Oklahoma, Oregon, Washington and Idaho are now reducing
wheat acreage and switching over to other crops. USDA anticipates a $1.4 billion decline in cash
receipts for wheat in 2017 and the lowest level of wheat acreage planted since the
government began keeping records in 1919. DAIRY FARMERS Dairy farmers took a huge hit in 2016
when milk prices fell as low as $13.10 per hundredweight (cwt) and averaged $14.80/cwt for the year. This was a 55%
drop from their peak levels in 2014 , a loss felt every single day by farmers who work with a perishable product. The
milk price for 2017 is forecast to be between $17.80 and $18.40/cwt, sometimes enough to break even but not nearly enough to
recover losses from the last several years. According to the National Farmers Union, dairy farmers receive just $1.59 for a gallon of
skim milk that retails for $4.69. CATTLE RANCHERS The
net farm value of cattle fell from an all-time high of $3.67
per pound in November 2014 to as low as $2.19 in
October 2016. This is the lowest value since 2010, causing
U.S. cattle ranchers to lose billions of dollars in equity. The average retail p rice for beef nationwide fell more
than 9% in the last six months of 2016, dropping to an average of $5.96 per pound. The direction cattle prices take this year will be
pivotal for ranchers who endured historic losses in 2015 and 2016. BETTER FARM POLICY All too often, food is treated like any other
commodity and farming like any other profession. This could not be further from the truth. While many blame the current economic
downturn on the oversupply of major commodities, the real root cause is one of failed policy.
If we’re going to save the
family farm, we need policies that support the success of small and midsized farmers and the
communities they call home – not the profits of multinational companies. The long and short of it is this:
without sound policies, it is nearly impossible for farmers to consistently make a good living from the land. FAIR PRICES & PARITY
Agriculture doesn’t fit neatly into most economic curves. As a sector, farming is relatively inelastic, with
farmers and eaters both unable to alter their consumption or production dramatically in any given year. People must eat and what
they eat only shifts marginally in a given period of time, no matter how much farmers produce. Farmers, meanwhile, almost always
have an incentive to produce as much as possible to squeeze a profit from their land and build a cushion for the tough times that will
inevitably come. The greater the supply of a particular crop on the market, the lower the price drops. Since consumers are buying
more or less the same amount of food from week to week, a farmer can actually make less money when production is good. There
are many ways we can secure fair farm prices. Historically this has been achieved through a
combination of supply management programs like grain reserves, and by setting floor prices –
analogous to the minimum wage for other jobs. These programs ensure that the people who grow our food can at least recover their
cost of production for those goods. Many have advocated for parity pricing for farmers, which helps them recover their cost of
production plus a little more so they don’t just break even, but actually make a profit. The idea of parity pricing is analogous to the
concept of living wages. EQUITABLE ACCESS TO CREDIT Affordable credit is essential for farmers, who have to spend money to plant
their crops and care for their animals months before they reap a financial benefit. The long and short of it is this:
without
sound policies, it is nearly impossible for farmers to consistently make a good living from the
land. But the banking industry has been on a roller coaster ride since the 2008 financial crisis and risk tolerance among agricultural
lenders has been subdued since then. Combined with the consolidation of financial institutions nationwide, affordable and
accessible credit has been increasingly scarce in rural areas. Historically, there have also been inequities in
who can access agricultural financing. Beginning farmers, organic farmers or those engaged in diversified production or more local
and regional markets have often struggled to secure credit or find loan packages that make sense for their farms. What’s more,
there is a long history of racial discrimination at USDA Farm Service Agency offices (something the last Administration took strides to
rectify), where Black, Latino, Native American and other socially disadvantaged farmers were denied the loans needed for their
farms, ultimately leading to dispossession of their land. While there have been many important improvements in farm credit policy
at the federal level, there is still much work needed to ensure that farmers of all kinds can secure the credit they need to thrive on
the land.
Trade war thumps – Chinese retaliatory tariffs gut the soybean industry
Brandon 18 ( Hembree Brandon, Editorial Director of Farm Press, Jul 12, 2018, “Tariffs:
‘Serious damage to U.S. farmers…’” http://www.deltafarmpress.com/commentary/tariffs-
serious-damage-us-farmers kq)
In a statement coinciding with the start of its opposition campaign, the Chamber noted: “Tariffs imposed by the United States
are nothing more than a tax increase on American consumers and businesses — including
manufacturers, farmers, and technology companies — who will pay more for commonly used products and materials.
Retaliatory tariffs imposed by other countries on U.S. exports will make American-made goods more
expensive, resulting in lost sales and ultimately lost jobs here at home. This is the wrong approach, and it
threatens to derail our nation’s recent economic resurgence.” The Chamber released a state-by-state
breakdown of the impact the tariffs will have. In the Mid-South: •Mississippi — $519 million of
exports threatened: $99 million to Canada; $181 million to Mexico; $229 million to China; $10 million to Europe; 339,500 jobs
are supported by international trade. •Louisiana — $5.9 billion of exports: $120 million to Canada; $7.2 million to
Mexico; $5.75 billion to China; $87 million to Europe; 553,200 jobs supported by international trade. •Tennessee, $1.4
billion of exports: $483 million to Canada; $86 million to Mexico; $314 million to China; $508 million to Europe; 857,000 jobs
supported by international trade. •Arkansas — $339 million of exports: $225 million to Canada; $93 million to Mexico;
$15 million to China; $5.5 million to Europe; 348,400 jobs supported by international trade. •Missouri — $881 million of
exports: $432 million to Canada; $72 million to Mexico; $138 million to China; $239 million to Europe; 826,700 jobs supported by
international trade. The agriculture sector has been foremost in taking it on the chin economically from
the tariffs. Soybeans, with $14 billion in exports in 2017, representing 41 percent of the value of products on China’s tariff hit
list, dropped to a low of $8.40 per bushel July 6, well below most farmer’s cost of production.
“Soybeans are the top agriculture export for the United States, and China is the top market for
purchasing those exports,” says John Heisdorffer, a soybean grower from Keota, Iowa, and president of the American
Soybean Association. “Soybean farmers, whose crop represents 41 percent f the value of products on China’s tariffs list, will feel the
full effect.” After months of petitioning the Trump Administration for an alternative to tariffs, soybean growers’ pleas went
unanswered, the ASA says. “The math is simple,” says Heisdorffer. “You tax soybean exports at 25-percent, and you have serious
damage to U.S. farmers.” stevanovicigor/iStock, Getty imagesSoybeans at sunrise In 2017, China imported 31 percent of U.S.
production, equal to 60 percent of total U.S exports, the ASA notes, and nearly one in every three rows of harvested beans went to
China. Over the next 10 years, Chinese demand for soybeans is expected to account for most of the growth in global soybean trade,
underscoring the importance of this market for future U.S. soybean sales. In a July 11 statement the soybean grower organization
expressed “extreme disappointment” at the U.S.
Trade Representative’s announcement that an additional
$200 billion in tariffs will be imposed on Chinese goods. “This action worsens the trade dispute
between the U.S. and China,” the statement said. “While trade tensions with U.S. soy’s largest customer continue to escalate,” said
ASA President Heisdorffer, “soy growers from across 30 states are in Washington, talking with the members of the administration
and Congress, urging them to rescind these tariffs and bring a sense of stability and certainty back to farmers who depend on trade.
“The announcement of additional tariffs on China is a move in the opposite direction. We’re focused on increasing trade
opportunities and keeping the robust and growing Chinese market we have worked for decades to secure. Our message to the
administration and lawmakers remains the same: these tariffs needlessly hurt soy growers and rural communities. The American
Soybean Association continues, Heisdorffer said, to encourage the Trump administration to find a non-tariff solution to address its
concerns with China, while also utilizing soy as the largest agricultural export to help reduce the U.S. trade deficit with China. "While
other sectors of the U.S. economy are surging, the
farm economy is facing adversity from many angles, such
as low commodity prices and income, rising interest rates, record debt and poorer loan
performance," the American Farm Bureau Federation said in a recent statement. "One factor that will certainly help to improve
the farm economy, and is in the best interest of U.S. agriculture, is a timely and successful resolution of these trade disagreements."
Industrial US agriculture is unsustainable – topsoil erosion, drought, aquifer
depletion – increased production only worsens the problem
Morris and Bucini 16 – (Katlyn Morris and Gabriela Bucini, University of Vermont Departments of Agroecology and
Plant Biology, California’s drought as opportunity: Redesigning U.S. agriculture for a changing climate, New Pathways to
Sustinabaility in Agroecological systems, https://www.elementascience.org/articles/10.12952/journal.elementa.000142/)
We have arrived at our current industrial agriculture model based on the maximization of short-
term yields and the argument of ‘efficiency’- the premise that the larger and more uniform the
farm, the cheaper it is to produce each unit of output. This assumption has justified the funding
of large-scale monocultures rather than small-scale, decentralized, diversified farming.
California’s current agricultural systems are unsustainable by design, given their reliance on
irrigation in an arid climate, as are many farms throughout the U.S. Monocultures of fruits, nut
trees, and alfalfa for animal feed occupy the desert of California’s Central Valley, and those
require irrigation at levels that cannot be sustained. Three-quarters of California’s cropland is irrigated, mainly
concentrated in the Central Valley which encompasses the Sacramento Valley and San Joaquin Valley (See Figure 1) (California
Department of Conservation, 2010; Mount et al., 2014; The United States Department of Agriculture - USDA, 2015). By some
estimates, California only has enough freshwater stored to meet current levels of use for 1–2
years (Famiglietti, 2014). Various aspects of California’s agriculture have recently been criticized by the media and public,
including the high water requirements of some crops such as almonds (Holthaus, 2014). In addition, California exports
alfalfa hay to Asia and the Middle East to feed livestock, which is indirectly ‘exporting’ one
hundred million gallons of California’s water rather than being used to nourish domestic crops
and people (Leithead, 2014). California’s agriculture has recently suffered from drought and resulting freshwater shortages
beginning in 2011. The drought has exposed the vulnerability of the region’s agricultural systems, which points to the need to
implement more sustainable practices for this and other extreme conditions. While drought is a characteristic feature of the climate
in California, this
current drought is among the most severe in the last millennium for its
accumulated moisture deficit (Griffin and Anchukaitis, 2014). Paleoclimatic records show that multi-annual droughts
have been common in southern California since 800 A.D., especially in the medieval period (800–1300) which was characterized by
warm temperatures (MacDonald, 2007). In the last century, the
Dust Bowl of the 1930s in the western United
States was characterized by a prolonged decadal-scale drought which, coupled with
unsustainable agricultural practices (heavy tillage, monocultures of annual grain crops), resulted in crisis (Eckholm,
1976). More recently, prolonged droughts afflicted California in the late 1970s and again in the early 1980s; however, one notable
difference is that California’s
population today is roughly double that of the 1970s (Dimick, 2015).
The combination of sustained low precipitation and high temperatures is the driving force of
prolonged droughts. While records show that similar low precipitation levels have occurred in the past 1200 years, the
unprecedented high temperatures of these recent years could be a determinant of the particularly high drought severity (Griffin and
Anchukaitis, 2014). While precipitation sets the occurrence and duration of droughts, high temperatures can exacerbate their
severity as a consequence of increased evaporative demand. For southern California, projections of future temperature from
general circulation models show that climate change will lead to higher temperatures, especially during summer months
(MacDonald, 2010; Pierce et al., 2013). In recent years, the absence of sufficient water supply from precipitation, coupled with
decreased snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges, has led to significant surface water shortages (Dimick,
2015; Hayden, 2015; Venton, 2015). Four hundred thousand acres of California farmland were taken out
of production in 2014 due to a combination of the drought and difficulty accessing irrigation
water (American Farmland Trust, 2015). But given that 32–40% of California’s irrigated cropland is planted to high-value
perennials including nuts, grapes and other fruits, these crops must be watered even in drought years (Mount et al., 2014). Farmers
have compensated for the freshwater shortages by drawing more heavily on groundwater resources, with a 62% increase in
groundwater pumping in 2014. Since aquifers are not being recharged as rapidly as they are being depleted, farmers are digging
deeper wells to reach stored groundwater. The results are increasingly high costs of pumping, salt intrusions
into aquifers, and land subsidence. Parts of the San Joaquin valley are undergoing faster rates of land subsidence than
ever, which results in costly infrastructure damage and reduced flow capacity of canals. Overdrawing groundwater also
causes compaction, which permanently decreases capacity for future groundwater storage; this
occurred in the Central Valley in the 1960s and 70s and again over the past several years (Sneed et al., 2013).
Overregulation thumps– US agriculture will stagnate absent easing of

regulations
Miller 17 (Henry Miller, Henry I. Miller is an American medical researcher and columnist,
formerly with the FDA, since 1994 the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public
Policy at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank located on the
university's campus in California.[1] He is an Adjunct Fellow of the Competitive Enterprise
Institute., “Over-regulation at USDA is holding back American agriculture”,
http://thehill.com/homenews/396545-rosenstein-asks-federal-prosecutors-for-help-in-review-
of-kavanaugh-documents-report - DCS)
The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) will tackle “key problems” in the industry at its October 6 annual board
meeting including optimizing agricultural water usage and improving soil health. And while those issues are important, FFAR is
ignoring the most pressing issue in the industry — excessive and wrong-headed government
regulation. That omission was predictable, given that four ex officio members of FFAR’s board are senior USDA officials.
Excessively burdensome regulation blunts technological innovation, as explained in a 2013 policy memo by
Progressive Policy Institute economists Michael Mandel and Diana Carew: "For each new regulation added to the
existing pile, there is a greater possibility for…inefficient company resource allocation, and for
reduced ability to invest in innovation.” The result? "The negative effect on U.S. industry of regulatory
accumulation actually compounds on itself for every additional regulation added to the pile." As
the regulator of the critical agricultural sector of genetically engineered plants, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s
Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is in dire need of reform to make its
regulation more science-based and less burdensome. Some background is necessary. Before the advent of
molecular techniques for genetic modification in the 1970s, APHIS had long regulated the importation and
interstate movement of organisms (plants, bacteria, fungi, viruses, etc.) that are plant pests, which were
defined by means of an inclusive list — essentially a binary “thumbs up or down” approach. A
plant that an investigator might wish to introduce into the field is either on the prohibited list of
plant pests, and therefore requires a permit, or it is exempt. This straightforward approach is risk-based, in
that the organisms required to undergo case-by-case governmental review are an enhanced-risk group (organisms that are known to
injure or damage plants), unlike organisms not considered to be plant pests. But for 30 years, APHIS
has applied a parallel
regime (in addition to its basic risk-based regulation) that focuses exclusively on plants altered or produced
with the most precise genetic engineering techniques. APHIS reworked the original concept of
a plant pest (something known to be harmful) to craft a new category — a “regulated article”
— defined in a way that captures virtually every recombinant DNA-modified plant for case-by-
case review, regardless of its potential risk, because it might be a plant pest. (Recombinant DNA
technology is the prototypic “gene-splicing” technology, invented in the 1970s.) In order to perform a field trial with a regulated
article,
a researcher must apply to APHIS and submit extensive paperwork before, during and
after the field trial. After conducting field trials for a number of years at many sites, the researcher
must then submit copious data to APHIS and request “deregulation,” which is equivalent to approval for
unconditional release and sale. These requirements make genetically engineered plants extraordinarily
expensive to develop and test. The cost of discovery, development, and regulatory
authorization of a new trait introduced between 2008 and 2012 averaged $136 million, according to
Wendelyn Jones of DuPont Pioneer, a major corporation involved in crop genetics. That huge price-tag is the primary
reason that more than 99 percent of the genetically engineered crop acreage currently
cultivated is huge-scale commodity crops, while so-called “specialty crops” — fruits, nuts and
vegetables — are underrepresented. APHIS’s approach to recombinant DNA-modified plants is impossible to justify.
Plants have long been selected by nature, as well as bred or otherwise manipulated by humans, for enhanced resistance or tolerance
to external threats to their survival and productivity, such as insects, disease organisms, weeds, herbicides and environmental
stresses. Plants have also been modified for qualities attractive to consumers, such as seedless watermelons and the tangerine-
grapefruit hybrid called a tangelo. Along the way, plant breeders have learned from experience about the need for risk analysis,
assessment and management. New varieties of plants (whichever techniques are used to craft them) that normally harbor relatively
high levels of various toxins are analyzed carefully to make sure that levels of those substances remain in the safe range. Celery,
squash and potatoes are among the crops in need of such scrutiny. The basic tenets of government regulation are that similar things
should be regulated similarly, and the
degree of oversight should be proportionate to the risk of the
product or activity. For new varieties of plants, risk is a function of certain characteristics of the
parental plant (such as weediness, toxicity or ability to “outcross” with other plants) and of the introduced gene or
genes. In other words, it is not the source or the method used to introduce a gene but its
function that determines how it contributes to risk. Under APHIS’s “regulated article” regime, however, only
plants made with the newest, most precise techniques have been subjected to more extensive and burdensome regulation,
independent of the risk of the product. Under its discriminatory and unscientific regulatory regime, APHIS has approved 196
varieties of genetically engineered crops, and farmers have widely and rapidly adopted many of them. After the cultivation
worldwide of more than 5 billion acres of genetically engineered crops (by more than 18 million farmers in 26 countries) and the
consumption of more than 4 trillion servings of food containing genetically engineered ingredients in North America alone, there has
not been a single documented ecosystem disruption or a single confirmed tummy ache. The regulatory excesses to which genetic
engineering applied to agriculture has been subjected — not only by USDA but also by EPA and FDA — have diminished investment
in research and development and make it less likely that the field will yield the “next big thing.” The
reform of regulation
of genetically engineered plants could yield tremendous humanitarian and economic benefits in
the near-term and for generations to come. Regulators won’t do it without significant prodding,
however, so it should be part of the agenda of FFAR and major health-related philanthropies.
Alt Cause - Climate change
Climate change outweighs - causes overall negative effect on crop and livestock
growth
EPA 16 (EPA: The Environmental Protection Agency is an independent agency of the United
States federal government for environmental protection. Climate Impacts on Agriculture and
food supply https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/climate-impacts/climate-impacts-
agriculture-and-food-supply_.html,10-6-2016 -DCS)
Crops grown in the United States are critical for the food supply here and around the world. U.S.
farms supply nearly 25% of all grains (such as wheat, corn, and rice) on the global market.[4] Changes in
temperature, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), and the frequency and intensity of extreme
weather could have significant impacts on crop yields. For any particular crop, the effect of increased
temperature will depend on the crop's optimal temperature for growth and reproduction.[1] In some areas, warming may
benefit the types of crops that are typically planted there, or allow farmers to shift to crops that
are currently grown in warmer areas. Conversely, if the higher temperature exceeds a crop's
optimum temperature, yields will decline. Higher CO2 levels can affect crop yields. Some laboratory experiments
suggest that elevated CO2 levels can increase plant growth. However, other factors, such as
changing temperatures, ozone, and water and nutrient constraints, may counteract these
potential increases in yield. For example, if temperature exceeds a crop's optimal level, if sufficient water and nutrients
are not available, yield increases may be reduced or reversed. Elevated CO2 has been associated with reduced protein and nitrogen
content in alfalfa and soybean plants, resulting in a loss of quality.
Reduced grain and forage quality can reduce
the ability of pasture and rangeland to support grazing livestock.[1] More extreme temperature
and precipitation can prevent crops from growing. Extreme events, especially floods and droughts, can
harm crops and reduce yields. For example, in 2010 and 2012, high nighttime temperatures affected corn yields across
the U.S. Corn Belt, and premature budding due to a warm winter caused $220 million in losses of Michigan cherries in 2012.[1]
Dealing with drought could become a challenge in areas where rising summer temperatures cause soils to become drier. Although
increased irrigation might be possible in some places, in other places water supplies may also be reduced, leaving less water
available for irrigation when more is needed. Many weeds, pests, and fungi thrive under warmer
temperatures, wetter climates, and increased CO2 levels. Currently, U.S. farmers spend more than $11 billion
per year to fight weeds, which compete with crops for light, water, and nutrients.[1] The ranges and distribution of
weeds and pests are likely to increase with climate change. This could cause new problems for
farmers' crops previously unexposed to these species. Though rising CO2 can stimulate plant
growth, it also reduces the nutritional value of most food crops. Rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide
reduce the concentrations of protein and essential minerals in most plant species, including wheat, soybeans, and rice. This direct
effect of rising CO2 on the nutritional value of crops represents a potential threat to human health. Human health is also threatened
by increased pesticide use due to increased pest pressures and reductions in the efficacy of pesticides.[3]
Climate change causes massive disruptions in food availability – labor force

doesn’t solve
Winkler 17 (Elizabeth Winkler: Elizabeth Winkler is a writer based in Washington, DC. Her
articles have appeared in The Economist, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Vox, The New
Republic, Quartz, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. 7/27/17, How the climate crisis could
become a food crisis overnight,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/07/27/how-the-climate-crisis-could-
become-a-food-crisis-overnight/?utm_term=.fdcbb63d8f00 – DCS)
In the summer of 2010,

Russia faced a severe drought, a heat wave and a series of catastrophic
wildfires, destroying a third of the country’s wheat harvest. Half a year later, the Arab Spring
began. The two are connected: The Middle East and North Africa, among the most food-insecure
regions in the world, rely heavily on grain imports from the Black Sea, especially Russia, one of the world’s largest wheat
exporters. But the Russian government banned grain exports amid the dismal harvest, looking to protect its
own food supply. Sapped of a major supplier, countries across the two regions saw bread prices
skyrocket. And while many other factors fueled the political unrest characterized as the Arab Spring, the high cost of food fueled
the broad popular discontent that prompted a string of attempts to overthrow illiberal regimes — some successful, some violently
suppressed. The episode illustrated the fragile nature of the network the world uses to feed its approximately 7 billion people. Now
a new report by Chatham House, a London-based think tank, details how climate change further
threatens that network, as the type of extreme weather event that knocked out the Russian harvest becomes all the more
common. Global food security depends on trade in just four crops: maize, wheat, rice and
soybeans. The first three account for 60 percent of the world’s food energy intake. The fourth,
soybeans, is the world’s largest source of animal protein feed, making up 65 percent of global protein feed
supply. Their production is concentrated in a handful of exporting countries, including the United
States, Brazil and the Black Sea region, from which they are flowing at ever-greater volumes. Between 2000 and 2015, global food
trade grew by 127 percent to 2.2 billion metric tons — and growth rates are projected to keep increasing. But the movement of
these crops hinges on just 14 “choke-point” junctures on transport routes through which exceptional volumes of trade pass. Such
choke points have been perilously overlooked, said Rob Bailey, research director for energy, environment and resources at Chatham
House and co-author of the report. Trouble ahead Imagine the following frightening-yet-plausible scenario: What
if the next
time Russia’s wheat harvest is devastated by drought, other major food producers are also
facing struggles with severe weather and wrecked harvests? In the United States, that could
mean a freak flood season that wipes out inland waterways or overwhelms coastal ports. Brazil,
the world’s other heavy-hitter, accounts for 17 percent of global wheat, maize, rice and soybean exports. But its road network is
crumbling. Extreme rainfall could knock out a major transport route.
If this happened together with a U.S. flood
and a Russian drought, there would be global food shortages, riots and political instability,
starvation in areas that are heavily dependent on imports, and recessions everywhere else.
Vatican spokesman Greg Burke says the Vatican began turning off some 100 fountains, including two Baroque masterpieces in St.
Peter's Square. (Reuters) The Panama Canal, linking Western and Asian markets, is one of the most critical
maritime choke points: Thirty-six percent of U.S. maize exports and 49 percent of U.S. soybean exports pass through it each
year. Another is the Turkish Straits, which connect Black Sea producers to global markets — including, critically, the
Middle East. Seventy-seven percent of wheat exports from Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan pass through these waters. Inland
waterways, roads, and railways are critical too. Sixty percent of U.S. agricultural products make
their way from farms to ports via the 12,000-mile Inland Marine Transportation System (IMTS),
which comprises a network of rivers and tributaries. Similarly, 60 percent of Russian and Ukrainian wheat exports
rely on the Black Sea rail network — a choke point that, along with its ports, the report calls the most volatile of
the 14 choke points thanks to conflict with Crimea, diplomatic tensions over Syria and Yemen, and unstable trade relations with
Europe. Disruption at any of these choke points would mean trouble, but if several jammed at
once, it could be disastrous. Climate change makes such a scenario more likely. While it’s difficult to
connect any specific weather event to climate change, models suggest the shifting climate is making such
events more common. For the United States, the could mean a lot more episodes like the one in August 2012, when
Hurricane Isaac closed ports and suspended barge traffic on parts of the Mississippi River. A frightening cycle Political
instability can also cause choke point disruptions. In 2015 and 2016, tensions between Russia and Turkey fueled
power plays in the Turkish Straits, and an attempted internal coup led to a temporary shutdown of the Bosporus. And disruption of
key arteries due to political instability can lead to a self-reinforcing cycle, as food shortages breed further instability.
In the Middle East and North Africa, statistical analyses show that food security is a particularly high indicator of political stability.
Over a third of grain imports for the region pass through a maritime choke point for which there is no alternate route. But the
problem is widespread. The 2007-2008 global food crisis was accompanied by protests in 61 countries and riots in 23. To make
matters worse, chronic underinvestment in infrastructure has weakened critical networks. Extreme
weather and
increased trade flows put them at risk of failing. The McKinsey Global Institute places the world’s infrastructure
investment deficit — the gap between funding available and funding needed — at $250 billion a year through 2040. (The United
States has one of the largest deficits among G-20 countries, according to Chatham House.) But even where there is infrastructure
investment, governments often fail to factor in climate risks: A 2016 survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development found that, with very few exceptions, they are largely overlooked even in rich countries. “It is a glide path to a perfect
storm,” said Bailey. In fact, 13
of the 14 choke points have seen some form of temporary disruption or
closure in the last 15 years, according to the report. (The only one that hasn’t, the Strait of Gibraltar, may now come under
pressure in Brexit negotiations.) This should prompt policymakers to prepare for worst-case scenarios. But as Bailey observed,
“We’re not very good at conceptualizing risks which we haven’t yet experienced.” The mentality is very different when it comes to
the oil market, where past oil embargoes make the idea of a supply shock more tangible. “People obsess about choke points there,”
he said. One solution is for countries to invest in individual emergency stores. But this risks creating an international "Hunger
Games" — encouraging hoarding and scrambling behaviors in the event of a crisis and a death spiral of declining market confidence.
“What is needed is a coordinated international approach like you have in energy markets,” Bailey said. In 1974, the
International Energy Agency established emergency response mechanisms to minimize the risk
of oil and gas disruptions. Governments and international responders, like the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the U.N. World Food Program, should
model this with rules on coordination during acute food disruptions. This would include
emergency food supply sharing arrangements and smarter strategic storage — where choke
points can’t cut off supply. But they also needed to take preventive measures, like diversifying production so countries
aren’t dependent on a handful of mega-crops and exporters. Funding should support alternative sources and supply routes around
the world, as well as climate-resilient infrastructure. But all of this requires long-term planning. It needs to start now — before
extreme weather becomes even more frequent.
Climate change crushes food security

EPA 16 (EPA: The Environmental Protection Agency is an independent agency of the United
States federal government for environmental protection. Climate Impacts on Agriculture and
food supply https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/climate-impacts/climate-impacts-
agriculture-and-food-supply_.html,10-6-2016 - DCS)
Climate change is very likely to affect food security at the global, regional, and local level.
Climate change can disrupt food availability, reduce access to food, and affect food quality.[14] For
example, projected increases in temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns, changes in extreme weather events, and
reductions in water availability may all result in reduced agricultural productivity. Increases in the frequency
and severity extreme weather events can also interrupt food delivery, and resulting spikes in food
prices after extreme events are expected to be more frequent in the future. Increasing temperatures
can contribute to spoilage and contamination. Internationally, these effects of climate change on agriculture and food
supply are likely to be similar to those seen in the United States. However, other stressors such as
population growth may magnify the effects of climate change on food security. In developing
countries, adaptation options like changes in crop-management or ranching practices, or improvements to irrigation are more
limited than in the United States and other industrialized nations. Any
climate-related disturbance to food
distribution and transport, internationally or domestically, may have significant impacts not only
on safety and quality but also on food access. For example, the food transportation system in the United States
frequently moves large volumes of grain by water. In the case of an extreme weather event affecting a waterway, there are few, if
any, alternate pathways for transport. High temperatures and a shortage of rain in the summer of 2012 led
to one of the most severe summer droughts the nation has seen and posed serious impacts to the
Mississippi River watershed, a major transcontinental shipping route for Midwestern agriculture. This drought resulted in
significant food and economic losses due to reductions in barge traffic, the volume of goods carried, and
the number of Americans employed by the tugboat industry. The 2012 drought was immediately followed by flooding throughout
the Mississippi in the spring of 2013, which also resulted in disruptions of barge traffic and food transport.[3] Transportation
changes such as these reduce the ability of farmers to export their grains to international
markets, and can affect global food prices. Impacts to the global food supply concern the United
States because food shortages can cause humanitarian crises and national security concerns.
They also can increase domestic food prices.
No worker shortages
There are no labor shortages – low wages and statistics prove
Costa, 17 – Former Director of Immigration Law and Policy Research @ Economic Policy
Institute (Daniel, “Modern-day Braceros: The United States has 450,000 guestworkers in low-
wage jobs and doesn’t need more,” March 31 2017, https://www.epi.org/blog/modern-day-
braceros-the-united-states-has-450000-guestworkers-in-low-wage-jobs/) //kq
On César Chávez Day, lost in all the news about the Trump administration’s criminalization and
scapegoating of immigrants and attempts to withhold federal funds from cities with policies that protect immigrants, are the
450,000 low-wage-earning migrant workers employed in the United States through the H-2A, H-2B,
and J-1 visa temporary foreign worker programs. Many of the workers in these temporary visa programs are in a
precarious situation and vulnerable to abuse and retaliation at the hands of employers and their agents. These “guestworkers”
often arrive in the United States in debt, and are tied to and controlled by their employers. Research
shows guestworkers are often paid lower wages than similarly situated U.S. workers, and earn
wages similar to those of undocumented immigrant workers. This is reminiscent of the Bracero
Program—a large guestworker program in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s that admitted hundreds of thousands of
Mexican workers to work temporarily on U.S. farms and in other low-wage occupations—and
which César Chávez fought against. Chávez knew that exploited, indentured, and underpaid
workers would degrade labor standards for all workers in the United States, including immigrants. After
scandals, political pressure, and President John F. Kennedy campaigning against it, the program was terminated in 1964. Sadly,
America has not learned its lesson. The United States is repeating an historical mistake, once
again admitting large numbers of guestworkers in low-wage occupations. With the possibility looming that the
Trump administration will reduce enforcement and oversight in guestworker programs—which will be
further exacerbated if Trump’s proposed 21 percent budget cuts to the Department of Labor
(DOL) are enacted—the United States may once again face scandals like the one where the bodies of guestworkers who died
in a traffic accident were not immediately claimed, because farm labor contractors and agricultural growers argued over who their
employer was. A snapshot of today’s low-wage guestworker programs The H-2A program allows employers to hire workers from
abroad for agricultural jobs that normally last less than one year, including picking crops and sheepherding. Thereis no
numerical limit on H-2A visas, and in recent years, the H-2A program has grown sharply, doubling over the
past five years to 134,000 workers, and accounting for nearly 10 percent of the crop labor force. H-2B workers are
employed in seasonal (nine months or less) low-wage nonagricultural jobs like landscaping, forestry, food
processing, hospitality, and construction. There is an annual numerical limit of 66,000, but workers often stay longer than one
year or have their stay extended. Despite the cap on the H-2B program, a “returning worker exemption” allowed 85,000 new visas to
be issued in 2016. The J-1 visa is part of the Exchange Visitor Program, a cultural exchange program run by the
State Department that has 14 different J-1 programs, including programs that permit Fulbright Scholars to come to the United
States, but also five de facto low-wage guestworker programs. J-1 workers in low-wage occupations are au pairs,
camp counselors, maids and housekeepers, lifeguards, and staff restaurants, ice cream shops and amusement parks and national
parks like Yellowstone. Only one of the five programs is numerically limited: the Summer Work Travel program is capped at 109,000
per year. Numerous media reports and legal proceedings have documented how H-2A, H-2B, and J-1 guestworkers are treated
poorly. For example, Buzzfeed News asked whether H-2A and H-2B are “The New American Slavery?” and Politico Magazine
reported this week that the State Department covered up and lied about thousands of complaints received from J-1 workers.
Immigrant worker advocates have been sounding the alarm bells about all three programs for years, but the employers who
hire guestworkers continue to lobby for more visas and fewer rules that protect workers. So, how
many workers are employed in these three programs? Calculating the number of workers is not straightforward, and the
government does not publish reliable data by visa. Using the same methodology I developed in this report, I
estimate in Table
1 below that there were over 270,000 low-wage workers employed in the H-2A and H-2B programs
in 2016. [Table Omitted] Note: LPR refers to lawful permanent resident. DOL methodology to estimate the total population of H-2B
workers was used to calculate H-2B subtotal. All references to a particular year should be understood to mean the U.S.
government’s fiscal year (October 1–September 30). Adjustment of status for H-2A based on actual numbers for 2014 and and H-2B
based on actual numbers for 2012-2014. Source: U.S. Department of State, Nonimmigrant Visa Statistics website,
http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/law-and-policy/statistics/non-immigrant-visas.html; methodology for number of H-2B
workers based on U.S. Department of Labor's methodology, explained in “Wage Methodology for the Temporary Non-Agricultural
Employment H-2B Program; Final Rule” (20 CFR Part 655, RIN 1205–AB61). Federal Register vol. 76, no. 12 (January 19), 3469.
Adjustment of status data acquired from USCIS through Freedom of Information Act request by Lazaro Zamora, Bipartisan Policy
Center (unpublished). Mortality rate calculated from Centers for Disease Control data at http://wonder.cdc.gov. Share Tweet Embed
Download image Table 2 shows that the number of J-1 workers in low-wage occupations was 167,960 in
2015, and the number in 2016 was likely similar (2016 data on J-1 are not available). [Table Omitted] The grand total of
guestworkers employed in low-wage occupations in all three programs in 2016 is 438,190 (Table 3), close to half a
million, but many were not employed in the United States for the entire year. On average, H-2A workers were in jobs certified to last
for [Table Omitted] Comparable estimates for the number of temporary Bracero workers are difficult to come by. The most
commonly cited statistic is that there were almost 450,000 Braceros “admitted” in the peak year of 1956, meaning that this many
workers authorized through the Bracero program entered the United States. However, using admissions to count unique workers, as
many reports have done, is misleading. For example, the number of
H-2A workers admitted in 2015 was more
than 2.5 times the number of visas (a proxy for the number of workers) issued that year, in part because some H-
2A workers live in Mexico and commute daily to jobs in the Arizona and California deserts, generating an individual, counted
admission each time they enter the United States. A Bracero worker’s job could last from six weeks to six months, also making it
difficult to count the actual number of workers. To get a better measure of how many Bracero workers there were and what their
impact was on the labor market, the DOL calculated the average annual number of Bracero workers, generating an estimate of full-
time equivalent workers. The table below, from a 1973 study, shows 125,700 full-time equivalent (FTE) Bracero workers in 1956, the
peak year for admissions, suggesting a ratio of 3.5 Bracero admissions per FTE job. The peak year for FTE Braceros was in
1959, at 135,900. (Ignore the number of “immigrants” below, which represents Mexican nationals who became permanent
residents in those years.) [Table Omitted] A similar “annual average” calculation of temporary, low-wage foreign workers present in
the United States in 2016 would be lower than 438,000; but how much lower depends on the length of time that each individual
worked in the United States. However, no matter how you count, there’s no question that there are more low-wage guestworkers
today than there were Bracero guestworkers in the peak year for either Bracero admissions or FTE workers. Lobbying
blitz
around guestworker programs is already underway, and will be exacerbated by the Trump
administration’s immigration enforcement Through an executive order, President Trump has already redefined the
priorities for deportation so broadly that nearly every unauthorized immigrant is now considered a priority for detection and
removal, and his administration is expected to step up enforcement against unauthorized migration on the southern U.S. border and
at worksites within the interior of the United States. This will impact the five percent of the U.S. labor force that is comprised of
unauthorized immigrant workers. Two-thirds of the entire unauthorized population has lived in the United States for at least 10
years, and unauthorized migration over the Mexico-U.S. border is at historically low levels, which means the Trump administration
will mostly be trying to remove long-term residents who are integrated into the United States through employment and family ties.
If a significant number of unauthorized immigrants are removed and fewer new workers arrive, employers
are likely to
request more guestworkers, particularly in agriculture, landscaping, hospitality, and construction. Employers
seeking new workers are likely to pressure the Trump administration and Congress to create
new temporary foreign worker programs and/or expand the current programs, as well as to
loosen and curb the enforcement of rules that protect migrant and U.S. workers. Specifically,
employers are pressing Congress to eliminate the requirement to provide housing for H-2A workers and they want to remove the
cap on H-2B visas. This corporate lobbyingblitz has already gotten underway, as many low-wage
employers have become addicted to having indentured employees who can’t complain or legally
search for a better U.S. job. Just yesterday, the Wall Street Journal editorial board called for more guestworkers in
low-wage jobs, warning of a “growing labor shortage” in agriculture and construction. But they failed to
mention that the earnings of most farmworkers are still extremely low and that the latest JOLTS
data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show there are three unemployed construction workers
for every job opening—not exactly signs of a dire shortage.
Empirics prove no impact to shortages and market forces solve.
Levine, 09 – Specialist in Labor Economics (Linda, “Farm Labor Shortages and Immigration
Policy,” November 9, 2009 http://nationalaglawcenter.org/wp-
content/uploads/assets/crs/RL30395.pdf) //kq
Immigration legislation sometimes has been crafted to take into account the purported labor
requirements of U.S. crop growers. In 1986, for example, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA, P.L. 99-603) to curb the
presence of unauthorized aliens in the United States by imposing sanctions on employers who knowingly hire individuals who lack permission to work in the country. In addition
included two industry-specific legalization programs—the Special

to a general legalization program, P.L. 99-603
Agricultural Worker (SAW) program and the Replenishment Agricultural Worker (RAW)
program7 —that were intended to compensate for the act’s expected impact on the farm labor supply and encourage the
development of a legal crop workforce. These provisions of the act have not operated in the
offsetting manner that was intended, however, as substantial numbers of unauthorized aliens have
continued to join legal farm workers in performing seasonal agricultural services (SAS).8 On the basis of
case studies that it sponsored, the Commission on Agricultural Workers concluded in its 1992 report that individuals legalized under the SAW program and other farm workers
planned to remain in the agricultural labor force “indefinitely, or for as long as they are physically able.”9 According to the DOL’s National Agricultural Workers Survey, two-
thirds of so-called SAWs stated that they intended to engage in field work until the end of their working lives.10 7 The INS approved more than 1 million of the applications that
individuals filed under the SAW program to become legal permanent residents. Anticipating that SAWs would leave farming because IRCA did not require them to remain in
order to adjust their status, P.L. 99-603 included the RAW program as a back-up measure to ensure growers of an adequate labor supply. The RAW program was never used
because the annual calculations of farm labor supply and demand that were made by the U.S. Departments of Labor and Agriculture during the FY1990-FY1993 period found no
national shortages of farm workers. 8 Seasonal agricultural services (SAS) were defined broadly in IRCA as field work related to planting, cultivating, growing, and harvesting of
fruits and vegetables of every kind and other perishable commodities. The terms “SAS,” “seasonal farm work,” “field work,” and “crop work” are used interchangeably in this
report. 9 CAW, Report of the Commission on Agricultural Workers, p. 75. 10 DOL, U.S. Farmworkers in the Post-IRCA Period, Research Report No. 4, March 1993. (Hereafter cited
as DOL, U.S. Farmworkers in the Post-IRCA Period.) Farm Labor Shortages and Immigration Policy Congressional Research Service 3 For many SAWs, the end of their worklives—
at least their worklives in farming—may now be near at hand. The diminished physical ability generally associated with aging in combination with the taxing nature of crop tasks
could well be prompting greater numbers of SAWs to leave the fields. The Commission on Agricultural Workers noted that the typical SAW in 1990 was a 30- year-old male who
“is likely to remain in farm work well into the 21st century,”11 but DOL estimated the average age of SAW-legalized workers in 2007 was 47. 12 Because relatively few farm
legalization program has

workers are involved in crop production beyond the age of 44, and even fewer beyond the age of 54,13 it appears that the 1986
become less useful over time in fulfilling the labor requirements of crop producers. A
combination of factors likely has contributed to the decrease in SAWs’ share of agricultural employment.14 While the share of IRCA-
legalized farm workers has been falling over time due to aging and the availability of nonfarm jobs, the
leading factor probably is the substantially increased presence of illegal aliens.15 In the first half of the
1990s, unauthorized workers rose from 7% to 37% of the SAS labor force.16 Their share climbed to 55% by FY1999-
FY2000, before settling at 53% in FY2005-FY2006.17 Moreover, the number of SAS workdays performed by unauthorized aliens more than tripled between FY1989 and
Unauthorized aliens,
FY2002.18 In addition, of the many foreign-born newcomers to the sector in FY2000-FY2002, 99% were employed without authorization.
arguably, have been displacing legal workers from jobs in the agricultural industry. Farm worker
advocates assert that crop producers prefer unauthorized employees because they have less
bargaining power with regard to wages and working conditions than other employees. Growers
counter that they would rather not employ unauthorized workers because doing so puts them at risk of incurring penalties. They argue that the considerable presence of
unauthorized aliens in the U.S. farm labor force implies a shortage of legal workers. Farm worker groups and some policy analysts contend that even if the previously mentioned
the industry could adjust to a smaller supply of

DHS and SSA activities were to deprive farmers of many of their unauthorized workers,
legal workers by (1) introducing labor-efficient technologies and management practices, and (2)
raising wages which, in turn, would entice more authorized workers into the farm labor force.
Grower advocates respond that further mechanization would be difficult to develop for many crops and that, even at higher wages, not many U.S. workers would want to
perform physically demanding, seasonal farm labor under variable climactic conditions. Moreover, employer representatives and some policy analysts maintain that growers
cannot raise wages substantially without making the U.S. industry uncompetitive in world markets which, in turn, would reduce farm employment. In response, farm worker
supporters note that wages are a small part of the price consumers pay for fresh fruits and vegetables and
accordingly, higher wages would result in only a slight rise in retail prices. These remain untested arguments as
perishable crop growers have rarely, if ever, had to operate without unauthorized aliens in their workforces. A Farm Labor Shortage? Trends in the farm
labor market generally do not suggest the existence of a nationwide shortage of domestically
available farm workers, in part because the government’s statistical series cover authorized and unauthorized workers. This overall finding does not
preclude the possibility of spot shortages of farm labor in certain areas of the country at various times of the year. Caution should be exercised
when reviewing the statistics on farm workers’ employment, unemployment, time worked and wages that follow. The
surveys from which the data are derived cover somewhat different groups within the farm labor force
(e.g., all hired farm workers as opposed to those engaged only in crop production or workers employed directly by growers as opposed to those supplied to growers by farm
labor contractors), and they have different sample sizes. A household survey such as the Current Population Survey (CPS)
could well understate the presence of farm workers because they are more likely to live in less
traditional quarters (e.g., labor camps) and of unauthorized workers generally because they may be
reluctant to respond to government enumerators. And, some of the surveys have individuals as
respondents (e.g., the CPS and DOL’s National Agricultural Workers Survey) while others have employers as respondents (e.g., the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s
National Agricultural Statistics Service Farm Labor Survey, FLS). Surveys that query employers are more likely to pickup
unauthorized employment than are surveys that query individuals. Underlying Assumptions Estimating
whether the number of workers in the United States is sufficient to fulfill employer demand is
difficult because there is no agreed-upon definition of a labor shortage. Economists believe labor
markets reach a balance between supply and demand, with a lag, absent government policies that prevent a shortage or surplus
from occurring. For example, economic theory posits that firms needing more workers to fill jobs in a particular occupation
will initially raise wages to attract employees from elsewhere in the economy and thereby
restore equilibrium between supply and demand in the occupation. In contrast, businesses tend to
think there is a shortage in a given occupation if as many workers as they want cannot be
obtained at the current wage being offered. Farm Labor Shortages and Immigration Policy Congressional Research Service 5 Estimating shortages or
surpluses also is not straight-forward because the supply of and demand for labor generally cannot be measured
directly. There is no proxy for the supply of workers to most occupations.19 An oft-used measure
of demand is employment. Accordingly, • an increase in an occupation’s employment denotes that
employers have increased their demand for labor and may be moving toward—but have not
reached—a shortfall of workers, while • a decrease in an occupation’s employment signals that
employers either have (1) reduced their demand for labor and may be moving away from a
shortage, or (2) maintained or increased their demand but may have exhausted the supply of readily available workers. The trend in wages commonly is used to
clarify the latter situation: if employment in an occupation falls despite employers substantially bidding up wages, it is assumed that the number of workers readily available to
fill jobs in the occupation may have reached its limit. Other measures that can be examined to shed additional light on the relationship between labor supply and demand
include unemployment and time worked. Both these indicators are analyzed below to supplement trends in farm employment and wages. Employment Although the
employment of hired workers engaged in crop or livestock production (including contract workers) has
fluctuated erratically over time, the trend overall has been downward (see columns 3 and 7 in Table 1). The employment pattern
among crop workers hired directly by growers (i.e., excluding those supplied by farm labor contractors and crew leaders) regularly rose and
then fell back during the 1990s, but to a higher level through 2000 (column 4). This ratcheting upward of employment
produced a 12% gain over the 1990-2000 period. In contrast, other wage and salary workers experienced steady and robust job growth over almost the entire period: from 1990
to 2000, wage and salary employment in nonfarm industries advanced by 18%. These divergent employment patterns suggest that hired farm workers did not share equally in
the nation’s long economic expansion of the 1990s and appear to be inconsistent with the presence of a nationwide farm labor shortage at that time.
“Labor shortages” are lies to preserve profit, and the plan will undermine wage
increases – history proves
Martin, 06 – Professor Emeritus. Agricultural and Resource Economics UC Davis (Phillip,
“Braceros: History, Compensation,” Cornell University Press. April 2006,
https://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=1112) //kq
*Edited for offensive terms (within historical context)
Some economists noted that farmers were wanted immigration to continue and farm wages to remain
low to protect the value of land- land that had "had been capitalized on the basis of five decades of cheap
labor." High land prices, they concluded, could be maintained only with the "continued availability of Mexican labor." When
urged to pay higher wages to attract US workers, some farmers countered that California agriculture
could afford to pay workers when they were needed, and that if "we should be forced to maintain
our [farm] labor when it is idle we would be forced out of business." In the spring of 1942, California
farmers predicted that there would be labor shortages for the fall harvest, and they called for the
importation of between 40,000 and 100,000 Mexican farm workers. Reformers who were hoping to use the Grapes
of Wrath to bring about fundamental reforms in farm structure and the farm labor market complained that there was no
shortage of workers, only a repeat of "the age-old obsession of all farmers for a surplus labor supply."
The Mexican government, remembering the discrimination and debts of the 1917-21 Bracero
program, insisted that the US government guarantee the contracts that farmers provided to Mexican workers,
that farmers pay round-trip transportation from the worker's place of recruitment to the place of work, and that
Braceros receive the same wages as were paid to US farm workers. The US government agreed, and
500 Braceros arrived in Stockton on September 29, 1942 through an exception to immigration laws for "native-born residents of
North America, South America, and Central America, and the islands adjacent thereto, desiring to perform agricultural labor in the
United States." Between 1942 and 1964, some 4.6 million Mexicans were admitted to do farm work.
Many Mexicans returned year after year, but the one to two million who participated gained US work experience, and some decided
to continue migrating illegally after the program ended. The Bracero program was small during the war years; admissions peaked at
62,000 in 1944, meaning that less than two percent of the four million US hired workers were Braceros. The wartime Bracero
program ended on December 31, 1947. Farmers were still allowed to recruit Braceros through official channels, but illegal Mexican
workers were also available. Some workers and employers wanted to operate outside the program, the
workers to avoid paying bribes to get on recruitment lists in Mexico, and US farmers to avoid
having to pay transportation costs. Illegal Mexican farm workers found on US farms were
legalized in a process that official US government publications called "drying out the wetbacks[migrants]," which involved taking
them to the Mexico-US border, issuing them documents, and returning the now legal Braceros to the farm on which they were
found. There were no penalties on farmers for knowingly hiring unauthorized workers, and the number of " wetbacks[migrants]"
soon exceeded the number of legally admitted Braceros. In 1949, for example, about 20,000 Mexicans received contracts from US
employers to cross the border as guest workers, and over 87,000 arrived illegally in the United States and then had
their status legalized. To reduce the number of " wetbacks[migrants]," a President's Commission on Migratory Labor in 1951
recommended employer sanctions, fines on employers who knowingly hired illegal workers, and a halt to the practice of legalizing
illegal workers after they found US jobs. The Mexican government endorsed the Commission's recommendations, agreeing "that the
wetback[migrant] exodus could be stopped only when [US] employers were penalized for hiring them." However, growers had
the upper hand in Congress, which in 1951 approved PL-78, the Mexican Farm Labor Program. In 1952,
the Immigration and Nationality Act was enacted and, while it made harboring illegal aliens a felony punishable by a
$2,000 fine and a prison term of five years, it also included the so-called Texas proviso, which asserted that
employing an illegal alien is not harboring. Thus, there were no penalties on US employers who
knowingly hired illegal workers. The PL-78 Bracero program sowed the seeds for later Mexico-US migration. The availability
of Braceros permitted labor-intensive agriculture to expand to meet a growing demand for fruits and vegetables, creating a
demand-pull for Mexican workers in California. Many areas of rural Mexico became dependent on
money earned from US jobs, and networks were soon established to link rural Mexican villages with US farm jobs. US
workers who faced Bracero competition in the fields, but not in nonfarm labor markets, exited for
nonfarm jobs, leading to "labor shortages" that brought more Braceros. The Bracero share of the work
force in citrus, tomatoes, and other major commodities soon exceeded 50 percent, and farm wages as a percent of
manufacturing wages fell during the 1950s. One argument for Braceros was that allowing Mexicans to
come legally as guest workers would reduce the number of illegal " wetbacks[migrants]." Between 1942 and
1964, there were 4.6 million Braceros admitted legally and 4.9 million Mexicans apprehended in the
United States (both numbers double count individuals who entered the US as a Bracero several times or were apprehended multiple
times). The number of Braceros and " wetbacks[migrants]" increased together in the early 1950s. US Attorney General Herbert
Brownwell toured the border and, saying he was "shocked" by the lawlessness he saw, appointed a ex-general to be INS
Commissioner. The INS launched "Operation wetback[migrant]" in June 1954, under which INS
and local law
enforcement authorities removed 1.1 million Mexicans in FY54. The US Department of Labor
cooperated to achieve the goal of having legal Mexican farm workers by relaxing regulations on Bracero
housing, wages, and food charges. Farmers were encouraged to join associations that pledged to hire only "legal
Braceros," and their number peaked at 445,200 in 1956, as Braceros spread to new states and crops when DOL began to
accept farmer assertions that there were labor shortages. During the 1950s, California replaced New Jersey as
the garden state of the United States, as fruit and nut production rose 15 percent and vegetable production rose 50 percent. New
dams and canals increased the amount of irrigated land, the interstate highway system reduced transportation time to the eastern
seaboard, and improved plant varieties and packing technologies made California produce available more months of the year. The
availability of Braceros held down wages-average farm worker earnings in California rose 41
percent, from $0.85 an hour in 1950 to $1.20 in 1960, while average factory worker earnings rose 63 percent,
from $1.60 in 1950 to $2.60 in 1960. The Bracero program came under attack in the early 1960s, accused of being a
government policy that slowed the upward mobility of Mexican Americans, just as government-sanctioned
discrimination held back Blacks. Criticism of the Bracero program by unions, churches, and study groups persuaded the US
Department of Labor to tighten wage and housing standards, thus increasing the cost of hiring
Bracero workers and reducing the number employed. Growers argued that they needed
Braceros because American workers would not do seasonal farm work, and that the availability of Braceros kept
agriculture competitive and food prices low. The CBS documentary "Harvest of Shame" aired in November 1960, and the
discussion of farm labor that followed convinced newly elected President Kennedy that Braceros were "adversely
affecting the wages, working conditions, and employment opportunities of our own agricultural
workers." Kennedy encouraged DOL to further tighten Bracero program regulations in a manner that raised the
wages farmers had to pay to US and Bracero workers, which prompted some farmers to consider mechanization.
During the summer of 1963, there was a showdown in Congress over the Bracero program. Farmers argued that without Braceros,
fruit and vegetable production would shrink and food prices would rise. On September 17, 1963, 32 Braceros were killed and 27
injured when a bus taking them from the fields to their labor camp collided with a train in Chualar in the Salinas Valley. Their bodies
were not claimed immediately, highlighting the lack of accountability that critics said was common in the Bracero
program, and setting the stage for a decisive vote in Congress to end the Bracero program. Many California farmers
expected to employ Mexican workers under the H-2 (changed to H-2A in 1986) temporary worker program used to
import Caribbean workers to hand cut sugar cane in Florida and to harvest apples in the northeast. However, DOL required
farmers to pay the higher of three wages to be certified to employ Mexicans as H-2 workers: the
minimum, prevailing, or the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR), and limited the employment of H-2 workers to a maximum 120
days. This was not a problem for the shorter seasons in the east, but California farmers who wanted to employ Mexican workers 11
months a year tried to transfer the authority to certify the need for H-2 workers from the US Department of Labor to the US
Department of Agriculture. The farmers' failed in the Senate in 1965 only because Vice-President Hubert Humphrey cast the
deciding vote against the growers. The year 1965 was a "year of transition," as farmers adjusted to the end of
the Bracero program. The number of US migrants, 465,000, reached a record 15 percent of the 3.1 million hired US farm
workers. Some farmers joined or formed labor associations that generally increased labor market
efficiency, as they reduced or stabilized labor costs and simultaneously increased average worker
earnings. The Coastal Growers Association in Ventura county, for example, reduced its employment of lemon
harvesters from 8,517 in 1965 to 1,292 in 1978 while increasing average hourly earnings from $1.77 to $5.63.
With fewer workers employed for more hours, average annual earnings rose from $267 (for 151 hours) to $3,430 (609 hours). A
second response to the end of the Bracero program was labor-saving mechanization. The 1960s was a time
of rapid technological change, a celebration of the accomplishments of engineers who were able, in the case of the
cannery tomatoes used to make catsup, to work with plant scientists to develop a uniformly ripening
tomato and with canneries to handle large volumes of machine-picked tomatoes. The widespread
replacement of workers with machines in the fields was expected to continue until there would be only machine operators, not
hand harvesters. One study
predicted that if a fruit or vegetable could not be harvested mechanically, it
would not be grown in the United States after 1975. The third response to the end of the Bracero program was
successful unionization. There had been organizing efforts and farm labor strikes during the
1950s and early 1960s, but farmers were usually able to get their crops picked by borrowing
Braceros from their neighbors. In fall 1965, the National Farm Workers Association headed by
Cesar Chavez joined a strike called by the Filipino-dominated Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AFL-CIO) to
protest a decision of California table grape growers to pay lower wages to Filipino grape pickers
than had been paid to Mexican Braceros. The strike failed, as table grape growers used labor contractors to get their grapes picked.
However, Chavez mounted a boycott of the wine and liquor sold by conglomerates that also grew table
grapes during the Christmas buying season in 1965, and some consumers responded by shunning Schenley
Industries products. The UFW led a 300-mile march from Delano to Sacramento in the spring of 1966 to highlight the grape
dispute and, during the march, Schenley became the first table grape grower to sign an agreement with
what became the United Farm Workers. The agreement raised wages 40 percent and launched a 15-
year golden era for California farm workers. Between 1965 and 1980, farm workers and their struggles
were front page news, as churches, unions, students and politicians boycotted table grapes,
lettuce and wine in support of the UFW and farm workers. Most growers were not affected directly by union
activities, but many were willing to match or exceed "union wages" so their workers would not join the UFW.
Competition between the UFW and the Teamsters, the extension of minimum wage and unemployment
insurance protections to farm workers, and the hiring of nonfarm personnel managers on many large farms
led to predictions that the farm labor market would soon resemble nonfarm labor markets such as
construction, which offered higher than average wages to compensate for seasonality. The farm-
nonfarm wage gap narrowed: in 1977, farm worker earnings averaged $3.53 an hour, 59 percent of the $6 average in California
factories. The UFW testified in Congress in support of employer sanctions, fines on employers who knowingly hired illegal workers.
Chavez complained bitterly about the use of unauthorized Mexican migrants. UFW-called strikes for higher wages and benefits were
often broken by contractors with crews of unauthorized workers, and many of the contractors stayed in business. By the early
1980s, the UFW was losing members and contracts, contractors were expanding rapidly, and labor costs fell with stable farm wages
and disappearing fringe benefits. This "downward spiral" in the farm labor market was expected to be reversed by the
Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which aimed to legalize farm workers and stop illegal immigration. In
order to retain these newly legalized farm workers, the theory went, farmers would have to offer higher wages and benefits.
However, with illegal immigration continuing, farmers did not have to offer higher wages and
benefits.
AT Growth
Economic growth is unsustainable – US farms rely heavily on fossil fuels
Trawick and Hornborg 15 – (Paul Trawick and Alf Hornborg, Idaho State University and Lund University,
Revisiting the Image of the Limited Good, February 2015, Current Anthropology)
Production as Destruction: The Finite Materiality of Real Wealth Real

wealth, unlike its virtual counterpart, is
something that human beings do not and cannot create in godlike fashion the way they create
ideas and symbolic phenomena such as value. Yet the whole episteme of modern or Western culture— the
philosophical and metaphysical tradition lying at its core and dating all the way back to
Descartes—ascribes that illusory power to humankind, that is, to man (Foucault 1970; Grosfoguel
2010:68). As a category, real wealth consists of the transformed products of low-entropy forms of
matter-energy that are themselves scarce by definition and subject to nature’s laws. Such
wealth—sometimes referred to as “productive cap-ital” but basically just manufactured
“stuff”—being a highly ordered form of matter-energy, can only be transferred from one person
to another, converted into a different and less ordered form, and ultimately consumed and
degraded, leading in every case to a gradual increase of heat, waste, and disorder (Georgescu-Roegen
1971a, 1971b, 1975). Its production takes place within a largely closed planetary system — that is, one that
can exchange energy and information with its cosmic environment but not significant inputs of matter (Martinez-Alier 1987; Rifkin
1989). Within such a system the “creation” of wealth is an illusion because real-wealth production
is a physically destructive process. Far from increasing the total amount of order and wellbeing
existing on the planet, as neoliberal theorists would have us believe, economic growth—the
increasing per capita consumption of goods and services—steadily reduces it, causing increasing
disorder within the system as a whole. To the extent that the world economy is fundamentally
dependent on limited stocks of mineral resources such as fossil fuels, phosphates, and metal
ores, the model of a limited world inevitably in decline merely expresses the Second Law of
Thermodynamics, the famous entropy law, as we will see below. It is not derived, like the other worldview, from a narrative
generated by affluent men jostling for wealth, power, and prestige in the playing of some language game; rather, it expresses a
single, universal, and potentially revolutionary truth. In the long run there is no way that the majority of the world’s people can
benefit from such growth, which is in fact destructive of order, that is, of usable raw materials and available energy. Admittedly,
conceiving the ideas and technological insights that underlie production is very creative indeed— sometimes even miraculously so—
but the process of industrial transformation itself is exactly the opposite, as Georgescu-Roegen, the founder of ecological economics,
pointed out long ago. Why, then, do we call it “growth” and continue to speak—as Bill Clinton so
enthusiastically does—of “growing the economy?” Perhaps it would be best if, when talking
about wealth in general, we dispensed with the metaphor of creating it. All of the above points would be
true of the global economy no matter how we chose to construct it. But note the full extent of our reliance today
on a limited and very dirty supply of fossil fuels. In the United Kingdom, roughly 88% of the total energy
consumed by people each day comes from these (International Energy Agency 2004, 2009), while the much bigger economy
of the United States is just as dependent, with hydrocarbons now accounting for
approximately 86% of its energy consumption. The United States uses up a huge percentage—
approximately 30%—of the planet’s dwindling oil stock. This is to say nothing of petroleum’s importance as a
raw material in making plastics and other synthetic compounds, materials that form a major component of the built environment in
affluent parts of the world and that are now the predominant form of waste or trash contaminating both terrestrial and marine
ecosystems. According
to the International Energy Agency (2009, 2010, 2013), we have nearly
reached—almost exactly as predicted—the critical consumption threshold known as “peak oil.”
The recent surge of oil coming from fracking in the United States and from the rising exploitation of tar sands in Canada are not
exceptions to this phenomenon, as many people seem to think, but rather clear illustrations of it. At
a global level, more
than 80% of the total energy consumed daily by people in one form or another now comes
from nonrenewable fossil fuels, a figure that varies significantly among countries but has
generally shown a dramatic increase, especially in developing nations, during the last few
decades. In a world characterized by continued population expansion and the increasing per
capita consumption of finite nonrenewable resources, the more we squander the limited
resources that are available, by converting them into physical wealth, the faster the
accompanying environmental decline and the bigger and more disruptive of our lives the
problems of poverty, pollution, and climate change will become. In effect, the less time we will have as a
species to make other and better institutional arrangements (see Rifkin 1989:64–65). All of the seemingly creative
activities we engage in require raw materials and extrasomatic energy, and all of them
consume and degrade that matter-energy, most of which is a direct substitute for displaced
human labor. As GeorgescuRoegen noted, like Soddy (1926) before him, “In entropy terms, the cost of any biological or
economic enterprise is always greater than the product. . . . Any such activity necessarily results in a deficit” (1971b:80, emphasis
added). This, rather than the fictions of wealth creation, the rising economic tide, and the self-regulating market, is what science,
both natural science and social science, now tells us. In the physical world, and in
the “real economy,” the creation of
wealth is an illusion, because to produce it, to accumulate it, and to consume it is fundamentally
to degrade and to destroy. The current global system of economic and cultural production is thus violent by its very nature,
a violence in which all affluent people are to some degree complicit. Agribusiness, strangely enough, provides the
best illustration of all of these points. In the United States and other “developed” countries,
spectacular yields per hectare are achieved by virtually pumping extracted petroleum
products back into the ground and into the air—tractor fuel, petrochemical fertilizers, and
insecticides—while rapidly eroding the topsoil and mining the groundwater stored in
underlying aquifers. This is what most farmers now do on a daily basis, whether they work for an
agribusiness corporation or are struggling to hold on to a family farm. The self-contradiction that this generally involves, the utter
negation of the traditional values that have always underlain stewardship of the land, has been emphasized by many people (e.g.,
Berry 1977, 1981), as has the extent of the resulting cognitive dissonance and stress that many farmers now suffer from. From a
scientific point of view, such creation through destruction is the defining feature of economic
growth as we now define it. The efficiency of the U.S. food production system, as measured by
its energy input-to-output ratio, is shockingly low and utterly unsustainable, as most farmers
today must be keenly aware, simply because it costs them so much money and drives them so
far into debt to continue to participate in that energy-intensive system. For every kilocalorie of
food energy consumed by people in America today, 10 kilocalories of energy—mostly
petroleum derived—are consumed and made unavailable for anyone else on the planet to use
in the future (Giampietro and Pimentel 1993, 1994; Pimentel 1993). A large part of this consists of fuel for tractors and other
equipment to replace the labor that has been displaced from the cultivation process, but the greatest amount is expended on
packaging and on transport after the food leaves the farm. In
the short space of 50 years, this basic distortion of
agriculture by agribusiness has “progressed” to such an extent that fossil-fuel inputs now
constitute approximately 60% of the total energy used in food production, while the solar
energy harnessed through photosynthesis accounts for only 40%. Meanwhile, the nutritional content of our
food has declined dramatically even as the environmental costs of the industrialized production process have steadily gone up.
Because agriculture is the sector of the economy tied most directly to solar energy capture—the process on which the food chain
and the whole web of life depend—there can be no clearer illustration of the fact that economic “growth” as we have conceived it
historically is fundamentally both inefficient and destructive. The belief that this kind of “progress” is somehow creative and benign
and can therefore go on forever—that is, is sustainable—emerged during the heyday of the seriously flawed worldview that we refer
to as “the image of unlimited good” (Hornborg 1992; Nash 2007).
Turn - using the market to solve for shortages is counterproductive and
exacerbates consumption
Andrews 17 – (Donna Andrews, Department of Political Studies at the University of Cape Town, Capitalism and Nature in
South Africa: Racial Dispossession, Liberation Ideology and Ecological Crisis, March 10 2017)
This ascendancy of efficiency above other values is associated with capitalism. Underlying this
logic of efficiency are practices of wealth accumulation and profiteering and an entire set of
assumptions about a logic of the economy, the market and society. From this logic arises the
belief that nature would best be managed by market mechanisms. This faith in the logic of efficiency is
closely interwoven with the idea that a good life is one in which one can consume endlessly. It is this logic
of efficiency that has underpinned the drive and ethos of privatisation, globalisation and the expansion of transnational corporations
over many decades, all resting on enclosures, extraction and expansion. It requires the constant making and selling of goods and
services, the search for new markets and the commodification of all aspects of life. Obscured
and hidden by the
language of efficiency, neoliberal globalisation and privatisation create never-ending
overproduction, overconsumption and overexploitation in society. These processes create vast
amounts of waste and deplete finite and limited resources. The skewed distribution and use of these
ecological resources amongst and between countries and peoples is hidden. So too are unequal benefits from efficiency,
privatisation and globalisation. This
logic of efficiency, in part, contributes to societies with extreme
income inequality. The logic of efficiency conceives of nature only as a natural resource over
which human beings have command. It works on the assumption that natural resources are
limitless; where and when limits emerge, technology and science will be able to create
alternatives. This logic assumes more is best, that boundless growth is equivalent to progress
and advancement of society. Thus, this logic does not avert ecological crisis but instead
hastens it. Key for Princen is the necessity to understand that the “age of efficiency” is not universal or some perfect age-old
notion, but that it is historically specific and evolved over time. The logic of efficiency emerged parallel to the rise of industrialisation
and was influenced fundamentally by three primary institutions, namely the factory, the laboratory and the market. The
aim of
these institutions is to generate the highest throughput (amount of material or items passing
through a system or process) in modern society. The logic of efficiency thus serves a political and economic
purpose and is linked to a particular worldview. According to Princen, efficiency, like the idea of personal self-gain, must be
understood from a historical perspective. By making the logic of efficiency visible, my dissertation questions political, economic and
social theories and their assumptions about nature. The
ascendancy of the idea of efficiency, with its social
and economic meaning of large quantities at the fastest rate and lowest costs, coincides with
the conception of nature as passive, other and for the advancement of society. It is the constant call
by proponents of neoliberalism over the past fifty or so years for efficient and sustainable use of natural resources that has
exacerbated the ill health of the environment. It is now necessary to call for an alternative such
as the logic of sufficiency within the context of the ecological crisis, which can posit a new
approach to nature. 2.4.2 The logic of sufficiency Princen argues that we require new concepts for a different
society, which are premised on the recognition of limited resources and ecological decline. This
alternative society would not be based on principles of material wealth, profit making or the
logic of efficiency. He argues that society requires ideas, which call into question excessiveness and boundless production.46
Importantly he points, out “that what we take for normal is actually excess,” and suggests that we
“adopt sufficiency (or something like it) as a political tool.”47 Princen argues that “we need language
that enables living with, not living against nature” and he challenges us to imagine and create a different society,
which would overcome the multiple crises in our current society.48 In particular, he focuses on the intersection of ecological and
moral crises. As described above, a dominant idea in society is efficiency, which is essential for the current functioning of the current
paradigm. The idea of progress is equated with growth that posits access, mobility and convenience as the highest ideals. Other
important ideas of moderation, solidarity and community are subordinated and this is not by chance. Princen asks us to examine the
new language and concepts that have been created to foster this particular worldview.49 He argues that today the “fundamental
biophysical shifts require fundamental social shifts.”50 In an ecologically constrained society, Princen argues that the logic of
efficiency needs to be subordinate to new managing principles which do not promote more as good, but rather bring into closer
focus what is enough. He
suggests the idea of sufficiency as one such common sense and intuitive
principle. Similar ideas of being mindful as well as adaptive to ecological limits exist historically.
Princen stressed that “[s]ufficiency principles such as restraint, respite, precaution, polluter
pays, zero, and reverse onus have the virtue of partially resurrecting well established notions
such as moderation and thrift, ideas that have never completely disappeared.”51 We need all these
ideas but they run the risk of being displaced because modern society does not reward reduced throughput; it demands endless
output.52 Modern society demands endless consumption, associating wanting, buying and having more with the
good life. This good life aspires to the notion that money can buy convenience, choice and happiness. By looking at various examples
in the form of case studies, Princen explains how “choice was not one of indulgence versus abstinence or convenience versus
hardship. From the Pacific Lumber Company, Monhegan Lobstering, and the Toronto Island Project, it becomes apparent that
enough was a ‘first best’ choice, not second best, not a concession, not a sacrifice.”53 He argues how enough, the
idea of
sufficiency, is ecologically rational. He demonstrates how communities can and do exercise
restraint, follow principles of sufficiency and act collectively and in solidarity to ensure nature’s
well-being as well as that of the individual and community.
AT Food Shortages
No Impact – need for food production not dependent on US ag
Charles 13. (Dan Charles, NPR's food and agriculture correspondent “American Farmers Say
They Feed The World, But Do They?” NPR, NPR, 17 Sept. 2013,
www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/09/17/221376803/american-farmers-say-they-feed-the-
world-but-do-they.)
When critics of industrial agriculture complain that today's food production is too big
and too dependent on pesticides, that it damages the environment and delivers
mediocre food, there's a line that farmers offer in response: We're feeding the world.
It's high-tech agriculture's claim to the moral high ground. Farmers say they farm the way they do to produce
food as efficiently as possible to feed the world. Charlie Arnot, a former public relations executive for food and farming companies, now CEO of the
"U.S. farmers have a tremendous sense of pride
Center for Food Integrity, says it's more than just a debating point.
in the fact that they've been able to help feed the world," he says. That phrase showed
up, for instance, a few weeks ago at a big farm convention in Decatur, Ill. The seed and
chemical company DuPont set up a wall with a question printed at the top in big, capital
letters: "How are you making a difference to feed the world?" The company invited people to answer that question, and thousands of them did.
They wrote things like "raising cattle," "growing corn and beans," "plant as much as possible." Kip Tom, who grows corn and
soybeans on thousands of acres of Indiana farmland, says he's very aware of the fact
that the world has more and more people, demanding more food. Yet there are fewer
and fewer farmers, "and it's the duty of those of us who are left in the business, us
family farmers, to help feed that world." That means growing more food per acre, he says, which requires new and better
technology: genetically engineered seed, for instance, or pesticides. And this is why the words "feed the world" grate on the nerves of people who
believe that large-scale, technology-driven agriculture is bad for the environment and often bad for people. Margaret Mellon, a scientist with the
environmental advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists, recently wrote an essay in which she confessed to developing an allergy to that phrase.
'We have to use pesticides, or we won't be able to
"If there's a controversy, the show-stopper is supposed to be,
feed the world!' " she says. Mellon says it's time to set that idea aside. It doesn't answer
the concerns that people have about modern agriculture — and it's not even true.
American-style farming doesn't really grow food for hungry people, she says. Forty
percent of the biggest crop — corn — goes into fuel for cars. Most of the second-biggest crop —
soybeans are fed to animals. Growing more grain isn't the solution to hunger anyway,
she says. If you're really trying to solve that problem, there's a long list of other steps
that are much more important. "We need to empower women; we need to raise incomes; we need infrastructure in the
developing world; we need the ability to get food to market without spoiling. It seemed that this dispute needed a referee. So, I called Christopher
Barrett, an economist at Cornell University who studies international agriculture and poverty. "They're both right," he says, chuckling. "Sometimes the
the U.S. tend to make food
opposite of a truth isn't a falsehood, but another truth, right?" It's true, he says, that bigger harvests in
more affordable around the world, and "lower food prices are a good thing for poor
people." For instance, Chinese pigs are growing fat on cheap soybean meal grown by
farmers in the U.S. and Brazil, and that's one reason why hundreds of millions of people
in China are eating much better than a generation ago — they can afford to buy pork. So
American farmers who grow soybeans are justified in saying that they help feed the world. But Mellon is right, too, Barrett says. The big crops
that American farmers send abroad don't provide the vitamins and minerals that billions
of people need most. So, if the U.S. exports lots of corn, driving down the cost of
cornmeal, "it induces poor families to buy lots of cornmeal, and to buy less in the way of
leafy green vegetables, or milk," that have the key nutrients. In this case, you're feeding the world, but not
solving the nutrition problems. Arnot, from the Center for Food Integrity, recently did a survey, asking consumers whether they think the U.S. even has
a responsibility to provide food to the rest of the world. Only 13 percent of these consumers strongly agreed. In focus groups, many people said that if
"It is a
feeding the world means more industrial-scale farming, they're not comfortable with it. This is not what message farmers like to hear.
real sense of frustration for farmers that 'feeding the world' is no longer a message that
resonates with the American public," Arnot says. He tells farm groups that they'll have
to find another message. They'll need to show that the way they grow food is consistent
with the values of American consumers.
AT Food aid
Food aid suppresses developing economies, resolving in long-term starvation
Geran 88 – Director, Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, Heritage (Juliana, “How American
Food Aid Keeps the Third World Hungry,” August 1, 1988,
https://www.heritage.org/trade/report/how-american-food-aid-keeps-the-third-world-hungry)
//kq
HOW AMERICAN FOOD AIDKEEPS THE THIRD WORLD HUNGRY INTRODUCTION Americans have a proud history of
being charitable, concerned about the well-being of their fellow man at home and overseas. The federal governments Food for Peace program which
provides food for less develope d countries, is testimony to this. Yet ironically, and tragically, Food for Peace, formally known as P.L 480, has been one
of the most harmful programs of aid to Third World countries. While
sometimes alleviating hunger in the short run, the
program usuall y lowers the price at which Third World farmers can sell their crops This depresses
local food production, making it harder for poor countries to feed themselves in the long run.
Food for Peace, in fact, is mainly an aid program for U.S farmers, allowing t h em to dump their
surplus crops in Third World countries, while the U.S. taxpayer foots the bill, and the poor in less
developed countries bear the ultimate high cost. Food for Peace, despite its grand title, hinders
agricultural development in such countr i es and makes a mockery of American humanitarian rhetoric Market Incentives for
Farmers. As such, the .Food for Peace program; now in its.34th year, should be phased out. American food aid should be restricted to humanitarian
relief for droughts or disaste r s. In place of Food for Peace, the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) should promote policies that will give
farmers in less developed countries market incentives to produce more food to feed their own peop1.e. AID should encourage and assist with technical
advice the dismantling of state marketing monopolies in such countries so that farmers will be free to sell their crops for whatever price the market will
offer. THE EARLY FOOD PROGRAM Since the end of World War 11, the U.S. government has provided enormous
amounts of food to other countries as part of its foreign aid. While humanitarian concerns certainly have been some
of the motivation for this, the federal government has relied on food giveaways domestic a lly and overseas to keep prices high for
American farmers and to dispose of the crop surpluses generated by government agricultural
programs. In the late 1940s and early 195Os, the Marshall Plan, which sought to assist in the reconstruction of Europe, pro vided the engine for
dumping American food surpluses abroad. But by the early 195Os, Europe was back on its feet, and the surpluses in the U.S. farm belt began piling up.
The Food for Peace program, also known as Public Law or P.L. 480, was-createdirl95 to help solve the problem of huge U.S. farm surpluses resulting
from generous federal government commodity price guarantees. The farm program, in effect, forced the federal government to purchase crops. The
P.L 480 program gave Washington means for disper s ing of these surpluses, while, it was hoped, helping to alleviate hunger in other countries
Spending $20 Billion. P.L. 480 assistance is divided into a number of legal titles. Under Title I, food is sold to less developed countries at concessional
prices, and with special low or zero interest loans, at prices roughly 65 percent below the market price. Under Title 11 food is donated to less
developed countries for use in local development projects and to fight malnourishment. Under Title 111, passed in 1977 , food bonuses were extended
to I countries that sought to help their private sectors. Section 108, added in 1985, is similar to Title I11 but requires profits made by recipient countries
from sales of U.S. food assistance to be returned to an AID account t o be used to help private sector development in the recipient country. Section
416, which is not part of P.L. 480 but is a separate agriculture act provides free surplus commodities for less developed countries. The combined budget
for P.L. 480 and Sectio n 416 assistance in 1987 was $1.6 billion. Since 1954, the U.S. has spent 20 billion on P.L. 480 DISTORTING THE MARKET
American food aid to less developed countries under the P.L. 480 program, while meant to alleviate
starvation, has made it more difficult for recipients to feed their peoples. Local food production
has been discouraged by American food dumped in these markets. For example, in the 1950s and
1960s, massive U.S. wheat dumping in India disrupted India's agricultural market. Assistant
Secretary o f Agriculture George Dunlop speculated in 1984 that American food aid may have
been responsible for the starvation of millions of Indians U.S. officials have conceded that
massive food aid to Indig Indonesia, and 1 Interview with author, June 15,1984 2 Pa k istan in the 1960s
restricted agricultural growth by allowing the governments to 1 postpone essential agricultural
reforms, 2) fail to give agricultural investment sufficient priority, and 3) maint in a ricing system
which gave farmers an inadequate incen t ive to increase production gp In 1976, an earthquake hit Guatemala,
killing 23,OOO people and leaving over a million homeless. Just prior to the disaster, the country had harvested one of the largest wheat crops on
record, and food was plentiful As
earthq u ake relief, the U.S. rushed 27,000 metric tons of wheat to
Guatemala. The U.S gift" knocked the bottom out of the local grain markets and depressed food
prices so much that it was much harder for villages to recover. The Guatemalan government ultimately
b arred the 'import of any more basic grains. The August 25,1982, Kiznsas City limes reported that the Peruvian
agricultureminister begged the U.S. Department of Agriculture not to send his country any more
rice, fearing that it would glut the local market and drive down prices for struggling farmers. But
the U.S. rice lobby turned up the heat on Washington, and tv Peruvian government was told that it could either take the
rice or receive no food at all Keeping Crops from Market. U.S. food aid is still hav i ng devastating effects. A report by the AID
Inspector General found that food aid "supported the Government of Egypt policies which have a direct
negative impact on domestic wheat production in Egypt In Haiti, U.S. free food is widely sold
illegally in ma r kets next to Haitian farmers' own.crops thus driving down prices received by the
Haitians. A development consultant told the House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations in 1979 Farmers in
Haiti are known to not even bring th e ir crops to market the week that [P.L. 480 food] is being distributed since they are unable to get a fair price while
whole bags of U.S wheat are being sold.'14 In May 1984, ten
pe'ople were killed in Haiti when government troops
fired on crowds rioting t o protest corruption in the U.S. Food for Peace program In Jamaica, according to
economist cott D. Tollefson, Food for Peace has created a great disincentive to food production! Typical was the situation in late July 1984 when
Jamaica was suffering a short age of rice, the major staple. This led to a near political crisis.
Attracted by increased prices for rice substitutes, small farmers rushed their goods to the market. Days later, 4,890 metric tons of rice arrived from the
U.S. under P.L. 480, the first installment of an allocated 16,000 tons costing U.S 5 million The U.S: rice sentthe prices of substitutes tumbling, causing
serious hurt to local producers. U.S. AID helped Jamaica in 1984 design a food stamp program that was soon feeding almost half of the island's
population. Carl Stone, a political scientist at the University of 2 3 4 5 U.S. Government Accounting Office Disincentives to Agricultural Production in
Developing Countries As reported in James Bovard The Continuing Failure of Foreign Aid C at0 Institute, Policy Analysis #37 James Bovard, The Wall
Street Journal, July 2,1984. Scott D. Tollefson Jamaica: Limits of a Showcase Policy SAIS Review, SummerFaU 1985 November 26,1975 January 31,1986
3 Jamaica observes The existing food stamp program is a mockery to any real commitment to local agriculture. Our poor people are being
subsidized to buy imported food when our farmers can't sell their produce because of low levels
of consumer buying power.'6 Discouraging Domestic Production. The Food for Peace program has
repeatedly harmed Somali farmers. A 1987 Agency for International Development Inspector General audit of the P.L. 480 Title I
Program in Somalia concludes Nearly all Title I food deliveries to Somalia in 1985 and 1986 arrived at the wors t
.possible time, the harvest months, and none arrived at the best time, the critical hungry period The consensus of the donor community was
that the timin of deliveries lowered farmers' prices thereby discouraging domestic production Prices received by Som a li farmers
fell very sharply just at harvest time. U.S. corn entered the Somali market at prices less than half
the market price. Extensive corn and wheat remained unsold in government warehouses,
hanging over the market and depressing prices The Inspecto r General concluded The cause of thi's situation was
USAID/Mogadishu's unwillingness to reduce the Title I program in line with improved Somalia food production 7g Sometimes U.S. officials
themselves encourage harmful, nonmarket policies. In Morocco, U.S. A ID personnel suggested

that the government buy up domestic wheat and thereby drive up wheat prices. In the
Philippines, a 1986 P.L. 480-sponsored program called for that government to use the proceeds of the
donated food sales to buy up and inflate the do m estic food prices When food aid does not undercut local
farmers, it often replaces food that the recipient country would have purchased on international markets anyway: In a July 2,1984, Wall Street Journal
article, one analysis found that almost 90 perce n t of P.L. 480 donations to Brazil simply replaced grain that nation would have purchased from the U.S.
and elsewhere. The General Accounting Office reports that many countries have decreased their commercial purchases from the U.S. while continuing
to rec e ive P.L. 480 handouts PROMOTING GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION American food aid has often forced or allowed governments to take
repressive actions against their own people. For example, in Senegal in 1985 and 1986, the Food for Peace program resulted in the gov e rnment closing
the local rice markets in order-to force Senegalese to buy U.S. rice. The Senegalese are among the few peoples in the world who prefer broken rice to
whole-grain rice. Food for Peace does not offer broken rice. Senegal could have purchased b roken rice relatively cheaply from Thailand. Instead of
doing that Senegal accepted a U.S. donation of rice. Observes a former U.S. AID official What we had to do was force the marketing board marketing
rice to hold off every other kind of rice because ot h erwise consumers would not buy U.S. rice On the days when the U.S.-donated rice arrived, the
government would prohibit any other kind of rice from being sold. The money from the sale of donated rice went to the government's development
fund and from 6 Ibi d 7 Agency for International Development, Inspector General Audit, January 26,1987, p. 10 4 there, typically, into the pockets of
politicians. These events occurred when the U.S. was pressuring the Senegal government to let the free market rather than the government set the
price for rice Paying Farmers Less. Mozambique has been one of Africa's largest P.L. 480 recipients in recent years with P.L. 480 aid rising from $8
million in 1983 to $75 million in 19 87. Yet while the Mozambicans
are flooded with fr ee American food,
Mozambique government policies are destroying the country's farmers economically. Until recently,
the government was paying farmers less than half the value of their crops. It is no wonder that
food production is higher in the areas of M ozambique controlled by rebels than in the areas
controlled by the government, which receives the P,L 480 food donations e WaU Street Journal reported on November 18,1984, that
100,000 Mozambicans starved that year. Much of this tragedy was because of the government's agricultural policies. Free American food
gives foreign governments a license to repress their own farmers. Agricultural production in Ethiopia has been
disrupted by the government's villagization program, w hich has forced millions of peasants to abandon their countryside homes and live in
government-controlled villages, often far from their own farms. The resettlement program has shifted millions of Ethiopian farmers from the highlands
to tropical areas whe r e their traditional farming techniques are of little value. And the government refuses to pay farmers a market price for their
crop, thereby discouraging production. During the 1985 Ethiopian famine, donated food, moreover, was used
as 'bait" to capture h ungry peasants who were then forcibly transported from the north of the
country to the south. Much of the U.S.-donated food, moreover, simply rotted on the docks of Addis Ababa while the government used
donated trucks as human cattle cars SUGAR PROGRAM D UMPING The U.S. government's sugar program has
undermined foreign sugar growers to the benefit of fewer than 12,000 American sugar growers.
The aim of the program is to reduce U.S. imports of foreign sugar. The State Department estimates that the
reduced s ugar sales to the U.S. have cost Central American and Filipino farmers over 500
million a year in recent years To help those countries hurt by the sugar program, the Reagan Administration has created the "Quota
Offset Program This gives free food to count r ies hurt by reductions in sugar sales to the U.S. In 1986, the U.S. dumped almost $200'million in free food
on Caribbean countries and the Philippines through the Quota Offset program As The Wall Street Journal reported, " By
flooding local
markets and dri v ing commodity prices down, the nited States is making it more difficult for
local farmers to replace sugar with other crops;'In the same article, then Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holwill
is quoted as observing It makes us look like damn fo ols when we go down there and preach free enterprise 8 The Wall Street Joumd, September
26,1986 5 TITLE I1 AND CORRUPTION P.L. 480's Title II provides direct donations of food for projects in'Third World countries. Such projects are usually
supervised or administered by private voluntary organizations. The usual
routine for P.L. 480 programs, as one Senate Agriculture
Committee report describes it, is for an AID representative to visit a country, find a reason for c project
launch the project, and keep it going for years, regardless of need or results. Many of these programs
have fed the same people for more than a decade, thereby permanently decreasing the demand for locally produced
food and creating an entrenched welfare class. Against the Grain. Roughly a quarter of Food for Peace Title 11 speiding
goes for the Food for Work program, which is supposed to pay local peasants to work on
development projects, such as roads in their own regions, which would benefit them directly. FF W
projects are intended to increase agricultural productivity but typically are only make-work schemes. FFW workers often labor to improve the rivate
property of government officials or large landowners. In his bookAgainst the GminF,economist Tony Jackson r eports that the FFW
in
Bangladesh, then the largest FFW program in the world results in increased inequity" and
lktrengthens the semi-feudal system which now controls most aspects of the village life The workers
were supposed to receive a certain amount o f U.S. food as pay. In fact, they were paid less than
this; to make matters worse, the government of Bangladesh diverted U.S. wheat to other purposes, paying
the workers with inferior, infested wheat. According to Jackson, in the Dominican Republic, s hoddy AID FFW'program
management "led to giveaway programs, a road project that proved to be a footpath leading
nowhere, agricultural projects for which FFW incentives were not needed." In many places rural
residents neglect their own farms to collect gen erous amounts of food for doing little or no
work on FFW projects. FFW has contributed to a shortage of agricultural labor. at harvest time. Failure to
Improve Nutrition. Much of the food donated under P.L. 480 Title I1 is targeted for school food or hea lth programs for mothers and children AID claims
that these programs supplement local food output and reduce malnutrition. However, a 1982
AID audit of targeted food
assistance in India, the largest recipient under this program concludes The maternavchild health program has not
improved nutritionand,theschook feeding program has had no impact on increasing school
enrollment or reducing the drop out rate Even though targeted food assistance has been ineffective,
CARE (the private voluntary organization that administers the program for AID in India) and AID'S India mission "have resisted efforts to arrange an
orderly transfer of program responsibilities to the Government of India." Administrators of the Title I1 programs are supposed to give recipients
instruction in nutrition and family planning. Yet in Tanzania, Catholic Relief Services was giving 9 10 Tony Jackson, Against the Grain (Oxford, England
OXFAM, 1982). Interview with author, June 15,1984 6 recipients only three hours of instruction per year. A 1983 Inspector General
report finds that this free food in Tanzania and elsewhere in Africa has created permanent doles
people who could feed themselves no longer bothered to grow enough food. The Inspector
General concludes This type of perpetual feed i ng has little potential or benefit; rather, it tends
to make communities dependent on donated food." Another AID audit concludes that 'program
methodology in Kenya (and elsewhere in Africa) creates an unlimited demand for [foreign donated] food
The long-t erm feeding programs in the same areas for 10 years or more have great potential for [creating
unwelcome] food production and family planning disincentives." The official Catholic Relief Services policy manual
for Food for Peace programs states Any child under the age of 5 years is eligible to be registered in the program. All children should be encouraged to
stay in the program until the age of five AID auditors found that over half the children receiving free food were not nutritionally substandard AID
operators have been passing out free food in some villages for over a decade, and several feeding centers have reported that they would have to give
out free food for at least another decade Lack of Accountability. The GeneralAccounting Office examined 2 2 operational
plans by private voluntary organizations for 19 African countries and found that 14 "did not
include specific and measurable goals and criteria for measuring implementation progress 15
lacked adequate discussions of monitoring and evaluation s ystems for ensuring accountability and assessing program
benefits, 12 lacked adequate explanations of how programs would be phased over to local
institutions, and 16 lacked adequate financial information AID missions hi less developed countries do not- ro u tinely receive from private
voluntary organizations information such as numbers, locations, descriptions, and results of projects and had to specifically request it for review.
Mission officials made very few visits to projects. Officials in two missions i ndicated that visits are generally to accommodate visitors, such as
congressional and GAO staffs FAILED EFFORTS TO ENCOURAGE REFORM Congress repeatedly has mandated that P.L. 480 should encourage private
sector development in the Third World. In 1977, Con g ress created a Title I11 program to provide special bonuses to countries that changed policies to
help the private sector: Yetvery few countries have applied for Title 111 conditional aid, since they know they will get free or cheap food regardless of
wha t policies they follow. Congress effectively admitted the failure of Title III in 1985 by adding a new program so-called Section 108 assistance. This is
to channel P.L. 480 sales proceeds to private organizations in the T hird World while encouraging expanded market opportunities for U.S. agriculture
exports. Much, of the Section 108 money has gone into development finance companies in poor countries which often pay large kickbacks to inf luential
11 US. General Accounting O ffice report Food Aid Improving Economic and Market Development Impact in African Countries December 1987 7
politicians. Development finance companies in general have a very poor record in the Third World and have proved a poor means for foreign donors to
aid the private sector THIRD WORLD MISUSE OF FREE FOOD American food assistance to less developed countries often is misused by recipient
governments. For example, the Congo, instead of using P.L. 480 donations to feed its people, sold free food in 1983 t o buy a small arms factory from
Italy.12 In March 1984, The Nav York 7hes reported that AID believed Ethiopia was selling its donated food to buy more Soviet weaponry.13 Mauritius
insisted on receiving only the highest quality rice and then used it in hote l s to feed foreign to~rists Cape Verde begged for more emergen%relief aid at
the same time that it was exporting wheat donated by other countries Bread for Donkeys. In other cases, food aid is squandered because of
government price controls. Bread is so ch e ap in Egypt that U.S. P.L. 480 wheat is often baked into loaves and fed to donkeys. A 1987 General
Accounting Office report notes that Pakistan has used P.L 480 money to prevent a cutback of public sector employees.16 Money from P.L. 480 often is
used to support national agriculture bureaucracies even though they repress the farmers. In
the Philippines, in 1986, considerable
P.L. 480 money went to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food even though the Ministry was
sanctioning a state monopoly that was defr auding farmers P.L. 480 sale proceeds are often used
for general government expenses, even though bloated central governments and meddling
bureaucracies are perhaps the Third World's largest curse In addition to this misuse of P.L. 480 assistance, recipie
n t governments often neglect to file reports for years on how food aid is used. Nevertheless AID
continues shipping them millions of dollars more of free food every year AMERICAN MISMANAGEMENT
Management of the P.L. 480 program has been extremely inept. Ea c h year, the Administration requests a certain amount of aid for each country. Once
the money is appropriated, the designated recipient country becomes confident thatdieaid will-,be 12 AID Semiannual Report of the Inipector General,
March 31,1984, p..32 13 The New Yo& Ernes, March 21,1984 14 The Wall Stmet Journal, July 2,1984 15 Agency for International Development
Improvements Are Needed in AID'S Assistance Program in Cape 16 General Accounting Office Foreign Aid Information on U.S. International Food Ass i
stance Programs 17 General Accounting Office report The Philippines: Distribution and Oversight of US. Development and Verde," June 25,1980 March
27,1987, p. 24 Food Assistance," November 7,1986 8delivered. As such, theU.S. has little bargaining power to use food aid
to persuade foreign countries to reform their agricultural sectors Never Canceling Agreements.
Food for Peace administrators have not penalized countries flaunting their agreements with the
U.S As the General Accounting Office concluded Accor d ing to AD, the Food Aid Subcommittee has never canceled
agreements because of poor performance on economic development provisions, although the signing of
subsequent agreements is sometimes delayed until governments submit annual self-help measure impleme n tation reports. For example AID officials
acknowledge that Kenya's poor record of compliance with self-help measures had not been a significant factor in determining subsequent year
program levels 18 A 1987 Inspector General report finds that agreement wi t h Sudan was so sloppy that Sudan was required to deposit [in its
development account 71 million less thanit received for the donated P.L. 480 commoditie A 1986 AID Inspector General Audit of the P.L. 480 Title I
Program in Morocco concludes "US/AID Morocc o was unable to account for the proceeds generated by.Title I agreements totalling $193.3 million or to
ensure the Government of Morocco compiled with the agreements."m The 1985 Food Security Act provided new guidelines for P.L. 4
AT California econ
Trade war thumps – California agriculture is already taking major hits.
Wortel et al 18 Gary Wortel graduate of San Jose State University with a bachelor of arts in
public relations. (Fear is growing on California farms over Trump’s trade war. Valley Republicans
must help stop it; https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/editorials/article214016504.html; 7/6/18)
California farmers want to get around tariffs, too, but they can’t just pick up and move their production of almonds, wine grapes and
other crops. Nor would they want to since the Golden State has some of the richest farmland in the world. California
is the
nation’s top agricultural exporter with more than $20 billion a year. Almonds, worth between $6
billion and $7 billion a year, are California’s most lucrative crop, and 70 percent of them are
exported. So growers are very concerned about the trade conflict, says Richard Waycott, president and CEO of the Almond Board
of California, which represents 6,800 growers. Almond board leaders went to Washington, D.C., in May to stress the importance of
free trade to California lawmakers and officials with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Trade Representative.
Already, the trade disputes are hurting lots of farmers and the businesses that depend on them,
according to the California Farm Bureau Federation. In June, the EU started imposing retaliatory
tariffs on more than $3 billion in U.S. products, including the Harley-Davidson cycles and major
California crops such as rice. In April, China began hitting back with its own tariffs on $3 billion of
U.S. goods, including California farm products such as fruit, nuts and wine. But it could get much worse
starting July 6 if China – California’s top export market for pistachios and second for almonds –
follows through on $50 billion in additional tariffs it announced in reaction to U.S. duties on
Chinese goods. Trump, in turn, ordered the drafting of $200 billion more in U.S. tariffs. For almond growers, a 10
percent tariff in China that rose to 25 percent in April could jump to 50 percent in July if there’s
no agreement. China is a $500 million annual market for California almonds, but with all the uncertainty, contracts for future
shipments are already down, Waycott told the Sacramento Bee’s editorial board. While global demand for almonds is strong, being
cut off from China will hurt. It’s not just the EU and China that California farmers have to worry about. Turkey
recently
announced $267 million in tariffs targeting crops. That nation is the second largest export
market for California walnuts – about $190 million worth in 2016. And in coming weeks, California
agriculture could face more tariffs from Canada, Mexico and other key trading partners. As former U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom
Vilsack argues in an op-ed in The Sacramento Bee, it makes no sense to sacrifice the farm industry to feed Trump’s obsession with
reducing the U.S. trade deficit. “If exports sneeze, California agriculture catches a cold, and the state economy takes a hit,” he writes.
Because some crops aren’t harvested and shipped overseas until the fall, there’s some time to negotiate a ceasefire before the
tariffs fully take effect and stomp all over California farms. Then again, that’s also more time for Trump to ratchet up the trade war.
Agriculture isn’t the only industry at risk. Exports are a huge part of California’s overall economy,
totaling $172 billion in 2017, 11 percent of the U.S. total. The state took a hit when Trump pulled
out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and reopened the North American Free Trade Agreement. If
you’re worried about when the next recession will hit, a trade war would certainly make it
sooner. So now is the time for California Republicans – especially those representing farming communities in the Valley – to be far
louder in urging the Trump administration to stop this trade war. It’s not only good for their districts, it’s smart politics. Democrats
trying to unseat GOP Reps. Jeff Denham of Turlock, David Valadao of Hanford and Devin Nunes of Tulare have already strafed them
on trade. While Denham and Valadao signed a May letter warning the administration about the impact on California agriculture,
they need to more vocally and consistently make the case.
AT Small farms
Small farms skirt state and federal regulations, injury reporting, and safety
inspections – turns their working conditions adv
Moskowitz 14 (Peter, reporter for Aljazeera America, “Small farms, big problems: Labor crisis
goes ignored in idyllic setting,” Aljazeera America, 07/29/14,
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/7/29/small-farms-labor.html)//PM
FONDA, New York — The hills of this rural area 45 minutes northwest of the state’s capital look as idyllic as the scenes pictured on
boxes of Stonyfield Farm organic rBST-free milk. The ground is green with grass, onions and cabbage, broken up by thin gray strips of
pothole-dotted roads. The only protrusions are white farmhouses, red barns, a few silos and some cows. For some, this scenic land
contains a hidden hellscape. As Americans have latched onto a particular idea of agriculture as morally ideal — small, often organic-
certified farms transporting vegetables, humanely raised meats and antibiotic-free dairy short distances to farmers’ markets and
ethically focused grocery stores like Whole Foods — farm workers and activists say a crucial link in the food chain has gone largely
ignored by those who may consider themselves conscious consumers: labor. With
the image of the small farm
becoming ever more present in the collective conscience of an increasingly food-aware nation,
farm laborers and activists say it’s more important than ever to set the record straight and
highlight the fact that even in the quaintest settings, labor abuse is still rampant. In central and
western New York, where farm workers are often undocumented and speak limited English, working on
farms small enough to avoid the scrutiny of U.S. labor regulators, data are lacking on just how
rampant abuses are. But workers and the activists who represent them say minimum wage
violations, verbal abuse, long hours, unsafe working conditions and even physical attacks on
workers are commonplace. And they say the problem is growing, especially on small dairy farms as the dairy industry in
New York booms, thanks to the country’s newfound fondness for Greek-style yogurt. Lázaro Álvarez, one of as many as 800,000
undocumented farm workers in the U.S., has decided to speak up, despite the risks that entails, Álvarez, 39, lived in Mexico City until
April 2013. He was laid off from his job as a manager at a warehouse run by pharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim after the
company switched to a mechanical system to manage inventory, and he couldn’t find any work in his hometown. Álvarez left his
wife and two kids behind for the U.S., spending eight days crossing the desert — including three without food or water. He made his
way to Tucson, Arizona, and over the next few weeks to upstate New York, where a friend helped him find a job corralling cows on a
dairy farm in Chenango County. In September, Álvarez was charged by a bull. The animal pushed him up against a metal railing,
injuring his shoulder and ribs and giving him a deep cut just below his right eye. His boss, the owner of the farm, pulled the cow
away from Álvarez but wouldn’t take him to the hospital for two hours, until after the owner finished milking his cows. When
Rebecca Fuentes, an organizer from the Workers’ Center of Central New York called the hospital to check on Álvarez, the owner’s
sister answered the phone and pretended to be a nurse, according to Fuentes and Álvarez. Because his medical team did not speak
Spanish and because his employers waited by the phone at the hospital, he wasn’t aware until weeks later that his employers had
told authorities that he was just visiting the farm, not working on it, when the accident happened. His workers’ compensation case is
now a lot more complicated. About 15 days after the incident, when it became clear that Álvarez’s ability to perform strenuous
manual labor was still impaired, his employer fired him. He searched for work for two months. “I tried to get out of my head that I
had this accident, because it meant I couldn’t provide for my family,” Álvarez said. “It took me three months to tell them because I
was ashamed.” He eventually found work on another dairy farm. He now lives with two other workers in a dilapidated farmhouse at
the edge of his employer’s property. He makes $500 a week and sends home 80 percent of that to his wife and kids in Mexico. His
son is still finishing college, and his daughter recently landed a job as a lawyer in the Mexican government. Álvarez says the hardest
part of living in the U.S. isn’t the low pay or even the hard work; it’s the isolation and fear of being found by police and deported
back to Mexico. “I’m used to a subway, to restaurants and seeing lots of people,” he said. “This is a big change. I can’t go many
places.” About a month ago, a small fire started at the back of his house. He called his employer and told him to get the fire
department. Then, fearing the firefighters would call the cops on him or arrive with them, Álvarez walked deep into the woods
behind the farm. It took him hours to find his way back to the house. Advocates say stories like his are common: injuries,
underpayment and other forms of labor abuse occur, and migrant workers don’t know where to turn. There’s Luis, who until
recently worked 12 hours a day on a farm where one of the owners yelled and pushed him. When Luis found the environment too
hostile to continue working, he picked up his family and moved hours away to a new community to find work, re-establishing his
young children in a new school. There’s Orlando, who says that a farm owner whipped him with a plastic pipe a few years ago and
that he suffered not only physical injuries but also emotional ones from the incident. When he told the cops about the abuse, he
says they laughed in his face. “I never imagined being treated so badly,” Orlando said. “The owner treated me like an animal.” There
were 16 deaths in the agricultural sector in New York in 2012, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and 55 since 2006.
Statistics on injuries are much harder to come by. Small farms — defined as operations with 10 or fewer
employees — don’t have to report the same data to state and federal regulators that large
farms and virtually every other business do. There is no database for injuries like those Álvarez
sustained. Small farms also aren’t subject to the same regular safety inspections as larger
operations. There have been enough complaints from workers and activists about upstate New York’s dairy farms that the
U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration started a local emphasis program in July, conducting
surprise inspections on farms and workplace safety training for some farmers and workers. But
small farms were excluded from this program too, and it is scheduled to run only nine months. Farms,
regardless of their size, don’t have to give employees a day off and are not required to pay
overtime, and workers have no explicit rights to collective bargaining.
Small farms are exempt from many safety regulations

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12739296)//PM
*MSFWs = migrant and seasonal farmworkers, OSHA = Occupational Safety and Health
Administration*
Agriculture is one of the most hazardous occupations in the United States. In 2000, there were 780 deaths and 130,000 disabling
injuries in agriculture.12 The only industry that had more deaths was construction, with 1,220.12 The actual rate of occupational
injuries and illnesses in agriculture may, in fact, be much higher. Underreporting of medical conditions is significant due to lim-ited
access to health services, different cultural conceptions of health and disease, and fear of lost wages or jobs.13 Although
OSHA regulations require agri-cultural employers of 11 or more workers to provide drinking
water and hand-washing and toilet facilities, compliance with these regulations is poor; sanitation
violations have been noted in up to 69 percent of its field inspec-tions.10 Moreover, farms with fewer than 11
employees, a category that includes 95 percent of U.S. farms, are exempt from many OSHA
regulations.14 As a result, some MSFWs resort to drinking or bathing in water contaminated
with pesticides, chemical fertilizers, or organic waste.
Small farms fail – they are ineligible for OSHA funds.

Fairfax 07 (Michael J., Directorate of Enforcement Programs, “Small farming operations and
exemption from OSHA enforcement activity under CPL 02-00-051,” Occupational Heath and
Safety Administration, 07/16/07, https://www.osha.gov/laws-
regs/standardinterpretations/2007-07-16)//PM
Question: Paragraph X. of directive CPL 02-00-051 states that — "The Appropriations Act exempts small farming operations from
enforcement of all rules, regulations, standards or orders under the Occupational Safety and Health Act." (Emphasis not added.)
Paragraph X.A., then goes on to say that — "A
farming operation is exempt from all OSHA activities if it:
(Emphasis not added.) Employs 10 or fewer ..." Do the rules, regulations, standards, or orders under the Occupational
Safety and Health Act apply but are exempt from enforcement as stated in the CPL, OR Because the rules, regulations, standards or
orders under the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) are exempt from enforcement, they do not apply? Response:
Under OSHA's current appropriations law, OSHA is not allowed to spend any of the funds
appropriated to enforce any standard, rule, regulation, or order under the OSH Act which is
applicable to any person who is engaged in a farming operation which employs 10 or fewer
employees and does not maintain a temporary labor camp. The rules, regulations, standards, or orders under
the OSH Act do apply to these farming operations, but because of the small farms provision in OSHA's appropriations law, certain
employers under certain conditions are considered exempt from OSHA enforcement activity. If a farmer had ten or fewer employees
at all times during the previous 12 months, the farmer would be considered exempt from OSHA enforcement. He would not be
considered exempt if he had more than 10 employees at any one time during that period. However, if such a farmer has a temporary
labor camp under 1910.142, the employer would not be exempt from the enforcement of the OSH Act.
AT Econ
Impact non-UQ: Us agriculture has history of crises but no impacts have been
triggered
Economist 17 (Economist: 3/30/17. “How bad is the Farm Slump?”
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2017/03/30/how-bad-is-this-farm-slump)
THE farm crisis in the 1980s left a deep mark on the Midwest. It was the worst downturn in
farming since the Depression. After an unprecedented boom in demand for wheat ended, thousands of farmers
faced ruin. Agricultural banks and makers of farming equipment were washed away by a wave of bankruptcies. Midwestern
farmers look at parallels with the 1980s whenever their cyclical industry is heading downwards.
Prices for corn, wheat and other agricultural commodities started to fall after their peak in 2013, since when the comparison has
been raised again. Exports of wheat and soyabeans nearly tripled in the 1970s, thanks to the weakness of the
dollar after America abandoned the gold standard in 1971, and the Russian wheat deal in 1972, when America sold the
Soviet Union about 440m bushels of wheat for around $700m. Until then the Soviets had imported hardly
any American foodstuffs. The sudden bonanza was such that farmers bought more and more land, with
more and more debt. This went well until interest rates jumped up, the dollar strengthened and
exports to the USSR were halted after the invasion of Afghanistan. Farmers’ biggest asset, land,
dropped in value, which in turn increased their liabilities until they became so big that they
could not stay in business. The latest farming boom started in 2006, when demand for crops such
as maize (corn), sugar cane and soyabeans generated record profits thanks to demand for
(maize and sugar-based) ethanol, and the then skyrocketing Chinese economy. American farmers again
started to farm more land. They also used more yield-boosting technology—as did farmers in other parts of the world. A record
179m productive acres were brought in worldwide since 2006, says Dan Basse at AgResource, a research
firm. Things started to turn sour after a year of record profits in 2013, when the rapidly growing global supply of grains outstripped
demand, the appetite for ethanol stagnated and the Chinese economy slowed down. American
net farm revenue
dropped from $120 billion in 2013 to an estimated $62 billion this year. But unlike the previous big crisis,
the balance-sheets of many farmers are robust. Moreover, interest rates are still low and demand remains steady even if it isn’t
growing much any more. And although the values for farmland dropped last year for only the second time since the 1980s, these
drops were far less dramatic than they were back then: the value of land in Indiana, for instance, fell nearly 60% between 1981 and
1986. “This boom was not as strong and we don’t anticipate this crisis to be as severe as in the
1980s,” says Christopher Hurt at Indiana’s Purdue University. Even so, farmers have reason to be anxious. The
two things that matter most to them, weather and government policy, are unpredictable.
“Monkeying around with trade deals makes us nervous,” says Brent Gloy, who farms in south-western Nebraska. America exports
20% of its farm production; its top export markets are Canada, China and Mexico. Populist
politics were born in a
Midwestern farm-crash at the end of the 19th century. That 21st-century populism should come
along at the same time as an agricultural slump is further proof of what Mark Twain knew: history rhymes.
Agriculture is only 1% of GDP - not key to economy

USDA 5/2 (USDA The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), also known as the
Agriculture Department, is the U.S. federal executive department responsible for developing
and executing federal laws related to farming, forestry, and food. It aims to meet the needs of
farmers and ranchers, promote agricultural trade and production, work to assure food safety,
protect natural resources, foster rural communities and end hunger in the United States and
internationally. 5/2/18 “Ag and Food Sectors of the Economy” https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-
products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy/
- DCS)
Agriculture, food, and related industries contributed $992 billion to U.S. gross domestic product (GDP)
in 2015, a 5.5-percent share. The output of America’s farms contributed $136.7 billion of this sum—about 1
percent of G,DP. The overall contribution of the agriculture sector to GDP is larger than this because sectors related to
agriculture—forestry, fishing, and related activities; food, beverages, and tobacco products; textiles, apparel, and leather products;
food and beverage stores; and food service, eating and drinking places—rely on agricultural inputs in order to contribute added
value to the economy.
Illegal immigrants are not key to farm workforce

Williamson 16, Kevin D, writer for the National review, “The Specter of the $20
Avocado.” National Review, National Review, 7 Sept. 2016,
www.nationalreview.com/2016/09/illegal-immigration-american-farming-economic-myths-
debunked/.
To begin with the biggest big picture: It is a myth that American agriculture is dominated by
illegal-immigrant labor, and that enforcing U.S. labor laws would either shut down farms around
the country, as the most hysterical critics claim, or result in wildly higher food prices. The
evidence does not support this position or anything close to that position. Most illegals do not
work in agriculture — only about 4 percent of the illegal-immigrant population is employed in
farming. In no state is farming the predominant occupation of illegal immigrants; even in places such as California, where labor-
intensive fruit-and-vegetable farming attracts a relatively large illegal workforce, the main occupations of illegals are in
hospitality (restaurants and hotels), services, and transportation. Likewise, most of the people
working in agriculture are not illegals: The great majority of the farming workforce is composed
of legal workers, with illegals constituting about one-fourth of the total. Illegals make up a larger share of
the farm workforce than they do any other labor pool, but they remain a small though not inconsequential minority of workers. To
the extent that illegals do predominate in certain
crop economies, those constitute a relatively small part of
the U.S. farm economy. The big crops that economically dominate U.S. agriculture — wheat,
cotton, corn, soybeans, alfalfa/hay, sorghum, etc. — account for the greatest part of agricultural
output and are, not coincidentally, largely automated. Tiny labor forces, often one or two operators, use high-
tech modern combines to harvest vast fields of cotton, wheat, corn, and soybeans. That work is highly paid, and, if there are illegals
involved, they
likely are washing those farmers’ $60,000 trucks or the landowners’ Mercedes.
There are not very many poorly educated and low-skilled economic refugees from Latin America
operating cutting-edge farm implements that cost the better part of a million bucks a piece.
(And don’t be surprised if, within a few years, nobody is operating those machines: The age of
the autonomous tractor is upon us.)
AT Trade impact
Litany of alt causes to trade – agriculture isn’t even in the top 10 exports
Workman 18 (Daniel Workman, founder of World’s Top Exports and expert in international
trade. “United States Top 10 Exports.” World's Top Exports, 21 Mar. 2018,
www.worldstopexports.com/united-states-top-10-exports/.)
America shipped US$1.547 trillion worth of goods around the globe in 2017. That amount
represents a 6.6% uptick from 2016 to 2017 but a -2% decrease since 2013. Based on estimates
from the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook, exported goods plus services supplied by
the United States represent 12.2% of total American economic output or Gross Domestic
Product. The analysis below focuses on exported products only. Given America’s population of 326.6 million people, its total
$1.547 trillion in 2017 export revenue translates to roughly $4,700 for every resident in the
United States. America’s unemployment rate was 4.1% as of January 2018 — a healthy improvement
from the 4.8% jobless rate as reported by Trading Economics 12 months earlier. The following export product groups represent the
highest dollar value in American global shipments during 2017. Also shown is the percentage share each export category represents
in terms of overall exports from the United States at the two-digit Harmonized Tariff System code level. At the more granular four-
digit HTS level, America’s
top export products are refined petroleum oils followed by cars,
automotive parts and accessories, electronic integrated circuits then mobile phones.
Machinery including computers: US$201.7 billion (13% of total exports) Electrical machinery,
equipment: $174.2 billion (11.3%) Mineral fuels including oil: $138 billion (8.9%) Aircraft,
spacecraft: $131.2 billion (8.5%) Vehicles: $130.1 billion (8.4%) Optical, technical, medical
apparatus: $83.6 billion (5.4%) Plastics, plastic articles: $61.5 billion (4%) Gems, precious
metals: $60.4 billion (3.9%) Pharmaceuticals: $45.1 billion (2.9%) Organic chemicals: $36.2
billion (2.3%) America’s top 10 exports accounted for over two-thirds (69.2%) of the overall
value of its global shipments. Among the top 10 export categories year over year, mineral fuels
including oil was the fastest-growing U.S. shipment via its 47.3% value gain from 2016 to 2017. In
second place for improving export sales were organic chemicals which rose 6.6%. America’s exported machinery including
computers appreciated by 5.8% year over year. There
were two decliners among America’s top 10 export
categories in 2017 compared to 2016: aircraft and spacecraft (down -2.7%) and pharmaceuticals
(down -4.1%).
***AT Working Conditions Advantage
1NC – Working Conditions
No impact – benefits are on the rise and shortages aren’t a result of legal status
Hill, 16 – Ph.D. by 2019, Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California, Davis
(Alexandra, “The Labor Supply of U.S. Agricultural Workers,” October 27 2016,
https://arefiles.ucdavis.edu/uploads/filer_public/ac/59/ac592f0a-39c4-44b2-ac13-
c3cc11ad28eb/hillfarmworkersfinal.pdf) //kq
The U.S. agricultural labor market has historically been categorized by low wages and an abundance of available workers, however,
this is changing. In recent
years, the agricultural labor market has been seeing a lower supply of
workers, and, as an effect, producers have been increasingly competing with each other to attract
the necessary labor. Employers have been increasing wages and offering their workers non-pecuniary
benefits such as: facilitating enrollment in welfare programs; offering food donations at the
farm; and providing child care and health care services. However, the success of these employer efforts are
unclear. To better understand the changing agricultural labor market and the potential effects of these recent employer efforts to
attract workers, this paper constructs updated elasticity of labor supply estimates for U.S. crop workers. These elasticity estimates
explain how U.S. crop workers adjust their hours worked in agriculture in response to after tax wage changes. While aggregate
elasticity measures are useful for depicting an industry broadly, elasticities for subsets of a population are more useful for examining
the effects of compositional changes. This paper estimates elasticities for both the entire sample of U.S. agricultural workers 1 1
INTRODUCTION and for specific subsets, by separating workers based on legal status and welfare program participation. There are
two interesting questions that this paper addresses with these elasticity estimates. First, how do legal status and welfare program
participation affect the elasticity of labor supply for U.S. crop workers? And second, does the changing composition of the workforce
explain the ongoing changes in the agricultural labor market? To address the first question, the paper compares baseline aggregate
elasticity estimates with estimates that: (1) separate workers by legal status; and (2) separate workers by welfare program
participation. To address the second question, the paper examines the trends in the composition of the workforce, and discusses the
implications in light of the elasticity estimates. Previous literature that provides estimates of the elasticity of agricultural labor supply
is now somewhat dated (e.g. Emerson and Roka, 2002; Pena, 2010; and Taylor and Thilmany, 1993). Significant changes in U.S.
immigration policy since these estimates have resulted in major structural changes in the agricultural labor market that are not
captured in existing elasticity estimates (Martin and Calvin, 2010; and Taylor, Boucher, Smith, Fletcher, and Yunez-Naude, 2012).
Furthermore, previous estimates often relied on more aggregate data from sources such as the Farm Labor Survey and the U.S.
Census of Agriculture. While these data sources may provide more observations, thay are lacking accurate information data on legal
status and welfare. Labor responsiveness to incentives has been well documented in the broader economic literature on labor
supply, but has not yet been applied to the agricultural workforce (Gruber, 2000; Meghir and Phillips, 2008; Meyer and Rosenbaum,
2001; Mulligan, 2 2 BACKGROUND: THE U.S. AGRICULTURAL LABOR MARKET 2012; and Triest, 1990). Finally, more recent work has
found a large differential in the elasticity of labor supply between U.S. workers of different immigration statuses (Borjas, 2016). This
finding can be expanded on by examining the elasticity differentials among agricultural laborers— a workforce distinguished by a
high percentage of undocumented workers. This paper makes three main contributions to the current literature. First, the paper
updates the previous estimates of elasticity of labor supply for U.S. agricultural workers by including more recent and detailed data.
Second, this paper will also add to the broader economic literature by documenting the role of legal status and welfare program
participation on wage responsiveness for this subset of the working population. Finally, the paper will utilize these elasticities to
discuss the effects of the changing composition of the workforce, changes in immigration policy, and changes in employer behavior
on the supply of agricultural labor. 2 Background: The U.S. Agricultural Labor Market Over the last decade, the number of hired U.S.
farmworkers has been decreasing, while the average real wage rate has been climbing. To demonstrate this, figure 1 shows the
annual average numbers of hired farmworkers on the left axis, and annual average wages (in CPI-adjusted $/hr) on the right axis.
Historical decreases in the number of hired workers in U.S. agriculture have generally been attributed to changing demand due to
increased mechanization and technological advancements. However, beginning with the passage of the 3 2 BACKGROUND: THE U.S.
AGRICULTURAL LABOR MARKET Figure 1: Number and Wages of U.S. Hired Farmworkers ∗Wages are adjusted using the CPI to 1995
dollars. Source: Farm Labor Survey, National Agricultural Statistics Service Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, most
of the literature changed focus to supply driven changes in labor market (Taylor and Thilmany, 1993; Taylor, Boucher, et al., 2012;
and Martin and Calvin, 2010). At the
time, the passage of IRCA was of major concern to agricultural
employers and researchers. IRCA imposed major employer sanctions that made it illegal to hire
or recruit illegal immigrants, and simultaneously legalized some qualified illegal immigrants. Concern in the agricultural
sector was that this would reduce the supply of agricultural workers for two main reasons: (1) employers could no longer hire
undocumented immigrants, greatly restricting their hiring options; and (2) because the legalization of many of their
workers would facilitate their movement into different employment sectors. Figure
2 depicts annual changes in the
composition of of the U.S. agricultural workforce since 1990. This figure 4 2 BACKGROUND: THE U.S.
AGRICULTURAL LABOR MARKET nicely demonstrates that, if anything, there have been increasing
numbers of undocumented workers over this span. Given the continued prevalence of undocumented workers in
the agricultural sector, the former concern appears invalidated, however, the effects on worker provision of agricultural labor are
somewhat less obvious.
Legalization fails – prefer data-based studies and new research techniques

Sampaio et al, 13 (Breno Sampaio, Gustavo Ramos Sampaio, And Yony Sampaio; Breno is an
Associate Professor of Economics Federal University of Pernambuco, Gustavo Ramos is an
Associate Professor Department of Economics Federal University of Pernambuco, Yony is a
professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Consultant to the World Bank and Aadvisor
of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel; "On Estimating the
Effects of Immigrant Legalization: Do U.S. Agricultural Workers Really Benefit?;" American
Journal of Agricultural Economics, Volume 95, Issue 4, 1 July 2013, Pages 932–948|RYD)
The question of whether becoming a legal permanent resident affects the economic returns of
immigrants has been the focus of many empirical studies over the past two decades. These studies’
results have consistently shown that there are significant wage differences between legal and illegal workers, even when controlling
for several demographic characteristics. However, the validity of such results has been questioned by many
researchers, given their lack of solid identification strategies to correctly account for omitted
variables. In this article we move away from the methods previously used to study the subject,
which for the most part rely on the selection on observables, and propose using recently-developed techniques
designed specifically to address the issue of selection into treatment based (to some degree) on
unobservable variables. We begin by evaluating how sensitive estimates of the legalization effect are when the degree of
selection on unobservables increases relative to the case in which selection is completely driven by observables, which is what has
been assumed in most previous studies. We then obtain lower bound estimates based on the notion that the degree of selection on
observed characteristics is the same as the degree of selection on unobserved characteristics (Altonji, Elder, and Taber 2005b; 2008).
As prior results indicate that becoming legal has positive benefits, obtaining lower bound estimates of the parameter of interest
under weaker selection assumptions is very intuitive and useful, as these values ought to be larger than zero if the causal effects
were truly robust. Additionally, we employ the method proposed by Millimet and Tchernis (2010) that allows one to obtain
estimates of the parameter of interest while accounting for the bias arising from failure of the conditional independence
assumption, which is required to ensure the consistency of propensity score estimators. Our
results contradict the
finding that has consistently been reported in the literature, that obtaining legal residence
benefits workers by positively affecting their wages and many other important outcomes (although
some studies note that these benefits might be small, they find statistically significant positive effects; see, e.g., Kandilov and
Kandilov 2010 and Pena 2010). We
show that a modest degree of selection on unobservables is sufficient
to completely eliminate the previously obtained positive effects. Additionally, under the notion that
selection on observables is the same as selection on unobservables, we find that the role of unobservables that determine wages
would have to be more than .066 times the role of observables for the entire legalization effect to be explained away by the
unobservables, which is very likely to be true. Using the technique developed by Millimet and Tchernis (2010), we arrive at the same
conclusions, because all of the estimated coefficients are not significantly different from zero. This is also obtained when using the IV
estimator proposed by Klein and Vella (2009), and considering different samples (including married males and part-time workers).
Thus, our results shed light on an important subject regarding the immigration policy of the
United States; we provide support for the theory that lower skill levels—and not
discrimination—explain differences in the economic outcomes of immigrants, which was previously
suggested by Borjas (1990).
Contractors just hire more undocumented immigrants instead of addressing
labor conditions
Martin, 13 - Professor Emeritus. Agricultural and Resource Economics UC Davis (Philip L,
“Migration and US agricultural competitiveness,” May 2013, https://search-proquest-
com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/1466008849/abstract/A7796F39CE294966PQ/1?accountid=1
4667) //kq
Some 183,000 farms paid $3.4 billion to contractors and other intermediaries to bring workers to
their farms; many of these farms also hired farm workers directly. Two-thirds of contract labour expenses
were paid by FVH farms, emphasizing that farms producing fruits and vegetables are most likely to have contractors bring crews of
workers to their farms. The 11,000 farms that had contract labour expenses of $50,000 or more likely accounted for over 80 per cent
of the total. Seasonal workers are often distinguished from regular or year-round workers by how long they are employed on one
particular farm. There were 2.6 million workers hired direcdy by US farmers in 2007, and two-thirds worked on the responding farm
for less than 150 days, suggesting they were seasonal workers4. Three-fourths of the workers employed on fruit and nut farms, and
half of the workers employed in greenhouse and nursery operations were seasonal. One reason for confusion about farm labour is
that statisdcal agencies measure different aspect of the farm labour market. Table 1 summarizes average employment on farms, and
emphasizes that the share of hired workers has risen from 57 per cent in 2000 to 60 per cent in 2010. Both hired or wage and salary
and farm operator employment are projected to decline, but operator and family employment is expected to decline fastest, raising
the share of hired workers in average employment. 3 S's: Sales, labour's share, seasonality Sales, labour's share of production
expenses, and seasonality define the essential features of FVH agriculture and hired farm workers. First, sales emphasizes that FVH
agriculture involves a relatively small number of US farms and a small share of US farm land, but FVH farm employers pay almost half
of all farm wages. Second, labour's share refers to the fact that labour costs may be a third of the cost of producing many fresh fruits
and vegetables, and often the most "controllable" expense for farm employers. Third, seasonality is a persisting dilemma because
more workers are needed during some months than others. Seasonality raises questions for farmers and workers: will there be a
sufficient number of workers available when they are needed, and will seasonal workers earn enough when work is available to
support themselves and their families when there is no farm work? US farm sales of $300 billion in 2007 were divided almost evenly
between crops and livestock. In most states, crop agriculture is dominated by low value-per-acre field crops such as wheat, corn, and
soybeans that are planted and harvested by machine. Fruits, vegetables, and horticultural specialties were planted on only six per
cent of the 417 million acres of US crop land in 2007, but they generated a third of crop sales.5 In California and other states that
produce most FVH commodities, crop sales exceed livestock sales, and highvalue FVH commodities dominate crop sales.6 California
has been the leading farm state since 1950 because it produces high-value FVH commodities, and today such commodities are
almost 60 per cent of California's farm sales. Fruits, vegetables, and horticultural specialties are labour intensive in the sense that
labour is often the largest single production expenditure. With la- hour's share of the cost of producing fresh fruits such as
strawberries or vegetables 20 to 40 per cent, farmers often spend $2,000 per acre on labour for a crop that yields $6,000 an acre in
revenue. More important, labour
is a "controllable" expense in the sense that a farmer may more easily
negotiate whether to pay $0.25 or $0.26 cents for picking a 25-pound tray of raisin grapes than
negodate the price of seeds or fertilizer. Seasonality means that peak employment on a farm can be 5 to 10
dmes greater than trough or low period employment, as when 100 workers are employed in June and 10 in January. Since many FVH
farms specialize in one or a few commodities, thousands of apple or grape harvesters may be employed one week
and jobless a few weeks later. Migrants are one of the several sources of seasonal workers. Farmers usually define the
seasonal farm labour problem in terms of labour costs, asking how to ensure that there will be a sufficient number of seasonal
workers available at wages they can afford to pay. One answer has been to open border gates to workers from poorer countries, or
leave border gates ajar so that foreigners from poorer countries can enter and work illegally. Workers are eager to leave rural
Mexico and elsewhere because they can earn more in a season at US wages than they could earn in a year at home. In contrast,
worker advocates often begin with labour market outcomes that they find substandard. Seasonal farm workers earned an average
$10 an hour in 2012 for about 1,000 hours of farm work a year, making their earnings $10,000 a year. Compared to other US
production workers, who averaged $20 an hour, seasonal farm workers earn half as much and work half as many hours, so their
annual earnings are only a fourth of what full-time nonfarm workers make. Thus, farmers want the government to open doors to
foreign workers who can earn more in the US than at home. Worker advocates, by contrast, have been divided about what they
want government to do about farm worker poverty. Worker advocates who believe in the Jeffersonian ideal of family farms7, such
as UC Berkeley economist Taylor (1937),8 argued during the 1930s that the government should break up large farms and help farm
workers to become small farmers. Lawyer McWilliams (1939), on the other hand, thought that California's "factories in the fields"
were inevitable and urged that factory labour laws be extended to the hired farm workers employed on them. UC Berkeley
economist Fuller (1939) showed how farm wages kept low by immigration raised land
prices and gave landowners an
incentive to find more seasonal workers willing to accept low wages to preserve and enhance
the value of their land. Like McWilliams, Fuller urged the government to admit fewer Mexican Bracero workers in order to
put upward pressure on farm wages and to give farm workers the right to form unions that could bargain for higher wages with
employers.
--xt: No impact
Legal and illegal farmworkers have the same rights now
Vickerstaff 2017 (John Vickerstaff: John M. Vickerstaff is a graduate of the University of
Louisville's Brandeis School of Law. He also attended the University of Sydney School of Law in
Sydney, Australia, where he received a Graduate Diploma in Environmental Law. Feb 24, 2017
Feb 24, 2017 “HOW ARE UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS OFTEN TREATED UNFAIRLY AT
WORK?” https://www.vickerstafflaw.com/Articles/How-are-undocumented-immigrants-often-
treated-unfairly-at-work.shtml - DCS)
Many foreigners come to the United States in search of a better life, or simply to work in the country while gaining education and
experience before returning home. Some may change their minds during their stay and decide to pursue permanent opportunities in
Kentucky and other states. There is no denying that life may be difficult for immigrants, both documented and undocumented, who
are trying to build a future in America. Often, those
arriving in America are treated poorly by their
employers, who realize that many immigrants do not understand they have the same rights to
be treated humanely and given a fair wage as native-born Americans, regardless of their legal
status. According to Workplace Fairness, about 6.5 million undocumented immigrant workers currently
reside in the country, many of whom face numerous types of abuse at work. These often include
low pay, inhumane work hours and dangerous conditions. Newcomers to America often face
such barriers as difficulty speaking the language of their employers and co-workers, and not
understanding employment laws that protect employees. They may also be afraid that they will
be disciplined if they stand up for their rights.As a result, many employers take advantage of
immigrants, particularly those who are not in the country legally. Often, immigrants do not receive minimum
wage or are denied payment for working overtime. Their employers may deny them breaks for meals or going to the restroom. They
might not be given training or safety equipment that can make their jobs safer. Everyone,
including undocumented
immigrants, has the right to certain workplace protections, states the American Civil Liberties
Union. Unfortunately, some employers rely on the assumption that immigrant workers do not fully
understand workplace laws or fear retaliation. If workers demand fair payment and treatment, they may be
"rewarded" with longer hours, having their pay withheld, denial of safety equipment or being put in positions that are hazardous.
They may also be fired from their jobs without notice. In some cases, employers have threatened
to call deportation authorities if their employees speak out. No worker in America, including
undocumented immigrants, should have to put up with unfair and inhumane treatment from
their employers. Those who are facing such treatment or being threatened with deportation by their bosses may be able to
protect their rights by speaking with an experienced Kentucky immigration attorney.
--xt: Legalization fails
Their impacts are exaggerated – legal status would not significantly increase
earnings or aid – empirics and data
Anita Alves Pena, Associate Professor of Economics at Colorado State University, 2010,
“Legalization and Immigrants in U.S. Agriculture,” The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy,
https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/legalization-and-immigrants-us-agriculture
kq
Results suggest that earnings of agricultural workers and their program participation propensities
would be largely unchanged by a legalization program. One hypothesis for why the wage gap
documented here is smaller than that for agricultural data in earlier periods is that the wage gap
was structurally affected by IRCA and specifically by the SAW program. As low-paid undocumented
workers were granted amnesty and joined the legal workforce, downward pressure on the wage
rates offered to documented workers and upward pressure on those for undocumented
workers may have decreased the wage gap in agriculture over time. It may be hypothesized that similar forces would
operate toward further equalizing documented and undocumented wages in response to a new amnesty program. The analysis
presented in this article is applicable to the case of agriculture, as opposed to the farther-reaching
suggestions of recently proposed immigration reforms. Because selection into migration may be
affected by publicity surrounding legalization, long-term implications of a federal amnesty program are
uncertain. A new amnesty program would likely affect expectations regarding future opportunities to legalize in the U.S. and
therefore would influence selection into migration by those who would otherwise not migrate. Orrenius and Zavodny (2003), in their
analysis of IRCA, find that long-term patterns of undocumented Mexican migration were
unchanged. If this dynamic persists, impacts of a new program may be similar to the differentials identified in this article.
Prefer Pena – the model used is better

Anita Alves Pena, Associate Professor of Economics at Colorado State University, 2010,
“Legalization and Immigrants in U.S. Agriculture,” The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy,
https://siepr.stanford.edu/research/publications/legalization-and-immigrants-us-agriculture
kq
The contribution of the analysis presented here is multifaceted. First, the effect
of legal status on farmworker wages
has received limited attention in recent agricultural labor literature and therefore this paper serves as an
update. Secondly, previous articles have solely relied on older Heckman estimation approaches. This
article demonstrates that for the case of agriculture, results generally are robust to newer
techniques. Thirdly, understanding the dynamics of the relationship between legal status and wages is important for anticipating
the results of a policy such as AgJOBS.
Their studies are outdated or methodologically flawd– new studies find that
unobservable variables outweigh positive benefits in previous studies
Sampaio et al 13(Breno Sampaio, Gustavo Ramos Sampaio, And Yony Sampaio; Breno is an
Associate Professor of Economics Federal University of Pernambuco, Gustavo Ramos is an
Associate Professor Department of Economics Federal University of Pernambuco, Yony is a
professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Consultant to the World Bank and Aadvisor
of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel; "On Estimating the
Effects of Immigrant Legalization: Do U.S. Agricultural Workers Really Benefit?;" American
Journal of Agricultural Economics, Volume 95, Issue 4, 1 July 2013, Pages 932–948|RYD)
Our results show that a modest degree of selection on unobservables is sufficient to

completely eliminate the positive effects found in previous studies on wages, health
insurance, and bonuses. Additionally, under the notion that selection on observables is the same as selection on
unobservables, we find that the role of unobservables in determining wages would have to be more than .066 times the role of
observables for the entire legalization effect to be explained away by the unobservables, which is very likely to be true. Thus, non-
random selection appears to be an important issue in the present discussion. The results obtained from the Millimet and Tchernis
(2010) technique are also in accordance with this statement. By accounting for the failure of the CIA and the influence of
unobservables, our estimated coefficients all become statistically insignificant. Thus,our analysis indicates that
becoming a legal permanent resident has no effect on wages or on the probability of receiving
employer-sponsored health insurance or additional monetary bonuses. This result, contrary to most
evidence provided thus far, was already suggested by Borjas (1990) several years ago when he wrote, “[i]llegal aliens in the
United States have lower wages than legal immigrants not because they are illegal, but because
they are less skilled. In other words, if one compares two persons who are demographically
similar (in terms of education, age, English proficiency, years on the job, and so on), legal status has no direct impact
on the wage rate” (Rivera-Batiz 1999). As stated above, our article is devoted to analyzing the
robustness of the findings previously presented in the literature regarding the effect that
becoming a legal permanent resident has on the U.S. agricultural sector. As previous papers rely
on strong assumptions regarding selection into treatment (in this case, into legalization), we see our article as
an important step toward not only understanding the relationship between legal status and economic outcomes but also, more
importantly, toward highlighting that measuring such effects is much more difficult, from an econometric standpoint, than what
previous analyses claim. Therefore, a main contribution of our article is to use the National Agricultural
Workers Survey, a nationally representative data set of employed U.S. farm workers which is widely used to answer the
question proposed in this article, to show that prior results are weak under slightly different (and weaker)
assumptions.
***Topicality
No Path to Citizenship
1nc – No Path to citizenship
Legal immigration means admission for lawful permanent residence
Cheng et. al 4 – Primary Authors: Anthony W. Cheng, Economist for the Social Security Administration; Michael L. Miller, Population Analyst
for the Social Security Administration; and Secondary Authors Michael Morris, Jason P. Schultz, J. Patrick Skirvin, Danielle P. Walder; and Additional
Authors Robert E. Baldwin, Sharon K. Chu, Josiah M. Lynch, William M. Piet, and Lesley B. Reece, 2004(“A Stochastic Model of the Long-Range Financial
Status of the OASDI Program,” Social Security Administration: Office of the Chief Actuary, September 2004, Available Online from
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/pdf_studies/study117.pdf, Italics in original; Equations omitted)
Legal immigration is defined as persons lawfully admitted for permanent residence into the
United States.7 The level of legal immigration largely depends on legislation which basically
serves to define and establish limits for certain categories of immigrants. The Immigration Act of
1990, which is currently the legislation in force, establishes limits for three classes of
immigrants: family-sponsored preferences, employment-based preferences, and diversity
immigrants. However, no numerical limits currently exist for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens.
Historical data for legal U.S. immigration for years 1901 through 2002 are from the U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services.8 Legal immigration averaged nearly one million per year
from 1900 through 1914, then decreased substantially to about 23,000 in 1933. Since the mid-
1940s, legal immigration increased steadily to over one million in 2002.
An ARMA(4,1) equation was selected and parameters were estimated using the entire range of
historical data. The R-squared value was 0.92. Figure II.2 presents the actual and fitted values.
The modified equation is: (3) In this equation, IMt represents the annual level of legal
immigration in year t; represents the projected level of legal immigration from the TR04II in year
t; imt represents the deviation of the annual level of legal immigration from the TR04II value in
year t; and εt represents the random error in year t.
2. Legal Emigration
Legal emigration is defined as the number of persons who lawfully leave the United States, and
are no longer considered to be a part of the Social Security program. Although annual
emigration data are not collected in the United States, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that
the level of emigration for the past century roughly totaled one-fourth of the level of legal
immigration. Using the Census estimates as an approximate guide, the parameters of Equation
(3) are multiplied by one-fourth.9 The modified equation is: (4) In this equation, EMt represents
the annual level of legal emigration in year t; represents the projected annual level of legal
emigration from the TR04II in year t; emt represents the deviation of the annual level of legal
emigration from the TR04II value in year t; and εt represents the random error in year t.
3. Net Other Immigration
Net other immigration is defined as the annual flow of persons into the United States minus the
annual flow of persons out of the United States who do not meet the above definition of legal
immigration or legal emigration. Thus, net other immigration includes unauthorized persons and
those not seeking permanent residence.
Violation – Pathway to citizenship is an adjustment of status, not legal
immigration
Ahmad, 17 – Clinical Professor of Law, Yale Law School (Muneer I., 7-17,
http://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Ahmad.pdf) //kq
In an attempt to harmonize the competing interests in immigration reform, and to overcome the largely values-based opposition to it, recent com-
prehensive immigration reform proposals typically have included four components: enhanced border security and interior
enforcement, reformed agricultural and guest worker programs, revisedpriorities for lawful immigration (particularly in
Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields), and pathways to legalization. 22 Legalization entails a
conversion from undocumented status to lawful permanent residence, typically with the
opportunity to naturalize, and thus is often referred to as a pathway to citizenship. 23 Legalization,
then, is a critical component of comprehensive immigration reform, but one that always must be complemented by other programs so as to build
sufficient political support.
Vote neg – limits and ground – dozens of ways to adjust status destroys the
neg’s capacity for in-depth research, and their interp lets the aff claim
unpredictable advantages based off citizenship – neg ground, such as wages
and brain drain, is predicated off substantial admission of new immigrants
***Reject extratopicality – it’s unpredictable and ruins limits – it also doesn’t

guarantee neg ground because their advantages are not rooted in core
literature
--xt: no path to citizenship
The literature distinguishes legal immigration and a path to citizenship
Nunes, 17 – writes on work-force productivity, regulatory policy, and behavioral economics
(Ashley, “A Path to Legal Status but Not Citizenship,” 3-31-17,
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/03/immigration-reform-path-citizenship-path-legal-
status-undocumented-workers/) //kq
For the Left, the solution is to create a path to citizenship. Many arguments are made to support it. Undocumented
workers pay their taxes, though in many cases because it may help them gain legal status. And undocumented workers have been here a long time
without ever having had a legal right to establish permanent residence, but set that fact aside for the moment. The weakest rationale for granting them
a path to citizenship is this: that they have toiled hard on American soil, contributing to the national economy. They have, but they have done so by
violating the nation’s immigration laws. The end doesn’t justify the means. So what’s the solution? Government could get tough on those who hire
undocumented workers. Stiffer penalties would mean fewer job prospects for the job seekers. And studies show there there is a net outflow of workers
when available jobs are scarce. But businesses want migrant labor, and immigration enforcement has long been overlooked to make sure they get it.
Many rightly note that parked on America’s doorstep is a sign that reads “Keep Out” on one side and, on the other, “Help Wanted.” This hypocrisy has
augmented the problem of mixed-status families: cases in which some family members — most notably, children — have the legal right to be here
while others do not. Nearly 5 million American kids have at least one undocumented parent. Confronting that reality means accepting that forced
deportations, long touted as a solution, are socially unviable. They are also fiscally irresponsible. One estimate pegs the cost of deporting 11 million
people at over $400 billion. A
more pragmatic solution would be to offer a path to legalization that stops
short of citizenship. That would meet the humanitarian imperative to keep families together. But it would
also hold those who have violated immigration laws accountable for their actions. This would apply only
to undocumented workers who were of legal age when they entered the United States; those who were not of legal age should
be given a citizenship path identical to the one that is available to legal immigrants. Except for those
who were born on American soil, citizenship is not a right. It’s a privilege. A path short of citizenship sends a
powerful message to America’s legal-immigrant community, whose members have worked

tirelessly to follow existing immigration guidelines. There is a rule of law, and citizenship is
granted to those who follow it. A path short of citizenship would assuage Republican concerns that immigration reform would hurt
the GOP. Many undocumented workers hail from Latin America, and Latinos have long favored Democrats over Republicans. Some Republicans worry
that granting these workers a path to citizenship would tip the future balance of political power. That may sound petty, and it is. But it is also a political
reality. Withholding citizenship, the Left will argue, creates a working class who will never truly feel that America is their home. Citizenship, they
maintain, holds the key to becoming a “full and open member of American society.” Yet a significant number of legal immigrants
who can naturalize don’t. They have pursued an education, own homes, and have forged links in American society. Not being citizens
hasn’t stopped them from claiming their piece of the American dream. Why would it be any different for undocumented workers? The fact that not
all legal immigrants claim American citizenship challenges another liberal argument: that citizenship increases wages. Many
advocates of a path to citizenship tout studies that show that when immigrants naturalize, earnings increase — by as much as 25 percent, according to
one account. If that were true, wouldn’t all eligible immigrants line up for American passports? Wage increases, after all, would be a powerful a
powerful incentive. The reality is that evidence linking citizenship to wage increases is weak. Researchers often
mix legal noncitizens with undocumented workers when looking at earnings — an approach that skews
results in favor of the liberal position. More important, many studies don’t control for occupational choice. The salaries
of physicians who are American citizens will always be higher than those of secretaries who are
legal noncitizens. Nationality has little to do with it. Choice of profession does. Citizenship can
improve wages by offering access to jobs previously off limits. These include high-paying public- and private-sector
positions that require security clearances. But they also require advanced education and skills training. As a
whole, undocumented workers, nearly half of whom haven’t graduated high school, are ill
equipped for such employment. And suggestions that immigrants tend to pursue higher
education as a consequence of enjoying citizenship are not backed up by hard data.
--xt: ruins limits
Allowing a “path to citizenship” to be topical destroys limits – temporary and
non-immigrant programs would become aff ground
Bipartisan Policy Center, 14 – a think tank that revolves around picking ideas from both US
parties that are beneficial to Americans. (“Immigration 101: Path to Citizenship,” May 2014, p. 1,
http://bipartisanpolicy.org/wp-
content/uploads/sites/default/files/BPC%20Immigration%20Task%20Force%20Immigration%20
101%20-%20Path%20to%20Citizenship%20Issue%20Brief%20May%202014.pdf) //kq
Under current immigration law, there is no single path or “line” for U.S. citizenship. Instead, there are
several immigrant channels that foreign nationals living abroad or in the country on a temporary visa can navigate toward permanent residence and
eventual eligibility for citizenship. Before any person has the opportunity to become a U.S. citizen, they must first attain legal permanent resident (LPR)
status through one of several established immigrant categories and receive a permanent resident card (commonly referred to as a “green card”).
Temporary Non-immigrants: A Popular First Step
Many foreign
persons begin their path to U.S. citizenship long before they apply for LPR status.
Several temporary visa categories allow non-immigrants to visit, work, or study in the United
States each year for a specified length of time. The primary temporary work visas include: H-1B
specialty workers, H-2A seasonal agricultural workers, H-2B seasonal non-agricultural workers, L
intercompany transferees, and O individuals with extraordinary ability or achievement.1 Each temporary visa category has its
own set of requirements, and some are subject to statutory numerical limits (often called “caps”). For H-1B—one of the most popular H work visas—
there is an annual numerical limit of 85,000 visas per fiscal year that, due to high demand and exceptions for certain employers, is almost always met or
exceeded.2 Generally, there is a three-step application process for most temporary work visas (Table 1).
***Disadvantages
Horserading DA
Plan will be horse traded
Republican hardliners stop compromise and force tradeoffs – political games
outweigh voter commitment to humanitarian benefits
Jordan, 18 – writer at New York Times (Miriam, “Most Americans Want Legal Status for
‘Dreamers.’ These People Don’t.” 1-25-18, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/us/dreamers-
opponents-daca-deal.html) //kq
On the Republican side, moderates are feeling the pull of hard-line members who want any
legalization bill to incorporate significant changes to immigration enforcement, including measures
Democrats generally oppose, such as funding for a border wall, a sharp reduction in overall migration,
and a shift to merit-based admissions from a family-based system that critics call “chain migration.”
President Trump has repeatedly expressed support for legalizing DACA recipients — on Wednesday, he said he was open to
granting them a path to citizenship “at some point in the future, over a period of 10 to 12 years.” But he, too, has felt the
pull from people in his administration who objected to the program, which was created by former
President Barack Obama in 2012. In announcing the end of DACA last September, Attorney General Jeff Sessions
called it a “unilateral executive amnesty” that had encouraged more illegal immigration and
“denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal
aliens.” Lars Larson, a syndicated conservative talk-show host based in Portland, Ore., said that 10 to 15 percent of his callers
consider DACA recipients lawbreakers and want to give them “nothing at all.” “I point out that philosophically, I agree with them,
but practically
this needs to be resolved,” he said, by granting permission to stay only in exchange
for tougher enforcement measures. “Show us that you are bringing something of value.” In interviews, voters
who oppose legalization said that they felt the government was being held hostage by
sympathizers of the young immigrants. Most were resigned to the possibility that a deal could happen, and said that
they could live with it if conservatives came away with significant new immigration controls. Still, several invoked the law signed by
President Ronald Reagan in 1986, which granted 2.7 million people amnesty while tightening security at the Mexican border and
adding strict penalties for employers who hired undocumented workers. Though it promised to reduce illegal immigration, the
number of undocumented people has grown since then to an estimated 11 million. “Granting
legal status to Dreamers
could potentially cause a domino effect in which other families bring young children, hoping that
in time their children will be granted legal status,” said Jaclyn Haak, 19, a chemical engineering student at the
University of Minnesota. She acknowledged that many DACA recipients are contributing to the economy, but said that this did not
mean that legalizing them was in the country’s best interest. She said it could undermine job prospects for
Americans, echoing a concern by immigration restrictionist groups. For Joe Kleve, 21, a senior at St. Mary’s University of
Minnesota in Winona, the argument that the young immigrants had been brought by their parents held no weight. What if
someone’s parents were caught sneaking their whole family into a movie without paying, he
asked. “Are they going to just kick the parents out?” For Mr. Pham, 39, the issue was personal. He, too, arrived in
the United States as a toddler, as a legally admitted refugee from Vietnam. But until his family could find American sponsors, they
were parked in a refugee camp overseas for more than a year. “If
we can do it the legal way, so can they,” said
Mr. Pham, an information technology consultant. “We don’t have to be creating new programs
or giving them preferential treatment.” The voters opposing legalization were often well-informed about some of the
details of the immigration debate, such as E-Verify, an electronic worker-verification system that many Republicans want to make
mandatory for employers, and the diversity visa lottery, which admits up to 50,000 foreigners a year who must be vetted, but do not
need any special skills or family ties to the United States. Proposals to
eliminate the lottery have been
circulating for years. At the same time, a few of those interviewed held to common misconceptions
about the young immigrants. Some said the immigrants should not be allowed to become legal if they had not tried to do
so before DACA was created. But it is almost impossible for people to secure green cards once they have been here illegally for
several years. What “Dreamers” stand to lose, in their own words. About 800,000 young unauthorized immigrants are protected
under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. We spoke with a few of them in September, when President Trump
announced his intention to end the Obama-era program.Published OnSept. 5, 2017 Others expressed the sentiment
that the immigrants’ parents should have gotten “in line,” though for many foreigners, a legal pathway into the
country exists only if they have special skills or relatives in the United States who are citizens. While these voters remain in the
minority, support is not absolute among the majority who want to legalize the young immigrants. In a CNN poll last week, 84
percent of those surveyed said they supported legal status for Dreamers. But when given a choice between keeping
the government open and passing DACA legislation, 56 percent of those polled said it was more
important to keep the government open and only 34 percent said a legalization bill was more
important, with the rest believing they were equally important or having no opinion. The lack of firm support for the shutdown
most likely contributed to Democrats’ decision to end it on Monday.
Republicans won’t let a farmworker path to citizenship pass absent more

crackdowns
Siripurapu, 17 – Associate Editor/Reporter, Inside U.S. Trade (Anshu, “Should foreign farm
workers be allowed to become citizens? GOP, Democrats disagree,” July 19, 2017,
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article162548048.html) //kq
WASHINGTON The last time foreign farm workers got amnesty to stay in this country, many left the farms
for better paying jobs. So as the agriculture community pushes for a way to get more farm
workers into the United States, it’s finding not only the political obstacle — Republican
lawmakers are reluctant to do much for undocumented immigrants — but also an historic one, a
memory of a Reagan administration amnesty policy. “Isn’t it the case that if Congress were to
again grant a special pathway to citizenship to illegal immigrant farm workers that growers would
soon be left in the lurch?” asked House Judiciary Committee Chairman Robert Goodlatte, R-Va. Democrats are pushing for
a program that would help such workers get a path to citizenship. “Let’s stop saying, ‘Oh, we can’t do this program because then
people are going to want to do better for themselves.’ That’s America. They
should be able to do better for
themselves,” said Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill. The dispute is another chapter in the ongoing Washington
debate about immigration policy, a battle that shows no signs of ebbing – or finding common ground.
Conservative Republicans insist no overhaul of the immigration system can proceed without
strong border security as the first priority. While Democrats don’t disagree, they also maintain a path to citizenship
and security can be achieved at the same time.
AT: No Horse Trading (Kim)
Kim concludes horse trading will happen
KIM, 18 – Politico (SEUNG MIN, “Republicans balk at Trump’s cuts to legal immigration,” 1-30-
18, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/30/trump-legal-immigration-republicans-37804)
//kq
Yet clamping down on family-based migration is a consistent and fundamental pillar of Trump’s
immigration demands, and it’s unclear how much he is willing to compromise on cutting off so-
called chain migration in his quest for a Dreamer deal. The mixed reaction to Trump’s plan only underscores the
divisions within the GOP and the difficulties in reaching a bipartisan agreement on immigration. Trump’s allies in Congress, including
GOP Sens. David Perdue of Georgia and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, have stressed restrictions on family-based migration are a priority.
For conservative hard-liners in the House, the administration’s plan is actually too generous in offering a
path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Still other Republicans say tackling such legal immigration cuts
is far too complicated a challenge to solve when 690,000 young immigrants without legal status are in danger of losing temporary
deportation protections under an Obama-era directive. The Trump administration has long spoken favorably of shifting the nation’s
immigration system to one largely based on merit. And some Republicans say they’re fine with restricting
migration based on the luck of family ties as long as those green cards get rerouted to immigrants with highly
coveted skills. But it’s unclear when the debate about those changes — which would come in a Phase 2 of immigration reform —
would materialize on Capitol Hill. The framework doesn’t go into detail on any merit-based changes, and Trump himself
endorsed legislation from Cotton and Perdue last summer that would slash legal immigration levels by 40
percent in just one year. President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
at the World Economic Forum, Thursday, Jan. 25, 2018, in Davos. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) Full State of the Union 2018 coverage
Lawmakers have generally tried to overhaul the immigration system in one big package, despite
multiple failed efforts to do so — believing Congress needs to tackle all the thorny issues
simultaneously. “We’ve got to have a discussion about our workforce in the future, and in that discussion, we ought to also
have the discussion about where those visas go,” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said. “If you’re going bigger, and this has the effect of
cutting the legal workforce by a third or by a half, that is not good for the economy and not good for our entitlement programs or
anything else we want to fund in the future.” One estimate, released Monday by the libertarian Cato Institute, which supports more
open immigration laws, found that legal-immigration numbers could plunge about 44 percent under the White House proposal.
That, according to the think tank, could be the “largest policy-driven legal immigration cut since the 1920s.” A bipartisan plan
devised by six senators tried to satisfy Trump’s demands on “chain migration” by barring
parents of Dreamers from being sponsored by their soon-to-be-legalized children. It also delays green
card holders from being able to sponsor their adult children until they obtain citizenship. But the administration and its
congressional allies immediately said that wasn’t enough. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of
Texas, a key bellwether for Senate Republicans on immigration, said he was fine with new family-based
restrictions as long as the administration processed green card applications that were already
pending. That amounts to a years-long backlog, and the administration has proposed doing so.
But that, in turn, is drawing fire from immigration hawks because that amounts to at least 3.9
million foreigners waiting for visas, according to State Department figures, and even more applicants who are
backlogged at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. In Alaska, GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski says she regularly hears from the
sizable Filipino community about the immigration system and how it can take nearly two decades for them to sponsor relatives.
They regularly urge her to push for more equity in the legal immigration system, she said. “I need to look really carefully at it,
because in my state, it’s the issue of legal immigration that is as compelling as anything,” Murkowski said of Trump’s framework. “So
I’d like to try to figure out a way that we can work fairly with the legal immigration system.” Combined with deep resistance from
Democrats on upending the nation’s family-based immigration system, it appears unlikely Trump’s proposal can survive Capitol Hill
intact. A smattering of senators who have been regularly meeting in the office of Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) haven’t even gone
into such specifics on legal immigration, senators say. Instead, they’ve focused on building support for a bare-bones base bill that
could serve as a starting point for the expansive floor debate that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has promised.
Now, some senators, including Collins, say Congress would be better off brokering a narrower deal that allows Congress to pass
legislation protecting Dreamers by the Trump-imposed March 5 deadline. “My preference would be that we deal with the Dreamer
population and border security at this point,” Collins said. “The other issues are extremely complex and I think require more time.”
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said he would be “fine” with simply codifying the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program into
law. But by going further than that and offering a path to citizenship to 1.8 million Dreamers under Trump’s plan,
Portman noted: “The bigger you get, in this case, the harder it is. It would attract concern on both sides.” Such a
pared-down measure, however, is also almost certain to crash into resistance in the more conservative House — where
many lawmakers say the White House proposal is too liberal.
Wages DA
Plan lowers wages
***Note when prepping file – some of the 2NC – No shortage cards talk about
wage depression with legalization
Less workers means higher wages and productivity – it’s reverse causal
Levine, 04 – Specialist in Labor Economics Domestic Social Policy Division @ Cornell (Linda,
“Immigration: The Labor Market Effects of a Guest Worker Program for U.S. Farmers,” February
2004,
https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&
httpsredir=1&article=1200&context=key_workplace) //kq
Temporary alien worker programs are meant to assure employers, including growers, of an adequate supply of labor when and where it is needed
without adding permanent residents to the U.S. population. Guest worker programs are not supposed to harm the wage and job opportunities of U. S.
workers while they alleviate spot labor shortages. President Bush’s proposal of a broad guest worker program has reignited interest in legislation
introduced during the 108 th Congress that relates specifically to the agricultural industry. According to the few economic analyses
available concerning the Bracero program — the largest, longest-lived guest worker program for U.S. growers — it appears to have
fulfilled its purpose of expanding the farm labor supply. But, the lower labor costs of bracero-using farmers seemingly came
at the expense of U.S. workers. If a new guest worker program for the agricultural industry were
initiated or if it became easier for growers to import labor under the current H-2A program, the effects of the Bracero program
might be instructive: an increase in total agricultural employment, a decrease in domestic farm worker
employment, and a decrease in farm wages. Although the magnitudes might di ffer today depending upon how much the
U.S. farm labor and product market s have changed over time, the direction of the wage and employment effects likely
would remain the same. Policy Issues Although the U.S. Commission on Agricultu ral Workers reported in the early 1990s that there was a
surplus of farm labor due partly to illegal immigra tion, it noted that crop- specific local labor shortages persisted which indicated a temporal and
spatial mismatch between the supply of and demand for farm labor. Consequently, the Co mmission recommended that the U.S. Employment Service
(ES) take steps to improve the matching of available domestic workers with farm jobs. 1 It also recommended that the Congress examine the H-2A
program — the only legal means growers currently have to temporarily import foreign workers — in light of other countries’ guest worker programs
“with the goal of having the same pr ogram available to agricultura l and nonagricultural employers, both in law and regulation.” 2 In the mid-1990s,
the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform reported to the Congress “that an agriculture guestworker program, sometimes referred to as a revisiting
of the “bracero agreement,” is not in the na tional interest.” The Commission reached this conclusion because its member s believed proponents of
such a program had not proved that a farm labor shortage existed at that time or was likely to develop in the immediately following years. Whether or
not there is an adequate supply of farm labor, either on a national or local basi s, remains an ongoing matter of debate. 3 Unsuccessful attempts were
made during the past few Congresses to amend immigration law to include a new temporary alien worker program for the agricultural industry.
President Bush’s proposal for a broad guest worker pr ogram has reignited interest in legislation already proposed in the 108 th Congress that relates
specifically to agriculture. These bills include H.R. 3142/S. 1645 (the Agricultural Job Opportunity, Benefits and Security Act) and H.R. 3604 (the
Temporar y Agricultural Labor Reform Act). 4 Arguments for and Against an Agricultural Guest Worker Program. The debate about whether temporar y
alien worker programs have adversely affected the labor market outcomes of domestic farm workers has changed very little over time. Growers
of perishable, labor-intensive crops (e.g., fruits, vegetables, and horticultural products) whose demand for workers inte
nsifies during the harvest season have argued that they need access to foreign labor because
domestic workers are unavailable in sufficient numbers. They have asserted that impor ting foreign workers does not
harm domestic workers because the two groups do not compet e. In other words, they contend that domestic workers are largely unwilling to perform
the type of farm work in question even if higher wages were offered them. Domestic workers, it is claimed, have more attractive alternatives to farm
employ ment (i.e., nonfarm jobs arguab ly are less strenuous and dirty as well as more stable and prestigious). Without access to foreign labor, grower
advocates have maintained that their crops c ould not be harvested, consumer prices would rise, and imports from low-wa ge countries would increase.
Others have contended that were growers to raise wages and improve working conditions, more domestic workers would be willing to accept seasonal
farm employment. CRS-3 Figure 1. The Effects on Domestic Workers of an Increase in the Supply of Foreign Workers Farm worker advocates have a
sserted that government programs that add to the supply of agricultural labor depress wages, reduce
em ployment of domestic workers, and weaken incentives to improve working conditions as
well as to improve efficiency through mechanization of harvesting operations. More specifically, they have
claimed that the government’s fairly unique treatment of one segment of the agricultural industry —
assuring it access to workers at a given wage level — perpetuates less efficient production and
personnel practices than woul d otherwise be the case. They further have declared that growers prefer
foreign over domestic workers because the former are not covered by the same laws as
domestic workers (e.g., Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, Unemployment Insurance, a nd Social Security), are
less demanding due to the lower wages and poorer working conditi ons in their home count ries, and
are easier to control as they cannot work for another U. S. employer if the grower terminates them. The Labor Market Effects: Economic
Theory Fundamentally, the debate over the temporary importati on of foreign labor centers on whether an increase in the supply of la bor reduces
domestic workers’ wage and employment opportunities. Economic
theory can help to clarify this debate. The essentials are shown
in Figure 1 . Before the entrance of alien workers to the U.S. labor market, the amount of labor that
domestic workers are willing to supply to employers is represented by the curve labeled S 1 . It is
upward sloping because workers are willing to supply more labor services in response to higher
wages. Employers’ demand for labor is represented by the curve labeled D, which slopes downward
because employers are willing to employ more workers at lower wages. Equilibrium in this labor market
occurs at point A, where those willing to work for wage W 1 equals employer willingness to hire
at that wage. Before the importation of foreign la bor, then, total employ ment is equal to E 1 and
domestic workers’ wage rate is equal to W 1 . CRS-4 5 In the lexicon of economists, their “elasticity” or responsiveness to a
change in the wage rate. 6 For more information on the Bracero program see U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Temporary Worker
Programs: Background and Issues , committee print, 96 th Cong., 2d sess. (Washing ton: GPO, 1980). The addition
of alien workers
expands the total quantity of labor offering its services at any given wage rate. This is represente
d by the rightward shift of the supply curve to S 2 , with the additional foreign workers re
presented by the difference between S 1 and S 2 . This increase in the labor force will only find
employment if the wage falls, for only at a lower wage will employers be willing to hire more
workers. Thus, equilibrium after the importation of alien workers occurs at point B, where the
wage of domestic and alien workers drops to W 2 and total employment expands to E 2 . In
summary, supply/demand theory predicts that the wage rate for all workers falls from W 1 to W 2 after the entrance of foreign
workers to the U.S. labor market. As a result, total U.S. employment expands from E 1 to E 2 , domestic employment contracts from E 1
to E 3 , and alien worker empl oyment is equal to E 2 minus E 3 . Because the lower post-program wage (W 2 ) makes, in this example, farm work less
rewarding, some domestic workers likely will find other activities more attractive which will cause employment of domestic farm workers to decline
(from E 1 to E 3 ). While the total employment of foreign workers (E 2 minus E 3 ) expands, some portion is at
the expense of the farm jobs former ly held by domestic workers (E 1 minus E 3 ). This is called the
“displacement effect.” The size of the displacement effect and of the wage effect depends on the shape of the labor de mand and domestic
labor supply curves. 5 Along with decreasing domestic agricultura l employment, an alien worker program reduces the amount
of wages that accrues to domestic farm workers. Since an alien worker program also expands output, agricultu ral prices are
expected to fall, thereby benefitting U.S. consumers. Estimated Effects of the Bracero Program. Few studies have tried to empirically estimate the labor
market impact of the Bracero program, which allowed the temporary importation of farm workers from Mexico. The Bracero program ran
from 1942 to 1964. At its peak in 1956, ab out 445,000 Mexican work ers were admitted for employment in the U.S. agricultural industry. 6 Morgan and
Gardner examined a 7-state area, in
which more than 90% of braceros had been employed, to estimate the
impact of the program on the wage and employment levels of hired farm labor. Its effect was found to be
cons istent with economic theory: the Bracero program was estimated to have increased total farm employment, reduced domestic farm workers’
employment, and lo wered farm wages. Morgan and Gardner concluded that the wage
loss to all nonbracero farm workers
wa s 6% to 7% of total wages paid to farm workers in the bracero st ates between 1953 and 1964, or
some $139 million per year (in 1977 dollars). U.S. farmers we re found to have gained from the program by being able to hire about
120,000 more work ers at 15-20 cents less per hour than they would have in the program’s absence. Su ch a large employment response (about 26%) to
a much smaller decrease in wages (less than 9%) CRS-5 7 Larry C. Morgan and Bruce L. Gardner, “Potential for a U.S. Guest-Worker Program
in Agriculture: Lessons from the Braceros,” in Barry Chiswick, ed., The Gateway: U.S. Immigration Issues and Policies, (Washington: Am erican
Enterprise Institute, 1982). Note: The wage loss associated with the Bracero program was incurred by both domestic farm workers and illegal
immigrants since both groups were included in the labor supply estimate. 8 Donald E. Wise, “The Effect of the Br acero on Agricultural Production in
California,” Economic Inquiry , v. XII, no.4, Dec. 1974. (Hereafter cited as Wise, The Effect of the Bracero on Agricultural Production in California .) 9
John D. Mason, “The Aftermath of the Bracero: A Study of the Economic Impact of the Agricultural Hired Labor Market of Michigan from the
Termination of Public Law 78" (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1969). (Hereafter cited as Mas on, The Aftermath of the Bracero .) 10 Wise, The
Effect of the Bracero on Agricultural Production in California . 11 Mason, The Aftermath of the Bracero . 12 Lamar B. Jones and G. Randolph Rice, “Agric
ultural Labor in the Southwest: The Post Bracero Years,” Social Science Quarterly , v. 61, no. 1, June 1980. is consistent with the informal observation
that braceros were a substitute for mechanization, notably in High Plains cotton, and that the end of the
program substantially accelerated the mechanization of Texas cotton. This is also the period in which the
tomato harvester came into widespread use in California. 7 Wise examined the experience in California for two heavily
bracero-dependent crops to determine whether domestic workers would accept farm jobs if wages were raised. He estimated that a small
increase in wages would bring about a larger increase in the supply of domestic farm workers:
in winter melon production, a 1% increase in wages was associated with a 2.7% increase in the
domes tic supply of labor; in strawberry production, a 1% increase in wages was related to a 3.4% increase in the
domestic labor supply. 8 Mason also found that a small increase in wa ges paid by the Michigan pickle industry
(which had been bracero-dominated) induced a larger increase in domestic workers willing to pick the crop. 9 At
least for the mid-to-late 1960s, then, these findings appear to refute the notion that increased agric ultural
wages would not have prompted many more domestic workers to accept farm employment .
Wise additionally found that termination of the Bracero program led to a decrease in total employment, an increase in
domestic employment, and an increase in wages in strawberry and melon farming in California. More precise ly,
he estimated that without bracero labor from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s , domestic farm worker employment in
California would have been between 51% (i n strawberry production) and 261% (in melon production) higher, and wages would
have been between 12% (in strawberry production) and 67% (in melon production) higher. 10 While Mason estimated that shortly after the
Bracero pr ogram’s demise farm wages rose significantly in Michigan, he was unable to determine how much the absence of bracero labor or other
variables contributed to the increase. 11 In contrast, Jones and Rice found that the trend in farm wages did not chan ge significantly in four
southwestern states between the 1954-1964 bracero period and the 1965-1977 post-bracero period. 12 It would thus appear that the Bracero
program’s end did not have an impact on farm wages; CRS-6 13 For additional H-2A program information see CRS Report RL30852, Immigration of
Agricultural Guest Workers: Policy, Trends, and Related Issues , by Ruth Ellen Wasem and Geoffrey K. Collver. 14 Victor J. Oliveira, Trends in the Hired
Farm Work Fo rce, 1945-87, Agriculture Information Bulletin # 561 (Washington: GPO, 1989). (H ereafter cited as Oliveira, Trends in the Hired Farm
Work Force .) 15 Philip L. Martin, Seasonal Workers in American Agriculture: Background and Issues (Washington: National Commission for
Employment Policy, 1985). 16 Oliveira, Trends in the Hired Farm Work Force . however, the lack
of a discernible wage effect might be
explained by the replacement of braceros with illegal immigrants, which e ffectively would have left the
supply of labor little changed . Estimated Effects of the H-2A Program. The program began in 1952 and remains in effect today. It was
author ized under the Immigrati on and Nationality Act (Section 101(a)(15)(H)(ii)(A), hence its name ). The program was modified by the Immigration
Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA, P.L. 99-603). After decreasing between FY1989 and FY 1995, the U.S. Department of Labor certified 41,827
seasonal farm jobs for the admission of foreign workers in FY1999. 13 Despite the increase in certifications durin g the second half of the 1990s, the
number of workers brought into the United States unde r the H-2A program remains quite small compared to the nation’s 1.2 million hired farm and
agricultural service workers in 1999. It is likely that the markedly fewer worker s who have entered the United States under the H-2A program than
under the Bracero program is due, in part, to the stricter requirements of the current program 14 and to the continuing availability of illegal
immigrants. 15 Given the limited use that growers have made of the program, its aggregate wage and employment effects on domestic farm workers
likely have been minimal. 16 However, because of the reliance on the H-2A program of tobacco, vegetable, and apple growers in some
states (e.g., Kentucky, New York, North Carolina, and Virginia), it might have had a more substantial impact on domestic
farm workers in certain local labor markets.
Shrinking farm labor is driving wages up, but the plan reverses it
Bjerga & Laya, 17 – Bjerga is Adjunct Instructor in business journalism @ Georgetown, Laya is
a writer for Bloomberg (Alan and Patricia, “Trump's deportation policy stands to drive up farm
wages,” 25 Feb 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-24/farm-wages-to-
show-real-time-impact-of-trump-deportation-policy) //kq
Cutting the total unauthorized workforce by roughly half, meanwhile, would push wages for
undocumented and legal guest farm workers as much as 40 percent higher than they would have been
otherwise over a 15-year period, according to a 2012 study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Field worker
wages increased by 4 percent to an average of $12.59 an hour in the reference week of Oct. 9-15 from a year
earlier, according to the most recent USDA data. That's ahead of the 2.7 percent pace for nonfarm
employees in Labor Department figures for the same month, though the average wage for that group was $25.90.
PoliticsBase DA
Path to citizenship unpopular
Republican congress and base hate the concept of a path to citizenship
Beinart, 18 – is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and an associate professor of journalism
and political science at the City University of New York (Peter, “It's Not Illegal Immigration That
Worries Republicans Anymore,” 2-18-18,
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/what-the-new-gop-crack-down-on-legal-
immigration-reveals/553631/) //kq
A few weeks ago, the contours of an immigration compromise looked clear: Republicans would let the “Dreamers”
stay. Democrats would let Trump build his wall. Both sides would swallow something their bases found
distasteful in order to get the thing their bases cared about most. Since then, Trump has blown up
the deal. He announced on Wednesday that he would legalize the “Dreamers,” undocumented immigrants
brought to the U.S. as children, only if Democrats funded his wall and ended the visa lottery and “chain
migration.” He would support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants only if
Congress brought the number of legal immigrants down. There’s an irony here, which was pointed out to me
by CATO Institute immigration analyst David Bier. Until recently, Republican politicians drew a bright line
between illegal immigration, which they claimed to hate, and legal immigration, which they
claimed to love. Florida Senator Marco Rubio launched his presidential campaign at the Freedom Tower, Miami’s Ellis Island.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who in 2013 proposed a five-fold increase in the number of H1B visas for highly skilled immigrants, declared
in April 2015 that, “There is no stronger advocate for legal immigration in the U.S. Senate than I am.” Mitt Romney promised in 2007
that, “We’re going to end illegal immigration to protect legal immigration.” Trump has turned
that distinction on its
head. He’s willing to legalize the “Dreamers”—who came to the United States illegally—so long as the number of
legal immigrants goes down. He has not only blurred the GOP’s long-held moral distinction between legal and illegal
immigration. In some ways, he’s actually flipped it—taking a harder line on people who enter the U.S. with documentation than
those who don’t. What explains this? Trump’s great hidden advantage during the 2016 Republican presidential primary
was his lack of support from the GOP political and donor class. This allowed him to jettison
positions—in support of free trade, in support of the Iraq War, in support of cutting Medicare and Social Security—that
enjoyed support among Republican elites but little support among Republican voters. He did the
same on immigration, where the “legal good, illegal bad” distinction turned out to be much
more popular among the party’s leaders than among its grassroots. Cribbing from Ann Coulter’s book,
Adios America, Trump replaced the legal-illegal distinction with one that turned out to have more
resonance on the activist right: The distinction between white Christian immigrants and non-
white, and non-Christian ones. The words “illegal immigration” do not appear in Trump’s presidential announcement
speech. Instead, Trump focused on immigrants’ country of origin. “When Mexico sends its people,” he
declared, “they’re not sending their best … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re
bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists
… It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s
coming probably—probably—from the Middle East.” Trump, who often says bluntly what other Republicans say
in code, probably realized that “illegal immigrant” was, for many voters, already a euphemism for Latino or Mexican-immigrants. In
their book White Backlash, the political scientists Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal cite a poll showing that 61 percent of
Americans believe that most Latino immigrants are undocumented even though only about a quarter are. “When Americans talk
about undocumented immigrants, Latinos or immigrants in general,” they note, “the images in their heads are likely to be the
same.” What really drove Republican opinion about immigration, Trump realized, was not primarily the
fear that the United States was becoming a country of law-breakers. (Republicans, after all, were not
outraged about the lack of prosecution of tax cheats.) It was the fear that the United States—which was
becoming less white and had just elected a president of Kenyan descent—was becoming a third-world country.
When the Public Religion Research Institute and Brookings Institution asked Americans in 2016 their views of immigration from
different parts of the world, it found that Republicans were only three points more likely than Democrats to want to reduce
immigration from “predominantly Christian countries” and only seven points more likely to want to reduce
immigration from Europe. By contrast, they were 33 points more likely to support reducing
immigration from Mexico and Central America and 41 points more likely to support reducing
immigration from “predominantly Muslim countries.” What really drives Republican views about immigrants, in
other words, is less their legal status than their nation of origin, their religion, and their race. Trump grasped that during
the campaign, and in coalition with a bevy of current and former Southern Senators—Jeff Sessions,
David Perdue and Tom Cotton—he has used it to turn the GOP into a party devoted to slashing legal
immigration. On Thursday, when presented with a bill that traded the legalization of Dreamers for
more border security but did not reduce legal immigration, only eight Republican Senators
voted yes. However, 37 voted for a bill that legalized the “Dreamers,” added more border
security, and substantially reduced legal immigration.
***Counterplans
Blue Cards CP
1NC
CP: The United States Congress should pass the Agricultural Program Act (S.
1034)
Blue cards can solve for illegal immigrant agriculture work force
Avanzado 18 (Dona Maria Avanzado: “Blue Card Status for
Agricultural Workers” 12 June 2018, www.uscitizenship.info/blog/blue-card-status-for-
agricultural-workers/.)
The Senate immigration reform bill would grant the agricultural workers a new status and those
workers would be granted Blue Cards. Agricultural industries in the United States are in short of
workers and many employers hire undocumented immigrants as they are unable to find legal
workers and many Americans are not willing to take up jobs in agricultural industries. This makes the
farmers to hire undocumented immigrants and such workers are also willing to work for less wages. The senators want to solve such
problems and so they have established the Blue Card status and this status would solve the problems in the agricultural industry. If
the Senate bill is passed, the US employers would be permitted to hire foreign workers and the
process of hiring foreign workers would be made simple and the bill would also permit the
undocumented workers to apply for legal status. According to the Senate immigration bill, Blue
Card status would allow the undocumented foreign workers to adjust their status to permanent
resident status and obtain Green Cards, after five years. To obtain Blue Card status, undocumented
workers must prove that they have performed agricultural work for around 100 days within a two-year period, before 31st
December, 2012. Likewise, while applying for Blue Card status, undocumented workers will have to pay $100. These Blue Cards will
be valid for a three-year period and these cards can be renewed for another three years. Moreover, Blue
Card holders
can work anywhere in the United States and for all the designated agricultural employers. The
bill would also benefit the immediate relatives of the Blue Card holders and the children and the
spouses of Blue Card holders also would be permitted to apply for lawful status in America.
However, they may not be permitted to work until they become eligible for Blue Card status. The bill would require the US
employers to pay the foreign workers minimum wages or higher than what they generally pay. Likewise,
the registered US
employers who hire workers who hold Blue Cards must provide the workers housing allowance
or housing. Moreover, the US employers must treat the US workers and the non-immigrant
workers equally and equal wages and benefits must be provided. Currently, H2-A visas are being
issued to the low skilled foreign workers and this visa program is not effective and so the Senate
immigration reform bill would replace the H2-A program with the new Blue Card program.
NB: CP popular
Blue cards will solve and be bipartisan
Carle 17 – vtdigger (David, “Leahy Partners With Senate Allies To Shield Farmworkers From
Deportation” https://vtdigger.org/2017/05/04/leahy-partners-senate-allies-shield-farmworkers-
deportation/) //kq
WASHINGTON (THURSDAY, May 4, 2017) — Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), partnering with Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Michael Bennet (D-
Colo.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), introduced legislation to shield farmworkers from
deportation and to put them on a path to earned legal status and eventual citizenship. Under
their Agricultural Worker Program Act, foreign farmworkers who have worked in the United States in agriculture for at least 100 days
in each of the past two years may earn lawful “blue card” status. Farmworkers who maintain blue card status
for the next three or five years, depending on the total hours worked in agriculture, would become eligible to adjust to legal
permanent residency and obtain their green cards. The provisions are widely supported by both agricultural
stakeholders and by immigrant workers rights groups nationally and are similar to provisions in the
bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform legislation that Leahy guided through the U.S. Senate
as chairman of the Judiciary Committee in 2013. Leahy then successfully steered the bill to
bipartisan passage by the full Senate. Republican leaders in the House subsequently blocked the Senate-passed bill from House
consideration and a vote. Leahy said: “Across our country, including the many dairy farms of Vermont, foreign workers support agriculture and help put
food on our tables. It is past time we show our support for them and our understanding of the challenges that farmers and workers face in doing the
hard work of dairy farming. Our bill would allow these workers to come out of the shadows and contribute to their farms and communities without fear
of arrest. The current system has long been broken, and it needs to be fixed. I am proud to support this solution and to continue the work of achieving
these reforms.” Feinstein, the Ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said: “Everywhere I travel in California, I hear from farmers,
growers and producers from all industries — wine, citrus, fruit and tree nuts, dairy — that there aren’t enough workers. Farm labor in California is
performed almost exclusively by undocumented immigrants — a fact that should surprise no one. By
protecting farmworkers from
deportation, our bill achieves two goals — ensuring that hardworking immigrants don’t live in fear
and California’s agriculture industry has the workforce it needs to thrive. Vermont Secretary of Agriculture Anson
Tebbetts said: “Farmers need predictability so they can manage their farms. This law would help our farmers and our
farmworkers by bringing stability to agriculture.” The legislation would greatly benefit Vermont’s dairy industry, which
does not currently have legal access to foreign workers. The bill would not affect the H-2A visa program that brings temporary and seasonal workers to
many diversified farms in Vermont, but which excludes dairy farmworkers. Farm workers and their families with a “blue
card” would be allowed to travel abroad and return to the United States as long as they remain
employed in agriculture in the U.S. for a minimum number of days each year. They would be able
to live freely within their communities and live without the constant fear of arrest that has increased in
recent months as a result of of President Trump’s executive orders calling for greatly increased immigration enforcement. More than 40
groups advocating for worker and immigrant rights, including National Farmworkers, Farmworker Justice and the
Congressional Hispanic Caucus, have endorsed this bill.
The CP is popular and has bipartisan support – won’t anger trump’s base or
cause horse trade
Brown 17 (H. Claire Brown: Claire Brown is a staff writer for the New Food Economy focusing
on food policy and the environment. Her reporting has won awards from the Newswomen’s
Club of New York and the New York Press Club. She is based in Brooklyn. “A ‘Blue Card’ Bill
Would Protect Farmworkers from Deportation. Can It Pass?” 14 Dec. 2017,
newfoodeconomy.org/blue-card-would-protect-farmworkers-from-deportation-congress/)
On Wednesday, April 26, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) entered
an indoor mushroom farm in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Witnesses said the agents carried
photos of four men, none of whom were present. They arrested twelve people. The owner of
the farm said the agents never showed him a warrant. The incident shook agricultural communities around the
country. President Trump’s stance on immigration has already caused anxiety among business owners and farmworkers nationwide.
According to Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization, Farmworker Justice, as much as 70
percent of the agricultural workforce in the United States is undocumented. Could a widespread
immigration crackdown start on the farm? “We don’t know that there have been other raids on
agricultural properties quite like that, but we and others all over the country are afraid that that
is what’s going to happen,” Bruce Goldstein, president of Farmworker Justice, said Tuesday, in a
press call about coming legislative efforts. “They’re already arresting people in farmworker communities around the
country. In Oregon, they’ve arrested several people,” he added. “There’s great fear.” In an effort to protect farmworkers from the
threat of deportation, Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) has introduced a bill called the Agricultural Worker Program Act. If passed, the
legislation would allow undocumented agricultural workers who have worked in the U.S. for at least 100 days in the past two years
to apply for a “blue card.” Blue
card holders will then have a clear path to a green card: they can either
work in agriculture for 150 days per year over three consecutive years, or 100 days per year over
five consecutive years. This legislation is almost identical to the agricultural component of the
Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act that passed in the
Senate and died in the House in 2013. Feinstein said in Tuesday’s call that the blue card had wide support during the
2013 negotiations (though, she didn’t say whether that support was bi-partisan). “I sat through all the hearings. We did 300
amendments. But there was not a single amendment ever proposed to the agriculture part of the bill,” she said. Representative Luis
V. Gutiérrez (D-IL) said on the same call that he plans to introduce the legislation in the House sometime in the next week.
“Americans, we wink and nod every day. We know that every time we have a glass of wine, or a
delicious apple, or open up a yogurt, that immigrant hands have touched that. There’s no way
that anyone cannot know that,” he said, adding that a crackdown on undocumented agricultural
labor would lead to a drop in domestic farm production. “It’s pretty simple: Foreign hands are going to pick our
food that we eat every day in foreign countries. Or foreign hands can pick that food in the United States of America.” That sentiment
has been echoed elsewhere. Senator Feinstein mentioned that some Central Valley farmers are considering leasing land in Mexico
and moving their operations south of the border. Also,
on the call with Feinstein and Gutiérrez was Shah
Kazemi, owner of Monterey Mushrooms, the largest mushroom farm in the country. He that
he’s cut back production by 12 percent in California, 15 percent in Illinois, and 6 percent in
Florida due to labor shortages. For many workers, blue card status would mean they no longer have to live in fear of run-
ins with ICE agents. “We’re afraid, after doing all this work, that on the way home to see our children we’re going to be separated
from our families,” Lourdes Cardenas, a grape industry worker with 14 years of U.S. farm experience, said on the call. “It doesn’t just
affect us. It
affects our children as well.” Twenty-five-year resident Sagrario Arellano said that a
blue card would improve access to basic services like healthcare and education. “We would not
be afraid to go to the store, or to ask for help in processes from local agencies—something as
simple as going to the bank and processing our checks, and not being afraid that ICE will be
waiting there to pick us up and deport us,” she said. Opponents of immigration reform in the agricultural sector
have pointed to mechanization as a solution to the farm labor shortage. But Kazemi disagreed. “Automation is not our future,” he
said, adding that technology is years away from replacing workers in mushroom farming. Of course, many proponents of this bill
would like to see a more comprehensive approach to immigration reform. “This bill doesn’t have everything that we farmworker-
advocates want,” said Goldstein. “But
to achieve compromise in Congress on immigration policy is
extremely difficult.” Even so, this bill could draw broad bi-partisan support: The Farm Bureau,
whose president Zippy Duvall has visited the White House twice in the last three months,
supports blue card-type programs. And Arturo Rodriguez, president of United Farmworkers of
America, thinks this piecemeal legislative strategy is one that could “reignite the discussion on
fixing our broken immigration laws in this country.” It remains to be seen whether or not the bill will gather
momentum in Congress. But Representative Gutiérrez is confident the votes are there. “We could pass this bill today if they simply
gave us a vote. That’s how many Republicans exist that are our allies in this fight.”
AT Can’t travel / No flexibility
Blue card allows travel, family reunification, and worker flexibility in job choice
Farmworker Justice, 13 - nonprofit organization that seeks to empower migrant and
seasonal farmworkers to improve their living and working conditions (“Summary of Farmworker
Provisions in Senate Immigration Bill, S. 744,” May 21 2013,
https://www.farmworkerjustice.org/sites/default/files/Ag%20Imm%20Summary%20S744-
3%20pager5-28-13.pdf) //kq
Step One: Apply for “Blue Card” Temporary Resident Status. If this proposal passes, afarmworker could apply for a “blue card”
(temporary residency) through a government - approved organization, a licensed attorney o r a
recognized immigration practitioner. A farmworker’s spouse and children who have been present in the U.S. since
December 31, 2012 would also be eligible for blue card status. The application period would begin after the final regulations are
published and would last 1 year , unless extended. In order to qualify, e ligible workers must x have worked in U.S.
agriculture for at least 100 work days or 575 hours during the 24 - month period ending December
31, 2012; x not be excluded by certain immigrat ion laws; x complete national security and law
enforcement clearances; x not have been convicted of a felony, 3 or more misdemeanors, or
certain other crimes; and x pay an application fee and a $100 fine. 1 Th e following description summarizes the
agricultural provisions of S. 744 as approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 21, 2013. While in “blue card” status,
farmworkers and their family members with derivative “blue card” status may travel outside of
and return to the U.S. The blue card holder and his/her spouse are authorized to work and may
work in any occupation, but in order to earn lawful permanent residency, the blue card
farmworke r must satisfy the future agricultural work requirement described below. S t e p T w o : E a r n L e g a l
P e r m a n e n t R e s i d e n t S t a t u s : P r o s p e c t i v e W o r k R e q u i r e m e n t . The blue card holder must fulfill the following requirement s to
earn a “green card.” Immediatefamily members may also apply for and receive permanent resident
status when the farmworker does, so long as they continue to meet the admissibility
requirements. x perform agricultural work for at least o 100 work days per year for each of 5 year s during the 8 - year period beginning on the
date of enactment of the Act; OR o 150 work days per year for each of 3 years during the 5 - year period beginning on the date of enactment of the Act
x pay a $400 fine and application fee; and demonstrate that they h ave paid a pplicable federal tax liability; x and continue to meet other admissibility
requirements The earliest that an agricultural worker would be able to obtain a green card is 5 years after the
date of enactment of this act. If a blue card worker is un able to fulfill the agricultural work requirement, s/he may seek adjustment to
registered provisional immigrant status under the general legalization program.
Solvency
Blue cards solve agricultural shortages – it’s flexible, fast, and bipartisan, and
doesn’t cause turnover
O’Brien, 13 – Journalist for Associated Press (Matt, “Immigration talks between California
farm groups hit impasse,” April 5, 2013,
https://www.mercurynews.com/2013/04/05/immigration-talks-between-california-farm-
groups-hit-impasse/) //kq
The months-longtalks had reached broad consensus on reforms that would legalize hundreds of
thousands of agricultural workers living here illegally. A new “blue card” would give them a chance to
become legal residents and eventually citizens. It would offer a faster process than the 13-year one
proposed for other illegal immigrants. But field workers’ newfound mobility and freedom to work wherever they want would
likely draw some to the cities for better jobs, compelling agricultural companies to look elsewhere for workers. “That’s fine, but we need to have a good
guest-worker program when that happens,” Nassif said. The talks fell apart because “ grower associations are insisting to
Congress that farm workers are currently paid too much,” said United Farm Workers spokeswoman Maria Machuca.
Federal surveys reveal average wages — $9.17 for vegetable-sorters, $10.62 for ranch hands, $19.90 for inspectors — but growers say the surveys need
to be redone before being used to set minimum wages. “What we’re suggesting is we have a good statistical study that tells us what the wage should
be,” Nassif said. The United States has a 10-month agricultural work visa, the H-2A, but California growers say it is too costly and slow
for an unpredictable industry. California has the nation’s biggest farm workforce but ranks 13th in H-2A workers. Most of the 55,000
guest-workers recruited in 2011 went to Southern states. Farm business leaders want a smoother, nimbler program
and more visas. Unions want to keep or strengthen the existing program’s workplace and wage protections, and argue that growers are trying
to pay less than what farmworkers make now. Pete Aiello is too busy gearing up for strawberry season to keep up with politics, so the co-
owner of Gilroy-based Uesugi Farms said he was surprised to hear of the stalled negotiations. Aiello has never used guest-workers,
though he would consider an “easier-to-manage and less costly” program. He also said he is not too worried about legalized
farmworkers moving off the farms. “If we want these folks to stay here, to come here to work,
we have to be prepared to compete.”
Blue Cards is the quickest path to citizenship

Nosowitz 17(Dan Nosowitz: Writer for modern farmer “Blue Card’ Legislation Proposes New
Path To Citizenship For Undocumented Farmworkers.” , 11 May 2017,
modernfarmer.com/2017/05/blue-card-legislation-proposes-new-path-citizenship-
undocumented-farmworkers/.)
It’s estimated that around 60 percent of all US farmworkers are undocumented immigrants. We
don’t know for sure, because undocumented farmworkers are understandably hesitant to
announce themselves or allow themselves to be counted in a census, for fear of deportation.
Farmers in the country’s biggest growing regions, especially in California, have suffered from a labor shortage for years, and many
fear that under the Trump administration, stricter immigration laws will result in deportations and a further lack of labor for their
farms. There’s also the basic human rights element of this issue; undocumented immigrants
provide an immensely valuable service to the country and receive no legal protections. (For
more on the topic, read our Spring 2017 feature, “The High Cost of Cheap Labor”.) In the interest of
protecting both the immigrants and the agricultural workforce, Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Michael
Bennet (D-CO), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), and Kamala Harris (D-CA) introduced last week the Agricultural Worker Program Act, legislation
that may soon be known as the Blue Card Act. The idea is simple: any farmworker who has worked in the
agricultural industry for at least 100 days of each of the past two years would be eligible for a
“Blue Card.” (Green would logically be the best color to indicate an agriculture-based legal
status but unfortunately, it’s already taken.) Blue Card holders would also be put on the fast track to a
more permanent status in the US (either a green card or residency); depending on the number of hours worked, they
could be eligible in three to five years.
LPR CP
1NC
CP text depends on plan text
A path of legalization that stops just short of citizenship solves best – maintains
solvency and avoids political backlash
Nunes 17 (Ashley Nunes: Dr. Ashley Nunes is an analyst, writer and commentator specializing
in transportation safety, regulatory policy and workforce productivity. With over a decade of
academic and industry experience, he has lectured globally on the challenges facing developed
economies and has led research projects sponsored by the Department of Defense and the
Department of Transportation. Dr. Nunes holds academic appointments at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. in Engineering Psychology
from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (USA), where his research examined the
scientific merit of raising air traffic controller retirement ages. A Contributor to Forbes, Dr.
Nunes has previously written for the Washington Post, The Globe and Mail and The
Independent among others. His long-form content has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs
and the American Scientist and he has been interviewed by the BBC, the New York Times, and
the CBC. “A Path to Legal Status but Not Citizenship” 4/31/2017,
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/03/immigration-reform-path-citizenship-path-legal-
status-undocumented-workers/ - DCS)
Immigration reform is an issue that Washington can’t seem to address. Few disagree on beefing up security at the nation’s borders.
But politicians part ways when discussing how to handle the country’s 11 million undocumented workers, who have either
overstayed their visas or entered without permission. The resulting gridlock has left them in limbo for decades. For the Left, the
solution is to create a path to citizenship. Many arguments are made to support it. Undocumented workers pay their taxes, though
in many cases because it may help them gain legal status. And undocumented workers have been here a long time without ever
having had a legal right to establish permanent residence, but set that fact aside for the moment. The weakest rationale for granting
them a path to citizenship is this: that they have toiled hard on American soil, contributing to the national economy. They have, but
they have done so by violating the nation’s immigration laws. The end doesn’t justify the means. So what’s the solution?
Government could get tough on those who hire undocumented workers. Stiffer penalties would mean
fewer job prospects for the job seekers. And studies show there there is a net outflow of workers when available jobs are scarce. But
businesses want migrant labor, and immigration enforcement has long been overlooked to make sure they get it. Many rightly note
that parked on America’s doorstep is a sign that reads “Keep Out” on one side and, on the other, “Help Wanted.” This hypocrisy has
augmented the problem of mixed-status families: cases in which some family members — most notably, children — have the legal
right to be here while others do not. Nearly 5 million American kids have at least one undocumented parent. Confronting that reality
forced deportations, long touted as a solution, are socially unviable. They are
means accepting that
also fiscally irresponsible. One estimate pegs the cost of deporting 11 million people at over
$400 billion. A more pragmatic solution would be to offer a path to legalization that stops short
of citizenship. That would meet the humanitarian imperative to keep families together. But it
would also hold those who have violated immigration laws accountable for their actions. This
would apply only to undocumented workers who were of legal age when they entered the
United States; those who were not of legal age should be given a citizenship path identical to
the one that is available to legal immigrants. Except for those who were born on American soil, citizenship is not a
right. It’s a privilege. A path short of citizenship sends a powerful message to America’s legal-immigrant community, whose
members have worked tirelessly to follow existing immigration guidelines. There is a rule of law, and citizenship is granted to those
who follow it. A path short of citizenship would assuage Republican concerns that immigration reform would hurt the GOP. Many
undocumented workers hail from Latin America, and Latinos have long favored Democrats over Republicans. Some Republicans
worry that granting these workers a path to citizenship would tip the future balance of political power. That may sound petty, and it
is. But it is also a political reality. Withholding citizenship, the Left will argue, creates a working class who
will never truly feel that America is their home. Citizenship, they maintain, holds the key to
becoming a “full and open member of American society.” Yet a significant number of legal
immigrants who can naturalize don’t. They have pursued an education, own homes, and have
forged links in American society. Not being citizens hasn’t stopped them from claiming their
piece of the American dream. Why would it be any different for undocumented workers? The fact
that not all legal immigrants claim American citizenship challenges another liberal argument: that citizenship increases wages.
Many advocates of a path to citizenship tout studies that show that when immigrants naturalize,
earnings increase — by as much as 25 percent, according to one account. If that were true,
wouldn’t all eligible immigrants line up for American passports? Wage increases, after all, would
be a powerful a powerful incentive. The reality is that evidence linking citizenship to wage
increases is weak. Researchers often mix legal noncitizens with undocumented workers when
looking at earnings — an approach that skews results in favor of the liberal position. More important, many studies don’t
control for occupational choice. The salaries of physicians who are American citizens will always be higher than those of secretaries
who are legal noncitizens. Nationality has little to do with it. Choice of profession does. Citizenship can improve wages
by offering access to jobs previously off limits. These include high-paying public- and private-sector positions that
require security clearances. But they also require advanced education and skills training. As a whole,
undocumented workers, nearly half of whom haven’t graduated high school, are ill equipped for such employment. And suggestions
that immigrants tend to pursue higher education as a consequence of enjoying citizenship are not backed up by hard data. One thing
is certain. The needs of America’s changing economy cannot be met by laws that haven’t been touched in 25 years. Overhauling the
nation’s immigration system requires a dose of pragmatism. And the current occupant of the White House, as unconventional as he
may seem, might just be the one to deliver.
Solvency
Pathway to citizenship is counterproductive and inefficient the CP solves better
Skerry 13 (Peter Skerry: Peter Skerry was a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies at
the Brookings Institution. Currently, he is a professor of political science at Boston College. His
research focuses on social policy, racial and ethnic politics, and immigration. 2/25/13 , A Path to
Citizenship – or a Maze? https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/a-path-to-citizenship-or-a-maze/
- DCS)
President Obama wants the path to citizenship for illegal immigrants to be simple and direct. Yet
the likely vehicle for any immigration reform will be the bipartisan framework produced by eight senators in January, and the path to
citizenship it offers will be
neither simple nor direct. The undocumented will be required, through
lengthy, sometimes confusing procedures, not only to demonstrate their seriousness about
becoming Americans but also to atone for having lived here illegally. Such requirements are
necessary to placate outraged Americans. But as a path to citizenship, they will be
counterproductive. If anything, these requirements threaten to reinforce the ambivalence and indecision many
undocumented immigrants demonstrate about remaining here. Sending them into procedural limbo is not the
way to integrate them into American society. Counterintuitive though it may sound, a far better response
would be to grant these immigrants status as “permanent non-citizen residents” with no
option of ever naturalizing. According to the bipartisan framework, the path to citizenship would be “contingent upon
securing our borders and tracking whether legal immigrants have left the country when required.” The latter point refers to an
entry-exit visa monitoring system that Congress has authorized several times but never succeeded in implementing. The former
point is even more problematic, especially for immigrant-rights advocates: Border security would hinge on an ill-defined
recommendation from a panel of elected and civic leaders from Southwestern border states. Pending that
recommendation, illegal immigrants would register with the government. Those passing
preliminary background checks and “settling their debt to society by paying a fine and back
taxes” would then be granted “probationary legal status,” allowing them to live here and work
legally. The next step would be applying for lawful permanent residency — a green card, which typically
leads to eligibility for citizenship after five years. But this step could only be taken once the Southwestern commissioners certify
the border as secure. At that point, individuals on probationary legal status would have to “pass an
additional background check, pay taxes, learn English and civics, demonstrate a history of work
in the United States, and current employment.” Even then, none of today’s illegal immigrants
could obtain a green card until all those currently waiting receive theirs. The undocumented, says the
bipartisan framework, “will be required to go to the back of the line.” But his line includes about 5
million people, some of whom have been waiting 20 years for a green card. One needn’t be a
Democratic Party activist anticipating millions of new Hispanic voters to have misgivings about such a cumbersome process. Many
of the immigrants who are supposed to benefit will instead get bogged down in the procedural
maze. Yet there is more at work than the inevitable bureaucratic delays. Of the 2.7 million who qualified for the
amnesty granted by Congress in 1986, barely 41 percent had become citizens as of 2009. After
nearly a quarter century, the rest have remained permanent residents with green cards. Simply
put, not all illegal immigrants are sure they want to be US citizens. Well over half of the
undocumented come from Mexico, and an additional 20 percent from Central America — close
enough that many arrive here with the intention of eventually returning home. As activist lawyer
Jennifer Gordon, who sought to organize undocumented day laborers, has observed, “many were ambivalent about settling in the
United States,” characterizing them as “settlers in fact but sojourners in attitude.” Sociologists Richard Taub and William Julius
Wilson reported similar patterns among Mexican immigrants in Chicago. Such findings are hard to hear — and not just for
immigrant-rights advocates. Americans cling tightly to the image of “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Yet for much of our
history immigrants have often arrived intending to return home. Even though things have seldom worked out that way — yesterday
or today — many continue to see themselves as sojourners in America. Given this social reality as well as the political realities in
Washington, an alternative would be to devise an easier path — not
to citizenship but to “permanent non-citizen
resident status.” This would have the advantage of imposing up front a clear penalty that would
satisfy those Americans who want to see illegal immigrants make amends. But it would also give
the undocumented what most seem to want: the ability to remain here, raise their families, and
work without fear of arrest or deportation.
Mechanization CP
1NC – Mechanization CP
CP Text: The United States government should
- Increase investment into research and development for agricultural
technologies
- Reimburse purchases of labor-saving agricultural production and labor
management technologies.
The CP solves the aff - US investment in agriculture is key to sustainability and
social development
Clancy et al 16 (Matthew Clancy, Keith Fuglie, and Paul Heisey; Matthew Clancy, PhD in
economics, is a Research Economist specializing in agricultural innovation and science policy at
the United States Department of Agriculture, Keith Fuglie, Ph.D. in Applied Economics, is an
Economist with the Structure, Technology, and Productivity Branch in the Resource and Rural
Economics Division. His work focuses on the economics of agricultural technical change, science
policy, and productivity growth. Paul Heisey is an Economist in the Structure, Technology and
Productivity Branch of the Resource and Rural Economics Division. His work focuses on
agricultural science policy, in particular public and private sector agricultural research and
development, intellectual property, and genetic resources. Paul Heisey, Ph.D. in Agricultural
Economics, is an Economist in the Structure, Technology and Productivity Branch of the
Resource and Rural Economics Division. His work focuses on agricultural science policy, public
and private sector agricultural research and development, intellectual property, and genetic
resources; "U.S. Agricultural R&D in an Era of Falling Public Funding;" United States Department
of Agriculture Economic Research Service; 11-10-2016; accessed 7-18-2018;
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2016/november/us-agricultural-rd-in-an-era-of-falling-
public-funding/?platform=hootsuite|RYD)
*edited for gendered language
Unlike in many other parts of the U.S. economy, the public sector rather than the private sector has
historically been the dominant player in the conduct of research and development (R&D) directly used
by agriculture. The U.S. public sector has also been the largest performer of agricultural R&D worldwide. In recent years,
however, this status quo changed substantially. Between 1970 and 2008, the share of total food and
agricultural R&D conducted in the United States by the public sector was relatively stable at
around 50 percent. But, by 2013, that share had fallen to under 30 percent. This dropoff was due
to a decline in Government spending on public agricultural R&D as well as a surge in R&D spending by the private
sector. Between 2008 and 2013, for example, real (inflation-adjusted) public food and agricultural R&D fell by
about 20 percent while real private R&D increased by 64 percent. The United States also lost its
position as top global performer of public agricultural R&D, falling behind China in 2009 through at least 2013.
Among countries with substantial investments in public sector R&D for agriculture, the U.S. led with 20-23 percent of
the global total between 1990 and 2006. By 2013, this share had fallen to 13 percent. Nonetheless, the U.S.
remains the top producer of R&D outputs by several measures, at least as of 2013. Based on the latest available data, the U.S.
produces more journal articles and patents related to agricultural R&D than any other country, though by a smaller margin than in
the past. The
longer term impact of these funding shifts, however, may have negative implications for
future agricultural growth. Total agricultural output in the United States grew by 169 percent between
1948 and 2013. This rise was not due to increases in agricultural land or labor—in fact, both inputs
declined over the period. Rather, it stemmed from the adoption of a whole suite of innovations in crop
and livestock breeding, nutrient use, pest management, farm practices, and farm equipment
and structures. These innovations are the fruits of agricultural R&D. The Role of the Public Sector
Historically, the U.S. Government took a prominent role in producing new innovations and technologies for agriculture because
farmers themselves did not have the means to conduct formal R&D. Over time, specialized firms in the farm
machinery, agricultural chemical, crop seed, and other agricultural input industries grew large enough to make
considerable investments in R&D. This private R&D, however, has tended to focus on commercially
useful applications, so the public sector is still responsible for much of the fundamental research
that creates the building blocks for major agricultural innovations. Private R&D also has tended
to gravitate toward technologies that are easy to patent or otherwise protect with intellectual property rights.
Many important new farming technologies—such as agronomic and animal husbandry [breeding
and caring] practices, farming methods that conserve environmental resources, and
technologies requiring collective action like pest eradication—are not likely to be profitable for
private R&D. These technologies may embody knowledge difficult to incorporate into a
patentable product or service, or they may require additional incentives for farmers to adopt
them. Economists have noted several reasons why the production and sale of knowledge differs from that of other goods and
services: • Knowledge may have social benefits that are difficult to capture in a market. • Knowledge builds on itself so that the pace
of discovery is faster when knowledge is freely available. • Knowledge may have applications outside the domain of the discoverer’s
expertise. Perhaps most important in agriculture, though, is that technological innovations are often difficult and expensive to
acquire at first but are then comparatively cheap to distribute and copy. Consider, for example, improved crop varieties. While these
are developed at great cost, if they are nonhybrids, they are essentially self-replicating. Once a new variety is sold, a customer has
the means to produce and sell it cheaply without incurring the cost of research. When
firms cannot recoup their R&D
investments by charging a higher price for the innovation, there is little or no incentive to
conduct R&D. Assigning intellectual property rights, such as patents, can help address this problem by preventing
rival firms from copying and selling the innovation (for a period), but these rights did not apply to biological
innovations for much of U.S. history. Moreover, fundamental research as well as a whole host of important
agricultural innovations mentioned earlier are not well protected by patents. Because the private sector
may not perform some beneficial research, the public sector has traditionally acted as a major
supplier of food and agricultural R&D. There is a large body of economic research that attempts
to measure the return on public investments in agricultural R&D, which may shed light on whether public
R&D is worth the cost. Estimating the return on public R&D generally includes measuring not only the
economic benefits to farmers, but also the gains to consumers (who may benefit from more abundant food
at lower prices) and to society at large (if the technologies produce nonmarket benefits like improved environmental or
human health). Comparing these benefits to public costs gives an estimate of the “social” return to R&D. A high rate of return
relative to other public or private investment opportunities would justify the continued financing of agricultural R&D by the public
sector. And, indeed, this body of literature has tended to find that agricultural R&D has a very large
rate of return—on the order of 20 to 60 percent with a median rate of return of 40 percent. Such large rates of return
support the case for robust public sector agricultural R&D. [Chart omitted] Out of a total of $16.3 billion spent
on food and agricultural R&D in 2013, funding from the Federal Government accounted for $2.8 billion
(17.2 percent), and the States accounted for an additional $1.0 billion (6.1 percent). By comparison,
nongovernment sources—mostly the private business sector but also including foundations and farmer organizations—
contributed $12.4 billion (76.3 percent). The Federal Government has a highly decentralized process for allocating
money to research. For agriculture, most Federal dollars are allocated through USDA ($2.3 billion in 2013), with the remainder
flowing through a host of other agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Within
USDA, research funding flows through multiple channels, including the Agricultural Research Service, ERS, and the Forest Service
(which conduct in-house research) and the National Institute for Food and Agriculture (which funds research primarily in
universities). Additionally, a large share of public funding comes from the States to support research at State universities and
experiment stations, often due to requirements that States match Federal funding. As mentioned earlier, the public sector is not the
dominant player in funding or performing U.S. food and agricultural research. In 2013, public research institutions—namely USDA
intramural research and land grant universities, State agricultural experiment stations, and cooperating institutions (LGU/SAES/CI)—
performed under 30 percent of total agricultural R&D. Moreover, the majority of public and private money stays in its respective
sector. All but $21 million of public funding in 2013 went to public institutions. Similarly, out of $12.4 billion spent by private firms
and other nongovernment bodies during the same period, all but $686 million financed industry research, with most of the rest
funding research at LGU/SAES/CI. Within the public sphere, LGU/SAES/CI conducted $3.0 billion in research, twice the level of
USDA’s intramural labs. Within the private sector, nearly half of the research is in the food sector, and the remainder is in
agricultural input sectors like the seed, agricultural chemical, animal health and farm machinery industries. Declining Real
Investment in Public Sector Research The dominance of the private sector in agricultural R&D is a
comparatively new phenomenon. From 1971 to the early 2000s, public R&D and total private R&D followed
each other quite closely. At the same time, the public sector had much larger investments in agricultural
input R&D than the private sector (while the private sector funds both agricultural input and food R&D nearly equally,
the public sector allocates little funding to food R&D). In 2003, however, the two series began to diverge. Private R&D—in both the
food and agricultural input sectors—began to rise steadily from $6.0 billion in 2003 to $11.8 billion in 2013. At the same time, public
agricultural R&D fell from $6.0 billion to around $4.5 billion. By 2010, private agricultural input R&D alone had surpassed total public
R&D. [chart omitted] Multiple factors have contributed to the changing share of food and agricultural R&D conducted by the public
and private sectors. First, between the 1970s and 1980s, intellectual property rights were extended to biological innovations, initially
via special tools such as plant breeders’ rights and eventually through patents. Prior to the availability of intellectual property rights
for biological innovations, most private seed research focused on crops grown from hybrid seed, like corn. Hybrid seed gives
exceptional yield but only for the first generation, so farmers need to obtain fresh seed each year. The extension of intellectual
property rights to crop varieties gave seed companies the incentive to breed improved nonhybrid crops as well. As the number of
private nonhybrid varieties grew, public breeding programs in these crops were closed or curtailed. Second, new scientific
opportunities, particularly under the umbrella of what is sometimes referred to as “the New Biology,” have increased the potential
value of agricultural R&D. The New Biology has advanced the life sciences by blending in elements from other disciplines—such as
physics, engineering, and mathematics—and plays a crucial enabling role in a host of agricultural innovations, ranging from
genetically modified (GM) crops to new techniques for conventionally breeding plants and animals. The private sector has
capitalized on these opportunities. Third, population and incomes are growing rapidly in developing countries, and trade barriers are
falling. These changes have substantially opened potential markets for agricultural exports, including inputs like crop seeds and
chemicals. Because research entails large upfront fixed costs and then relatively small costs associated with producing and selling
the innovations, large markets enable firms to recoup large R&D costs and help promote further R&D. For example, large corn and
soybean markets helped these crops become some of the first to benefit from genetic modification. Finally, the
decline in
public funding for agricultural R&D has of course contributed to the decline in the public’s share
of total R&D. State-level public research expenditures began to fall in 1991, although this was partially
offset by a rise in funding from non-USDA Federal agencies until 2002. USDA research expenditures also began to drift downward
after 2001. The fall in combined public spending for agricultural R&D began to accelerate in 2009,
mirroring a decline in total Federal real R&D spending (across all Federal agencies) over the same period. U.S. public R&D is
also falling as a share of public R&D among major countries. Between 1990 and 2013, the U.S. share of
spending among nations with major public agricultural R&D investments fell from 22.5 percent to 13.4 percent. This decline was
driven by a combination of falling U.S. spending and rapidly rising spending in developing countries such as India and, especially,
China. Indeed, Chinese government spending on agricultural R&D rose nearly eightfold in real (inflation-adjusted) terms between
1990 and 2013, surpassing U.S. spending in 2008. [chart omitted] U.S. Remains First in Key Innovation Output Indicators While the
U.S. public sector share of agricultural R&D has slipped relative to the private sector share and to global public R&D, the U.S.
agricultural research system as whole remains one of the most productive in the world. In fact, the U.S. is still a leader in agricultural
science publications and citations, as well as agricultural patents. Scientific publications often reflect research aimed at making more
fundamental discoveries about how the world works, while patents may indicate the transformation of R&D knowledge into
agricultural products. In 2012, the U.S. had the highest share (18 percent) of global agricultural science publications, more than
twice the share of the second highest nation, China. Still, the U.S. share has dropped sharply from nearly a third of the global total in
1996, driven by a rise in publications from other countries rather than a decline in total U.S. publications. The U.S. share of citations
to its published research output is higher than its publication share, indicating higher-than-average quality. The U.S. share (over a
fifth of citations worldwide) is the highest among all nations, but it, too, has decreased since 1996. [chart omitted] The United States
also remains the world’s largest agricultural inventor. Between 2006 and 2011, U.S. inventors had 4,500 patents in agricultural
science and 18,000 patents in agriculture—about three times as many as the next highest country, Japan. U.S. patents for new plant
technologies and crop cultivars have also increased rapidly since utility patent protection was extended to biological innovations in
the 1980s. The number of patents granted annually for plant modifications topped 1,500 in 2014, while the number of patents for
crop cultivars exceeded 1,000 in the same year. Both the public and private sector produce scientific publications and patents.
However, as the private sector increases its own investments in agricultural R&D and moves into new areas previously under the
purview of public research, there is a risk that public sector R&D may compete directly with private
sector R&D for customers and scientific talent. Competition from the public sector, which does not have to recoup
R&D costs, may discourage private R&D from these areas—an effect called “crowding out.” But if the public sector
focuses on areas where the private sector continues to undersupply research (for example,
because the social benefits exceed potential profits), crowding out may be minimal. Then, the new
technological opportunities opened up by public research could stimulate more private R&D. In such cases, public sector R&D is
“complementary” to private sector R&D. As
it happens, public and private R&D expenditures do tend to fall
in different research areas. The private sector performs almost all research in “food and feed
manufacturing” and “farm machinery and engineering,” areas that may result in improved
production processes or products that provide profits for investors. In contrast, the public sector performs nearly
all R&D associated with “environment and natural resources,” “human nutrition and food
safety,” “economics, statistics, and policy,” and “social and community development.”
Successful research in these areas may generate widespread social benefits, even if private R&D
investors are unable to capture enough of the benefits to justify their own expenditures. The
public and private sector each conduct significant research in “plant systems and crop
protection” and “animal systems and animal health.” However, public and private research appear to focus on
different areas within these sectors. Much of the private R&D on plant and animal systems aims at new commercial products like
new GM crop traits, agricultural pesticides, and veterinary pharmaceuticals. In contrast, public
R&D focuses on topics
like improving field practices; studying pest populations, animal pathogens, and soil attributes;
and developing improved diagnostic tools for use in public and private research. [chart omitted] A
more formal way to check for crowding out or complementary R&D is to see what happens to private R&D spending when public
R&D spending changes. If the public sector crowds out the private sector, each increase in public R&D spending ought to decrease
private R&D spending, as the public sector siphons off customers and scientists in the affected research area. The opposite will be
true if the sectors are complementary. Economic studies have generally found that public R&D stimulates private R&D: an additional
dollar spent on agricultural research by the public sector appears to stimulate $0.70 in additional private R&D spending. The Future
of R&D Thedecline in U.S. public spending on agricultural R&D may have negative implications for
agricultural productivity. The recent emergence of new pests, diseases, and climate stresses on
agriculture—such as citrus greening, California’s drought, and new strains of viruses affecting pigs and poultry—are
imposing new demands on the Nation’s basic agricultural science capacities. Over the coming decades,
rising world population and changing diets afforded by higher per capita incomes are projected
to greatly increase the global demand for food. Significant improvements in agricultural
productivity around the world will be necessary to meet this rising demand. Finally, in the longer run,
climate change may have yet more serious effects on yields, pests, and disease, which may further reduce agricultural productivity.
In simple dollar terms, the decline in public sector funding has been more than offset by a rise in private research spending, and
stronger intellectual property rights and access to new markets are likely to continue bolstering private sector R&D. Yet, public
research and private research are not substitutes. Rather, they are complementary ingredients
to the Nation’s agricultural innovation system. The effects of a decline in public agricultural R&D
are likely to become more pronounced over time if the pace of fundamental advances in
agricultural sciences slows. Meanwhile, studies continue to find high rates of return to public
spending on agricultural research, which suggests that research is a good investment even in the
absence of the new threats to agriculture. Slippage of U.S. funding in agricultural R&D also
carries implications for U.S. engagement with the global research community. Many of the scientific
and technical constraints facing agriculture are shared among countries and regions, and the U.S. has long played an important role
in pushing out the scientific frontier needed to address these global challenges. To benefit from the rising research capacity of the
global community and the private sector, collaborative research arrangements with other countries and the private sector will
become increasingly important. These arrangements may help adapt and transfer scientific advances from U.S. institutions into
useable technologies for farmers around the world, as well as bring scientific advances from elsewhere to the United States. Finally,
in addition to promoting R&D collaboration between the public and private sectors, agriculture can benefit from collaborating with
disciplines outside agricultural science. New scientific discoveries and technological advances from other disciplines—genomics and
information sciences, in particular—may also be applicable to the challenges facing agriculture.
AT Perm
Reliance on labor and costs are the only roadblock to mechanization – the perm
and plan only results in a futile quest for new workers
Martin 17 (Phillip Martin; Philip Martin is a professor in the Department of Agricultural and
Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis, and Chair of the University of
California's Comparative Immigration & Integration Program; “Immigration Policy and
Agriculture: Possible Directions for the Future;” Journal on Migration and Human Security; 4-13-
17; accessed 7-20-18; http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2017/04/immigration-
article-of-the-day-immigration-policy-and-agriculture-possible-directions-for-the-
future.htmlRYD)
Satisfying and stretching the current farm workforce are short-term strategies to get farmwork done,
while labor-saving substitution and supplementing are longer-term strategies. Farmers are
grappling with the optimal strategy, which is likely to be determined by nonfarm developments,
including the speed with which costs fall and performance improves for labor-saving machinery,
potential changes to trade policy that affect imports, and changes that make guest workers cheaper or more
expensive. Farming labor-intensive commodities requires a great deal of capital, since planting an acre
of peaches or pears requires an investment of $15,000 per acre (football field) to generate revenue of $5,000 an acre after a several
year wait (Agricultural and Resource Economics, UC Davis 2017). Farmers
making such investments need to
decide whether to plant crops whose prices could be affected by imports and whether to invest in housing to
accommodate farmworkers or machines to harvest their crops. Juggling this triangle is difficult. The cost
of labor-saving machinery is likely to fall and performance to improve, but early adopters of
machines pay high prices and a lock in costs, since the machines must be paid for even if weather destroys the crop
or imports make it uneconomic to pick. Such uncertainty encourages many farmers to advocate for the
labor status quo, with guest workers replacing current workers who leave. Many farmers
delayed turning to guest workers because of the high cost of building housing in the urban areas
where most fresh fruits and vegetables are grown (almost all of California’s fresh fruits and vegetables are grown
in metro counties). With the cost of new housing for H-2A guest workers $10,000 a bed or more, many farmers hoped that the guest
worker provisions of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 (“S.744”) would
become law. S.744 would have replaced the H-2A program with new W-3 and W-4 programs and eliminated the need to provide
housing for guest workers. The W-3 program would be like the current H-2A program and tie a foreign worker to a particular US
farm employer and job for up to three years, while the W-4 “at will” program resembles the Replenishment Agricultural Worker
program in IRCA that was never implemented. W-4 visa holders would need an initial job offer to enter the United States, but could
then “float” from one farm employer to another and remain legal so long as they were not unemployed more than 60 days.
Minimum wages that would have to be paid to W-3 and W-4 guest workers would be reduced by $1 to $2 an hour, and farmers
would have to provide their W-3 and W-4 guest 8 S.744, 113th Cong (2013). Immigration Policy and Agriculture: Possible Directions
for the Future 261 workers with a housing allowance equivalent to $1 to $2 an hour, depending on the local cost of housing.
Employees would be responsible for finding their own housing. Making
it easier to hire guest workers is likely to
prolong the age-old quest for another group of newcomers willing to accept seasonal farm jobs.
If the United States is about to embark on another era of guest workers for agriculture, a better
strategy would be to use the Social Security and unemployment insurance taxes that farmers
currently do not pay on the wages of H-2A workers, in order to foster mechanization in the United
States and development in worker sending communities.
Retention of workers deters the process of mechanization – only the CP alone
can solve
Martin 13, (Philip L, Professor Emeritus: Agricultural and Resource Economics UC Davis, May
2013, “Migration and US agricultural competitiveness” https://search-proquest-
com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/1466008849/abstract/A7796F39CE294966PQ/1?accountid=1
4667 – KQ)
Agriculture has one of the highest shares of foreign-born and unauthorized workers among US industries; over three-fourths of hired
farm workers were born abroad, usually in Mexico, and over half of all farm workers are unauthorized. Farm employers are among
the few to openly acknowledge their dependence on migrant and unauthorized workers, and they oppose efforts to reduce
unauthorized migration unless the government legalizes currently illegal farm workers or provides easy access to legal guest
workers. The effects of migrants on agricultural competitiveness are mixed. On the one hand, wages held down by migrants keep
labour-intensive commodities competitive in the short run, but the fact that most labour-intensive commodities are shipped long
distances means that long-run
US competitiveness may be eroded as US farmers have fewer
incentives to develop labour-saving and productivity-improving methods of farming and
production in lower-wage countries expands. Keywords: Agriculture, farm labour, labour markets, competitiveness,
meatpacking Introduction Agriculture in the western United States has long been associated with migrant workers. Unlike the usual
process of agricultural development, in which small family farms are consolidated as labour-saving technologies enable farm
operators to farm more land, and ex-farmers and their children move to cities, agriculture in California and other western states
began with large tracts of land granted by the Spanish and Mexican governments. These large ranchos primarily grazed cattle and
grew grain without irrigation (Martin, 2009:Ch.2). Transportation and interest costs were lowered by the transcontinental railroad
after 1869, which gave California and other western farmers an incentive to produce fruits and vegetables that could be dried or
canned and shipped to distant markets. Most observers expected large farms to be broken into family-sized units to obtain seasonal
workers, recreating an Iowa family-farm system in western states that produced fruits and vegetables rather than corn and
soybeans. However, Chinese workers who were shut out of nonfarm labour markets by discrimination and newcomers from Japan
and other countries who could not find nonfarm jobs were available to be seasonal farm workers, and their availability made it
unnecessary to break up large farms to obtain a seasonal farm work force (Martin, 2009:Ch.2). Migrants from the Philippines, the
Midwestern Dust Bowl, and Mexico followed, putting labour-intensive agriculture on an immigration treadmill, always looking for
new workers abroad to replace those who move up in the US labour market by finding nonfarm jobs. The fact that labour-
intensive US agriculture usually found new workers willing to accommodate to the seasonal
demand for labour in crop production meant that there was less need for rather labour-saving
innovations or, if certain crops defied mechanization, productivity increasing changes or rising imports. In
this way, US farming is sometimes just as labour-intensive as in lower-wage countries although, once
commodities leave the farm, the US packing and processing system is among the world's most efficient. However, one
argument against immigration reforms that raise labour costs is that US farmers will be less able
to compete with imports from lower-wage countries.
Automation is coming now – only lower costs will ensure small farms can afford
machines
Bjerga and Parker 17 (Alan Bjerga Adjunct Instructor in business journalism @ Georgetown,
and Mario Parker, Bloomberg journalist, 1-20-17, “Robot Crop Pickers Limit Loss of Farm
Workers to Trump Wall” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-20/robot-crop-
pickers-limit-loss-of-u-s-farm-workers-to-trump-wall - KQ)
For many American farmers, the automation push isn't just about the president's goal to seal the border with Mexico, the traditional
source of cheap migrant labour for the world's largest agricultural exporter. There just aren't
enough crop pickers
around as immigration slows, deportations rise and the prospects of congressional reform look remote.
That's what prompted Steve Tennnes, a fruit and vegetable grower in Charlotte, Mich., to buy a $138,000 (U.S.)
machine that can collect up to three times as many apples per hour than workers who currently use
ladders and buckets, and do so more safely. He will be able to harvest more with fewer workers, and the benefits will
expand as he replants his orchard over the next decade to make it easier for the device to operate. "The trade-
off isn't, 'do you want a machine or do you want workers,'" Tennes, 39, said by telephone from his 50-hectare farm, where he
employs 72 workers. "It's, 'do you want to be in business or do you not want to be in business?'" After three straight years of
declining U.S. farm income, sources of labour
are becoming increasingly unreliable and costly, especially with
illegal immigration likely to face a crackdown in the Trump administration. That's forcing more
growers to invest in machines that reduce human involvement in the production cycle. More than 300,000
U.S. farm-workers don't have valid immigration papers, according to a 2009 survey by the Pew Hispanic Center. Other studies
suggest the number may be more than one million, based on the seasonality of the work and historical trends. That would be a
sizable chunk of the more than 2.6 million jobs that the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated for domestic farms last year. But
the supply of immigrant workers has been tightening. According to a Labor Department survey, in 1998, about 22 per cent
of foreign farm workers were in the U.S. for the first time. By 2013, that figure had plunged to 2 per cent. Fewer are arriving illegally,
and those who do come don't want farm work, said Craig Regelbrugge, co-chairman of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration
Reform, based in Washington. The consequences are potentially dire and could mean higher prices for some foods, according to a
2014 study from the American Farm Bureau Federation. An immigration policy focused on closing the border would shift up to 61
per cent of fruit production to other countries, sending jobs to Mexico and other nearby competitors, according to the biggest U.S.
farmer group. The government should create a new agricultural guest-worker program and streamline an immigration bureaucracy
that currently keeps legal workers from entering the U.S., said Kristi Boswell, a Farm Bureau lobbyist. "We support border security,"
Boswell said. "We will be looking for opportunities to use the enforcement pieces to make sure that agriculture has access to a new
program." In the meantime, the prospect of tougher restrictions is ginning up more interest in machines
from farmers who previously shied away from such big investments, according to Tony Koselka, the co-
founder of Vision Robotics Corp. in San Diego. The company sells lettuce-thinning machines for as much as $430,000 that
reduce the need for hand-picking of the perishable crop. The vineyards in Lodi, Calif., owned by Brad Goehring are adding
mechanical leaf-pullers to the automated harvesters that already reduced his need for grape-pickers by 95 per cent. While
his non-harvest workforce remained stable, he now needs just 15 people to pick the grapes, down from 300 before the machines.
Solvency – Shortages
Agricultural technology is the only way to solve for inevitable food shortages –
if we kick the CP it becomes a massive alt cause to shortages
Dutia 14 (Suren G. Dutia; Senior Fellow of the Kauffman Foundation and member of the
advisory board of Center for Digital Transformation, University of California; "U.S. Agricultural
R&D in an Era of Falling Public Funding;" Innovations, a peer reviewed journal published by MIT
press; Winter-Spring issue 2014; volume 9, number 1-2, pages 162-170|RYD)
Over the next 40 years, land, energy, water, and weather constraints will place unprecedented pressure
on mankind’s ability to access its most basic goods—food, fuel, and fiber. Humanity must now
produce more food in the next four decades than we have in the last 8,000 years of agriculture
combined. And we must do so sustainably. “The 2050 Criteria,” World Wildlife Fund The global agricultural system
faces tremendous challenges. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO) projects
that food production must increase by 70 percent over the next 40 years to satisfy increasing
demand, due to population growth and rising economic prosperity (Conforti, 2011). The main challenge of global
agriculture often is framed in terms of feeding a growing population, which is expected to
increase from seven billion people today to approximately nine billion in 2050. At the same time,
there is limited opportunity to expand the land used in agricultural production, and agriculture also
must deal with environmental risks such as climate change. To succeed in sustainably increasing food production, major
innovations in AgTech are required that increase agricultural productivity and improve the
efficiency and resiliency of the entire food system. While many variables will determine the demand for food in
2050 and the ease with which that food can be produced, the general trends suggest that we will need
significantly more food while facing an increasingly hostile environment, due to climate change and
diminishing resources. Projections from IHS Global Insights show large increases in the global demand for corn and soybeans, while
the amount of arable land per capita continues to decline due to population growth and urban development. The UN FAO
projects that both per capita and total demand for cereals, meat, and oil crops will rise by 2050,
with little increase in the amount of arable land. Climate change will pose a large challenge to these projections:
the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) projects that [figures omitted] climate change will nearly double
the price of corn, rice, and wheat. Figures 1–3 showcase these projections. Recently, Oxfam commissioned modeling to
make estimates about what food prices would look like 20 years from now, and determined that under normal
circumstances, food commodity prices are likely to increase about 50 percent between now and
2030. And if estimates of climate change are factored in, food prices could be up to 100 percent
higher than they are at present. This would put enormous pressure on the world’s population,
especially its poor. The Key Demand Drivers: Population Growth, Rising Incomes, and Demand for Renewable Energy
However, the food shortfall challenge will be made even more difficult by the demographic shift in
incomes occurring as the population rises; not only will there be more people overall, but more wealthy people who
demand more food with greater resource requirements. Figure 4 shows that the fastest growing segment of world
population is urban in the developing world. Billions of people already have moved from the rural countryside into
rapidly growing megacities, and billions more are expected to make this transition over the next forty years. As they gain affluence
through rising incomes, the
emerging middle classes of the developing world are consuming more
meat, fish, dairy, and processed foods, all of which require higher levels of input resources and
much higher levels of overall agricultural production. [figure omitted] The Dynamics of Development As a case
study of rising affluence driving changes in dietary preferences, consider Taiwan. Between 1975 and 1990, Taiwan’s GNI per capita
rose from $3,368 to $8,325. In this same period, per capita annual meat consumption rose from 30 kg to 70 kg (see Figure 5). A
similar trend emerged in China over the past 30 years, with annual per capita meat consumption growing from 9 kg to 58.2 kg. A
consequence of this rapid growth in meat intake is that China now consumes twice as much meat as the United States. Figure 6
shows total consumption of meat in China relative to the United States. While Chinese per capita meat consumption currently sits at
58.2 kg per year, U.S. per capita meat consumption is double that, at 120.2 kg per year. With increasing populations, even small
shifts in meat consumption in the developing world can have a large aggregate impact on total demand. Increased
demand
for meat poses a host of challenges to the global agricultural system, as livestock requires up to
8 kilograms of feed for every kilogram of meat produced (see Figure 7 for requirements based on type of
meat). Significantly more water is required to produce a kilogram of meat than a kilogram of plant crops. Meat production’s high
energy, water, and other resource costs thus lead to direct competition between crops grown for direct human consumption and
crops grown as inputs for raising livestock or fish in aquaculture. Biofuels
also will be a huge source of competition
for diminishing resources available for food production. According to the International Energy Agency, biofuel
production will see an 800 percent increase between now and 2050. While [figures omitted] much of that
biofuel will come from nonfood crops and second-generation production techniques such as cellulosic ethanol, most of the
current supply of biofuels and production in the near term will provide direct competition with
resources used to grow crops for human consumption and feed for livestock. Projected growth in
biofuel demand also is expected to require more than triple the land currently used for production, as shown in the bottom graph of
Figure 8, further intensifying competition between food crops and biofuel crops. [figure omitted] Planetary Boundaries and the Risk
Posed to Agriculture In order to continue sustainably, agriculture must exist within a stable
environment. Like other biological systems, agriculture is dependent upon earth’s biosphere for resources, such as water and
soil. Much of current agriculture also is dependent on manmade inputs like synthetic fertilizer. However, global environmental
challenges threaten the sustainability of these inputs. Recent
advances in earth systems science have yielded a
new understanding of processes that threaten the stability of the earth’s current biosphere
conditions. A landmark 2009 study in the journal Nature first proposed the concept of “planetary boundaries,”
geophysical thresholds that, if crossed, could be dangerous for innovations [figure omitted] humanity
(Rockstrom et al., 2009). Some of these planetary boundaries, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, are fairly well known.
Other boundaries, such as the nitrogen cycle and global land use change, have received relatively little attention as issues of global
concern. The full list of planetary boundaries and their proposed constraints is included in Figure 9 above. Six of the proposed
planetary boundaries are especially relevant to global agriculture: Climate change: Modern agriculture produces several
greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Agriculture contributes 13.5 percent of global GHG
emissions (IPCC, 2007). Biodiversity loss: Agriculture depends on a unique ecosystem of bacteria, fungi, and other
microorganisms present in the soil, and this ecosystem often is disrupted by modern agriculture activities. Nitrogen cycle: The
production of nitrogen-based fertilizer through the HaberBosch process removes roughly four times the atmospheric N2
recommended in the proposed boundary. Phosphorus cycle: The mining of finite sources of P and its concomitant application
as fertilizer with subsequent erosion into rivers, estuaries, and oceans. Nitrogen and phosphorus contribute to eutrophication.
Global freshwater use: Freshwater usage can grow only by 1,400 km^3 per year, and agricultural production accounts for
roughly 92 percent of total human water usage (Hoekstra & Mekonnen, 2012). Global land use: Agricultural cropland is 11.7
percent of total global land cover and must not exceed 15 percent, leaving limited land available for agricultural expansion.
Demand for food, fiber, and energy will continue to rise throughout the coming decades, and
agriculture’s impact on planetary boundaries also likely will rise. However, crossing the planetary boundaries
is not sustainable in the long term, as it will trigger geophysical shifts that will decrease agricultural production and lead to other
devastating impacts. Ultimately, humanity
must operate within the planetary boundaries to allow for a
stable global environment and a sustainable civilization. AgTech innovations can help to reduce
or even eliminate the negative global environmental impact of agriculture by reducing the fossil
fuel, fertilizer, water, and land requirements for food production. Increasing resource efficiency
can help to ensure a more sustainable and more productive food system.
Bots solve agriculture – even delicate produce can be picked at maximum
efficiency
Peters 16 Adele Peters is a staff writer at Fast Company, worked with GOOD, BioLite, and the
Sustainable Products and Solutions program at UC Berkeley, 8-11-16, “Farm Robots Are Starting
To Take Some Human Jobs, And That’s Not A Bad Thing”
https://www.fastcompany.com/3062029/farm-robots-are-starting-to-take-some-human-jobs-
and-thats-not-a-bad-thing
For farm workers, picking strawberries is painful work. Laborers–often migrant workers from Mexico, if the
farm is in California–might spend 10 to 12 hours a day in the sun, bending and re-bending over the tiny
plants, trying to fill baskets with the fragile fruits as quickly as possible for little pay. If the crop isn’t
organic, the fields are doused in pesticides that can put workers at risk of cancer. There’s another
option: Agrobot, one of several new specialized robots designed to do some of the worst manual labor on
farms. The strawberry harvester moves carefully through a field, using an artificial vision system to
identify ripe fruit and gently pick it. One new version of the robot, with 60 arms, can harvest a 20-acre
farm in three days; the same task would take 20 humans three days. Of course, the robot isn’t
cheap. A smaller 16-arm version of the machine will cost about $100,000 (it’s also only available for testing now, rather than full
implementation). On a strawberry farm in Mexico where workers might earn as little as $6 in a day, farm owners don’t have much
incentive to switch.
But in places like Japan, where small farms are often run by family farmers in their seventies and
where there’s a labor shortage, a new report calculates that the robots are already essentially
cost-competitive with humans. Farmers might also be willing to pay more. Farmers, on average, are
over 70 years old in Japan, says Sara Olson, lead agricultural analyst for Lux Research, which published a new industry report about
how quickly robots may start to replace some farmworkers. “So those tasks that the average sort of young and fit person would
already think of as backbreaking become nearly prohibitive, and cost becomes almost irrelevant in some of those cases.” In
other
places where it’s hard to find farm workers–including, potentially, the U.K. thanks to Brexit–the robots might
also make sense to buy now. For other crops, robots may be cost-competitive because of regulations in some areas. In
Europe, for example, where regulations strictly limit the amount of pesticides that workers can be exposed to, using a robot
can keep workers safe. Robots can also reduce pesticide use; a lettuce weeding machine can
precisely pull out weeds–a tedious task for humans–so that farmers don’t have to use as much weed killer. The report
found that an automated lettuce weeder is already as cheap as human labor in Europe. [PHOTO: ZBYSIU RODAK VIA UNSPLASH]
Other robots can replace some human labor in highly skilled tasks, such as pruning grapevines in a
vineyard. “To be really skilled in a way that’s commercially relevant takes significant training, and those are very highly paid
workers,” says Olson. “In some parts of the world, it’s a craft that’s dying out. Training a robot to do that job means you no longer
have the liability that your expert is going to move or retire.” Some of the robots
can also work in inclement
weather, unlike human workers, and have vision systems that work at night, so it’s possible to work essentially
around the clock.
Solvency – Working conditions
Machines are feasible and ease the demand of backbreaking and dangerous
labor
Huffman 12 (Wallace E. Huffman; C.F. Curtiss Distinguished Professor of Agriculture and Life
Sciences, and Professor of Economics and Agricultural Economics; “The Status of Labor-saving
Mechanization in U.S. Fruit and Vegetable Harvesting;” Choices magazine (a publication of the
Agricultural & Applied Economics Association); 2nd Quarter 2012 (April – June issue);
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/129107/2/cmsarticle_233.pdf|RYD)
For decades, U.S. growers have drawn upon illegal and legal workers from Mexico for planting
and harvesting labor in these crops. Over time, mechanization, modification of production practices, and improved
management practices have been central to reducing labor requirements for growing and harvesting
fruits and vegetables. Still, labor makes up 42% of the variable production expenses for U.S. fruit
and vegetable farms, although labor’s share varies’ significantly depending on the characteristics of the commodity and
whether the harvest is mechanized. In a global economy with produce imports from countries with low
wages, U.S. growers are anxious to reduce their labor costs. This paper provides a description of
important steps in the mechanization of U.S. fruit and vegetable harvesting, which can be hard,
backbreaking work and, in addition, the risk of falling is significant for hand-harvesting of tree
fruit from ladders. Consumers demand fresh market produce with minimal blemishes, bruises or damage. This eliminates the
option of mechanical harvesting, with current technology, for many products. However, a small amount of damage in
harvesting is permitted for fruits and vegetables destined for processing, and mechanical
harvesting can sometimes bring major cost savings. Switching to mechanical harvesting frequently requires
transformation of a farming operation—new crop varieties, new field configurations, and new packing processes. In addition, a
significant capital outlay is frequently required. Several photographs are included with this article as an aide to
visualizing mechanical harvesting technologies. Mechanization of Processing Fruits and Vegetables [graph omitted] California
Tomatoes The most storied success in mechanical fruit and vegetable harvesters is the self-propelled Johnson Tomato Harvester in
California.
Research and development to mechanize harvesting of processing tomatoes in
California was spurred by the anticipated end of the Bracero Program in 1964. This program had
provided a opportunity for Mexicans to obtain a permits to work in the Untied States, and as the program ended, the supply of
tomato harvesting labor was significantly reduced. In the 1950s, 5.3 hours of harvesting labor was required per ton of processed
tomatoes (Figure 1). In 1950, Jack Hanna, Department of Vegetable Crops, and Coby Lorenzen, of the Department of Agricultural
Engineering, both at UC Davis, began development of a system for mechanically harvesting processing tomatoes. Hanna began
breeding a tomato that could withstand the stress of mechanical handling, would ripen uniformly and would detach from the plant
during machine harvesting. Lorenzen worked on a harvesting machine to harvest tomatoes. In the late 1950s, another UC Davis
agricultural engineer developed a fruit-vine separator for Lorenzen’s harvester. By 1960, the University of California had obtained a
patent for the new tomato variety, and the Blackwelder Manufacturing Company, Rio Vista, California, undertook manufacturing
and selling the first mechanical tomato harvesters. This early mechanical tomato harvester cut the tomato plants at soil level and
lifted them up into a shaking mechanism that separated the fruit from the vines. Twelve workers rode on the early machines to sort
the fruit, remove green or blemished tomatoes and clods of dirt, requiring 2.9 hours of harvesting labor per ton of fruit--a 60%
reduction from hand harvesting. The tomatoes are conveyed directly into pallet bins that are transported on a trailer pulled beside
the harvester (Thompson and Blank 2000). [picture omitted] In 1964, 75 harvesters were sold in California and in 1965, 250 were
sold, yielding a combined capacity to harvest roughly 25% of the tomato crop. In five years, 95% of the total
California
processing tomato crop was harvested by mechanical harvesters, a major social gain (Schmitz and
Seckler 1970). In the mid-1970s, a further major technical advance occurred with the invention of high-speed electronic color sorters
incorporated into the harvester, which identified ripe tomatoes and used blasts of air to separate the ripe fruit from green and
rotten fruit and clumps of dirt. With improved leveling and ridging of tomato fields, new tomato varieties and a new shaker
innovation, labor requirements were reduced from 12 to 2-4 hand sorters per machine or to 0.4 hour of harvesting labor per ton
(Figure 2). Over 35 years, this dominant California technology has reduced labor requirements per ton of
California processing tomatoes by 92% (Figure 1). Current models of the Johnson self-propelled tomato harvester
(Figure 2), sold by the California Tomato Machinery Company, are equipped with two 32-channel high-speed color and dirt sorters
and use 2-4 hand sorters costing roughly $450,000 with a life of 15-20 years with intensive post-harvest maintenance. They have a
maximum capacity of 70 tons per hour and regularly are operated in two 10-hours shifts. Total harvesting costs are about $28 per
ton. Under this new technology, yield per acre for California processing tomatoes has increased and total production has increased
from 3 million tons—69% of total U.S. tonnage —in 1965 to about 12 million tons in 2010 (96% of total U.S. tonnage). Midwestern
and Eastern Tomatoes The Pik Rite Company is a leader for inventing and manufacturing tractor
drawn harvesters for
small-scale fruit and vegetable harvesting in the U.S. Midwest and East. The founder of the company built his first
mechanical tomato harvester in 1983, and after three years of improving and testing, sales began in 1986. The Model 190 is a low
capacity, 30 to 40 ton per hour, tractor-drawn harvesting machine with a lateral rotating single-brush-shaker system. This machine
has high-speed optical color sorters with blasts of air as an aid to the separation of ripe tomatoes from green ones and chunks of
dirt. The cost of this machine is $150,000-$160,000 and has a work life of 12-15 years. The Pik Rite tomato harvester is used in
Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where harvesting costs are roughly $48 per ton, substantially higher than the $28 per ton
costs in California. Midwestern and Eastern Cucumbers, Carrots and Peppers Pik Rite also develops and markets tractor drawn
mechanical harvesters for processing cucumbers, carrots and peppers. The cucumber harvester has a special dirt removal system
that uses blasts of air along with a “scrubber” belt to remove trash. It also has nonpinch conveyor chains spaced so small and
medium-sized cucumbers are saved and elevated to a storage bin, but oversized fruit exit with the vines into the field for better
harvesting efficiency. This separation process is aided by blasts of air blowing the vines and chaff upward and out of the rear of the
machine. This machine can unload its 125 bushel collecting bin in 20 seconds. [picture omitted] Florida Oranges In Florida,
oranges are grown for processing into orange juice. Hand harvesting still dominates but growers have
experimented with several mechanical harvesters. These trees are hand-picked by workers on ladders with a
bag, and when the bags are filled, the worker transfers the fruit to large metal box on the
ground. This is hard, dangerous work. Several companies have manufactured tree-fruit
harvesters for Florida citrus growers. They include Coe -Collier, OXBO, and Koran, which have supplied canopy-shaking
and trunk -shaking technologies. Oranges are difficult to harvest mechanically because they remain firmly attached to the tree when
ripe so both types of mechanical harvesting systems can cause significant tree damage; either to tree branches or tree trunks. The
canopy-shaking technology has two variations: one allows the fruit to fall to the ground where it is then picked up by workers or
machines. The other variation is a two-part motorized machine with one part gripping the tree trunk for shaking and the second
being a matching sloping table to aid with catching the falling fruit (Figure 3). The harvested fruit are conveyed into boxes. In an
attempt to reduce tree damage in harvesting oranges, the University of Florida has experimented with fruit loosening agents—
abscission compounds. When applied, this chemical loosens the stems so the ripe oranges are more easily dislodged, which reduces
damage from mechanical harvesting. However, mechanical harvesting of late-season Valencia oranges poses an additional problem
in that the trees at that time contain mature fruit that is ready for harvest and the young crop of oranges that will mature in the next
season. A successful abscission chemical needs to selectively loosen only the mature fruit, leaving the young crop unaffected. The
abscission compound has not yet been approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has made mechanical
harvesting less attractive. In addition, the arrival in Florida of the disease known as citrus greening which kills orange trees has also
reduced interest in mechanical harvesting. When trees are unhealthy, growers are more reluctant to add the additional stress of
mechanical harvesting. However, the main current form of mechanical harvesting is the trunk-shake and catch method (Figure 3),
but without an approved loosening agent for oranges, mechanical harvesting of oranges peaked at about 7% of the harvested
acreage in the 2008/09 season and then declined. In California processed plum harvesting, a similar trunk-shaking harvester is being
widely used successfully. Ripe plums detach more easily and reduce tree damage with mechanical harvesting. [picture omitted]
Other crops Mechanical harvesters for processing tart cherries have been successful in Michigan. The
machine is of a shake-and-catch type. This is a two-part self-propelled unit that is a lighter version of the harvester used for Florida
oranges (Figure 3). Ripe tart cherries bruise some in this harvesting system, but since the cherries are going immediately for
processing, the damage has not been viewed as significant. A large share of Michigan sour cherries are now harvested with this type
of mechanical harvester. For a large share of California wine grapes, mechanical harvesters are now used. These machines are a
relatively tall self-propelled unit that straddles the trellised grapevine rows. The harvester has rotating arms that dislodge the fruit
that is then caught on a table and conveyed into a wagon. See the machine by Korvan (Figure 4). Korvan also manufactures and sells
a mechanical berry picker for processing berries—largely for raspberries and blueberries. This machine is self-propelled and
surrounds the row of berry bushes similar to the wine grape harvester. It does some damage to the fruit, but since it is going
immediately for processing, this is not a serious problem. A little experimentation has been done with robotic harvesters that use
GPS to scout fruit location and then to pick fruit. However, electronic assessment of tree fruit is complicated by the fact that tree
limbs and unripe fruit may block the view of the electronic eyes. Mechanization of Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Harvesting The potato
is a large volume crop where mechanical harvesters were first invented almost 100 years ago. Although simple mechanical potato
diggers existed in the early 1900, the first complete harvester-separator machines did not exist until the 1950s. Incremental
innovations over time have transformed these machines into the modern self-propelled
mechanical potato harvester. Today’s machines scoop up the potato plant and soil beneath it. This material is elevated up
a rotating apron-chain consisting of steel links several feet wide, which allows lose dirt to fall away while retaining the potatoes. The
chain deposits this mixture into an area where further separation occurs. The most complex designs use vine choppers and shakers,
electronic sorters along with a blower system to separate good potatoes from rotten potatoes, stones, dirt and vines. Potatoes are
deposited into a trailing wagon or truck. These potatoes are used for both the fresh and processing markets. Other mechanical
harvesters for fresh fruits and vegetables are largely experimental. Fresh-market California iceberg
lettuce, melons,
strawberries and tomatoes have substantial harvesting costs and labor aids have reduced the
workload. For example, with iceberg lettuce, the head is cut by hand and trimmed, then laid on a table that conveys it to the
center where workers on the wagon field wrap it in plastic and place 32-heads per box, which are then stacked on the wagon. This
process has significantly reduced the cost of harvesting and packing iceberg lettuce. A similar process is applied to melons and
cantaloupe, except they are packed directly into boxes without plastic wrap. The hand-harvesting cost of fresh-market California
strawberries is very high, about $615 per ton, for this high-value delicate crop, which grows close to the ground and does not ripen
uniformly. Some California growers use conveyor belts as a labor aid to improve worker productivity. [picture omitted]
Washington State University and USDA-ARS scientists have developed an experimental
mechanical harvester for fresh market sweet cherries and apples (Peterson 2005); this machine harvests the
sweet cherries without their stems. A chemical fruit-loosening agent (abscission) is first applied to the trees a few days before
harvesting. The mechanical harvester is a two-part self-propelled machine with each part going on opposite sides of the trees.
Cushioned catcher pans on each unit are used to seal around the trunk and connect the two units. The harvester has a high density
rubber arm on each unit that bumps the tree branches, and this energy dislodges the ripe fruit (see Figure 5). Both harvesting units
have inclined catchment tables, but the mechanical conveyors are covered with a soft spongy material that reduces impact and the
padded conveyers move the fruit gently to the outer top side of each of the machines catching tables. As the fruit rolls over the table
a fan blows away leaves and trash, and the fruit passes to two slowly rotating modest sized storage bins or boxes. A benefit to
growers and consumers is that mechanically
harvested cherries have less bruising or damage than hand-
harvested fruit and reduced exposure to bacteria-laden human hands. Sweet cherry consumers are
accustomed to their cherries having stems, but research has shown that consumers can make the transition to stemless sweet
cherries. For mechanically harvesting sweet cherries and apples, a special tree architecture is needed—short with a “Y” shape,
opposed to the 20-25 feet tall conventional trees (see Figure 5). The mechanical sweet cherry harvester has excellent long-term
potential for harvesting high quality sweet cherries for the fresh market at an 80-90% reduction in harvest labor costs with less
damage than hand-harvested cherries (Whiting 2006). The new experimental BEI Black Ice Harvester works with delicate fresh-
market bush berries—raspberries, blackberries and blueberries. The Black Ice Harvester uses jets of air to create a turbulent local
environment within the machine and around the berry bushes, which then gently dislodge those that are ripe. The machine has
padded walls, and the berries fall onto a bed or table (the Centipede Scale catching frame) and then are gently conveyed to one
pound or smaller containers that are carried on the machine. A major advantage of this machine is that berries and bushes are not
touched by a picking or rotating-arm mechanism. This helps minimize damage to ripe berries and scarring of the bushes. With the
minimal plant damage by the harvester, the machine can be used to make multiple passes over the same bushes as the berries ripen
at different dates. With this machine, fruit quality meets or exceeds that of hand-harvested, and since no human handing of the fruit
is required in the harvesting and packing, there are reduced food safety concerns. The machine is being farm tested. Its estimated
cost is $150,000 for the smaller model and $200,000 for a larger model. A Perspective on the Future of Mechanization As in the past,
future mechanization of additional crops will be driven largely by benefit-cost considerations,
including the likely future international competitiveness of the U.S. industry. Relatively good machines exist for
mechanically harvesting many fruits and vegetables for processing. The most exciting development is that
there are new and effective harvesters that are in the final stages of testing for fresh market
berries, and for sweet cherries. These technologies would move forward rapidly if there is a
sudden increase in the cost of harvesting labor or uncertainly of availability of this type of labor.
Furthermore, these machines have potential for other crops. However, a short-term hurdle is that some crops are
declining in acreage because of changing demand and international competition. Also, some old orchard and vineyard architectures
are not compatible with the new harvesting systems. When the future prospects are good, orchards can be replaced with shorter
and trellised trees and vines. Uniform ripening of fruit and berries is critical to the success of some of these new harvesting systems.
NB Base
CP is popular among rural voters - avoids Base DA
Zurn and Youngberg 17 (Karolyn Zurn and John Youngberg; Karolyn Zurn is the president of
Minnesota Agri-Women. John Youngberg is the executive vice president of Montana Farm
Bureau Federation., ; "Agricultural R&D, collaboration critical to American farmers’
futures;" TheHill; 10-4-2017; accessed 7-20-2018; http://thehill.com/opinion/energy-
environment/353903-agricultural-rd-collaboration-critical-to-american-farmers-futures|RYD)
It’s no secret that U.S.

agriculture is struggling right now. Recent U.S. Department of Agriculture
estimates that farm income will drop to around $62.3 billion this year, about half of what farmers earned
in 2013. This will continue to have a significant impact on the sustainability of the American farm.
In fact, a July Rural Mainstreet Index poll of rural bank CEOs in areas with large farm and energy economies found that that “due to
weak farm income, almost one fourth of bankers reported rejecting a higher percentage of farmer loan applications and
approximately 60.9 percent reported boosting collateral on farm loans.” At the same time, farmers are tasked with
meeting the constant demand for more food. According to the University of Illinois, total production of rice, wheat,
soy and corn will need to rise 87 percent to meet a growing population by 2050. The demand for more food is rising at
the same time that land is being developed for other uses besides farming. In fact, farmable land per
capita could decline by an estimated 17 percent, as urban areas grow and weather changes our landscape. Historically,
farmers have been able to solve these problems by embracing new farming methods and
technologies to increase productivity but a recent decrease in public funding, coupled with the
news that the House Agriculture Committee is facing budget cuts of an estimated $10 billion,
will greatly impact America’s farms. This is why private funding has been and will continue to be key to the future of
agriculture.
NB Wages
The CP avoids the link to wages and turns it – modernization boosts wages
Taylor et al 12 (J. Edward Taylor, Diane Charlton, and Antonio Yu´nez-Naude; J. Edward Taylor
is a professor and Diane Charlton is a graduate student in the Department of Agricultural and
Resource Economics, UC Davis. Antonio Yu´nez-Naude is a professor in the Center for Economic
Studies at El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City. Taylor is a member of the Giannini Foundation of
Agricultural Economics; “The End of Farm Labor Abundance;” Migration Policy Institute,
February 2013, Accessed 7-11-2018, |RYD)
Fruit, vegetable, and horticultural (FVH)farms in the United States have enjoyed an extended period of
farm labor abundance with stable or decreasing real wages, thanks to an elastic supply of labor
from rural Mexico (Taylor 2010; Martin 2009). However, findings from panel data from rural Mexico point to a
declining long-term trend in the farm labor supply there (see Boucher et al. 2007, and below). At the same time,
an increasing demand for farm workers in Mexico may be creating unprecedented labor
competition for U.S. farmers. The combination of a declining farm labor supply and rising demand for
labor on Mexican farms raises the reservation U.S. farm wage—that is, the minimum wage needed to
induce new workers to migrate northward to farm jobs. Tighter border enforcement and drug-
related violence along the border may deter migration, but our analysis suggests that their
effect is largely secondary, reinforcing a negative trend in the immigrant farm labor supply. If this
analysis is correct, the obvious policy implication is that immigration reform is not the answer to
securing an abundant supply of low-cost farm labor from Mexico in the medium to long term,
if not sooner. This implication has important ramifications for U.S. agriculture as well as for rural communities. A reduced
supply of Mexican farm workers implies that U.S. growers must look for labor substitutes. One
option is to shift out of labor-intensive FVH production. That is unlikely, given the demand for high-
quality U.S. fresh produce. Another option is to seek migrant workers from other countries with lower
reservation wages. However, there is a limited supply of Central American workers willing and able to migrate
(through Mexico) to work on U.S. farms, and due to logistical and administrative costs, importing labor from more
distant countries does not appear to be feasible on a large scale. Another solution would be to
invest in labor-saving agricultural production and labor management technologies. Under this option,
capital improvements in farm production would increase the marginal product of farm labor;
U.S. farms would hire fewer workers and pay higher wages. From 2007 to 2009, 23% of U.S. farm
worker families had an income below the poverty line (Martin 2012). Changes in production
technology are necessary to increase farm wages, and better labor management is needed to match fewer
workers with more jobs–the two key ingredients to reducing farm worker poverty. Rising farm wages create an
incentive for both to happen.
States CP
1NC – States CP
CP: The 50 states and all relevant sub-nationalities should
- Allow undocumented workers to report labor abuse without fear of
deportation
- Extend minimum wage laws to undocumented workers
Congress gridlocked, wage theft reforms at state level spill up
McMillan 16 (Tracie McMilan: senior fellow at Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism
at Brandeis University (Tracie McMillan, January 29th 2016, , “Activists Demand A Bill Of Rights
For California Farm Workers”
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/01/29/464758284/activists-demand-a-bill-of-rights-
for-california-farm-workers)
Farm workers in two of the nation's most important agricultural counties joined other low-wage food sector workers on Wednesday,
demanding better wages with a new Bill of Rights.The thrust of the bill, which is aimed at workers in Ventura and Santa Barbara
counties in California, is to establish a "rule of law" in the fields, observers say."There
are rampant violations of farm
workers rights in agriculture," says Bruce Goldstein, executive director of Farmworker Justice, a national advocacy group
supporting the effort. "A lot of this is that a lot of employers feel like it's not likely they're going to get caught [breaking laws], and
that if they get caught the cost is not that much —so they might as well take the risk."That's
particularly true because
so many farm workers – an estimated 40 to 50 percent — are undocumented. Many are afraid
that if they report labor abuse they'll be deported, says Goldstein.More than 80 groups back the list of demands
in the bill, says Lucas Zucker, policy director for Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, one of the groups leading
the charge. The movement has garnered support from the United Farm Workers, Planned Parenthood and Maria Echaveste, who
formerly headed up the federal Department of Labor's wage and hour division.The bill's organizers say they've been inspired by
watching other low-wage workers, particularly those in the food industry, make gains. Major cities like San Francisco and New
York have passed ordinances raising wages to $15 an hour. Meanwhile, restaurateur Danny Meyer in New York has banned tipping
in part to stabilize restaurant wages."There
have been lots of kind of explosions of the last couple years
of cities trying to move minimum wages, maternity leave, wage theft ordinances," says Zucker. "But
that's really been concentrated in urban areas. There's been essentially nothing like this in a rural areas. We think this can set
precedent for other counties to set stronger labor conditions for farm workers."The two counties the bill of rights would affect,
Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, are immediately north of Los Angeles. Combined, they are home to roughly 40,000 farm
workers or roughly 1 in every 10 farm workers in the state. And because the U.S. holds roughly 1 million farm workers total, a bill of
rights in those counties would cover about 4 percent of all farm workers in the country, organizers say.Many
of the bill's
items — which are grouped into wage theft, safety and health, and overwork — simply
demand that existing laws be enforced, like respecting required rest breaks and penalizing
employers who steal wages. It also calls for educating farm workers on their rights and
establishing a complaint hotline.But a few items are arguably more ambitious, such as a request to hold jobs for
pregnant women who choose to avoid pesticide exposure by not working in fields and technical assistance for growers to reduce
dependency on dangerous pesticides. The bill also calls for the creation of a position in local government to address extensive sexual
harassment and violence against women in the fields.Though framed as a bill of rights, the organizers will need to shore up county-
level political support for the enforcement efforts, government funding and new public offices. Zucker says his group hopes to gain
traction on the bill quickly, and get some of the demands written into county ordinances before the end of the year. If
farm
workers can catch the momentum created by other efforts to improve working conditions , says
Goldstein, they can set the stage for bigger changes down the road."There's a lot of gridlock in
Congress on many labor and immigration and occupational safety and health issues," says
Goldstein. But local initiatives are often more progressive than federal ones. And when those
initiatives succeed locally, he says, "changes at the local and state levels can bubble up to the
national level."
H-2A rework CP
1NC
CP: The united states federal government should
- Create a new temporary visa program that allows prospective migrants
to negotiate employment terms with agricultural sector employers
- Allow visa holders to stay in the US for a year and allow indefinite
renewals
- Allocate all H-2A visas to the new visa program
Temporary Visas Solve the problems with H2-a
Semuels 13 (Alana Semuels: Journalist for The Atlantic, 3-30-13, “For U.S. farmers and
Mexican workers, it's tough being legal” http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-guest-worker-
20130331-dto-htmlstory.html#)
A coalition of farmers has proposed a more flexible alternative to H-2A. The Agricultural Worker Visa
Program would allow two options for guest workers. One would give workers visas good for 11 months
— one month longer than is now permitted — and would allow them to move from employer to employer,
which is difficult under existing rules. In theory that would allow undocumented workers to leave
abusive employers and find jobs elsewhere, worker advocates say. The other option would allow an
employee to work for an employer under contract for a fixed period, but would give the worker
a visa term of up to a year. The visa could be renewed indefinitely as long as the worker
returned to his home country for at least 30 days over a three-year period. This option would, in
theory, ensure employers a more predictable supply of workers and would give workers more
stability.
NB: Wages
The Counterplan doesn’t link to the wages DA
O’Brien et. al 14 (Patrick O’Brien: Principal with the World Agricultural Economic and
Environmental Services and former director at ERS/USDA for the Commodity Economics
Division, Et. Al. (John Kruse, Adjunct Professor, Agricultural Economics, University of Missouri-
Columbia, Darlene Kruse, worked for the Legislative Fiscal Bureau for the State of Iowa as a
legislative analyst), February 2014, “Gauging the Farm Sector’s Sensitivity to Immigration
Reform via Changes in Labor Costs and Availability”
https://www.fb.org/files/AFBF_LaborStudy_Feb2014.pdf)
Worker advocates also see the program as broken for several reasons including: the tying of a farm worker to a single
employer, skewing the balance of power between employer and worker and minimizing the
worker’s ability to address employer abuses; the potential for recruiter abuse both in workers’ home countries and
in the U.S.; lax enforcement of worker benefit provisions such as the provision of adequate housing; and
employer abuse in denying workers full and prompt payment for all hours worked at the AEWR wage. An improved
guest worker program could improve program operation from both an employer and a worker
advocate perspective. Such a program could protect the essence of the program—that is, insuring that
the hiring of foreign workers to fill worker shortages in the agricultural sector does not have any
adverse impact on the jobs and wages of U.S. citizens and authorized aliens working in
agriculture or elsewhere in the economy. Key elements of a more effective guest worker program could
include: 1. Creation of a new agricultural visa program that gives employers and employees the
flexibility to agree on the employment terms that work for them; 2. Stability via an agricultural
visa that lasts at least three years and can be renewed; 3. A way for farm workers who are in the U.S. without
documentation to apply for legal status as they continue working in agriculture; 4. Enforcement and verification to
ensure that agricultural visa holders are here legally and, in fact, working on farms; 5. A requirement
that visa holders return to their home countries when their visas expire, but allows employers to
continue to recruit eligible workers; 24 6. An alternative to, and elimination of, the H-2A temporary and seasonal visa
program, which simply has not met agriculture’s needs; 7. A program that is available to all agricultural sectors,
including dairy and livestock production; and 8. Streamlining program administration starting
with the critical determination of whether or not there is a farm labor shortage to be filled with
guest workers. Such a determination could be made earlier in the year to facilitate farm
business planning. The impact of an Alternative III reform with such a redesigned guest worker
program would be substantially different. Using the guest worker program provisions included in the Senate’s 2013
Bill, farm worker costs would increase by: 1. The general 1.5% to 3.0% ($0.30 to $0.60 per hour) increase in
wages in the overall economy; 2. Half of the $1 per hour increase in wages for guest workers who replace undocumented
workers given the lower wages set in the Senate version compared with existing AEWR’s. This puts the increase across the entire
hired farm work force at $0.25 per hour rather than the $0.50 under Alternative III with a guest worker program based on the
existing H-2A program; 3. A negligible change in the cost of guest worker benefits, although a significant
change in who receives the benefits. Assuming for simplicity’s sake that the benefits in question cost the same $2.50 per hour as
under the H-2A-type program, all 265,000
guest workers needed to replace agriculture’s net loss of
workers after legalization and the movement of workers out of agriculture to elsewhere in the
economy would receive the payment. Of this 265,000, 65,000 were already receiving the payments in 2012 based on
their H-2A status. Hence, employers would pay the added $2.50 per hour to about 200,000 new guest workers. However, no
payments would be made to non-H-2A workers working on farms with H-2A workers as required under the current program. Using
the same assumption that 25% of non-H-2A workers are already receiving the payments, employers would no longer be paying up to
235,000 non-H-2A workers. Hence, while who got paid benefits would change dramatically, how much is paid in benefits would not;
and 4. A fee charged farm employers to pay for the overall cost of running the program and payment of specific guest worker
expenses such as transportation. This fee could be set at a percentage of guest worker wages paid at the time of employer
application. Given that employers are already paying some of the expenses in question themselves
(such as the cost of transporting guest workers from their homes to the work site), the net increase in employer cost could
be as little as 1%--or $0.10 per hour
***Kritiks
Imperialism K
1NC – Impreialism K
Formalizing agricultural migration upholds the imperial financial processes
which destroy Mexico from above – the alt is an intervention from Mexican
Diasporic and Binational Communities which holds the only potential for
opposing imperialism
Wise & Breña, 06 – Wise is the director of the Graduate Program in Development Studies at
the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas. Mariana Ortega Breña is a freelance editor and
translator based in Ithaca, New York. She specializes in academic writing, particularly in the
humanities and the social sciences. (Raúl Delgado and Mariana Ortega, March 2006, “Migration
and Imperialism The Mexican Workforce in the Context of NAFTA”
http://www.yorku.ca/rajagopa/documents/topost-naftaWorker-wise-06.pdf) //kq
*Note. Maquiladora: a factory in Mexico run by a foreign company and exporting its products to
the country of that company.
Since the imposition of neoliberal politics and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexico’s
economic integration with the United States has undergone significant changes. The
intensification of commercial ties between the two nations as part of a new strategy of imperialist
domination controlled by financial capital and the large U.S. multinational corporations has
restructured binational work processes and strongly affected the labor force. I shall argue here that the
reigning model of economic integration is sustained by the role that the Mexican workforce—both
in Mexico and outside its borders—has played in the industrial restructuring of the United States. This
process has elements that can be characterized as a kind of transnationalism “from the top,” a strategy
that responds to the interests of U.S. capital. At the same time it has elements that some writers (e.g.,
Smith and Guarnizo, 1999) see as a transnationalism “from below,” embodied in the practices of migrant
workers and their organizations and their counter33 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 147, Vol. 33 No. 2, March 2006 33-
45 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X05286083 © 2006 Latin American Perspectives © 2006 Latin American Perspectives, Inc.. All rights reserved. Not for
commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Downloaded from http://lap.sagepub.com at YORK UNIVERSITY on June 18, 2007 parts in Mexico.
Transnationalism from below not only creates opportunities for resistance but also outlines
avenues for an alternative kind of development. The interplay between the two perspectives presents a number of
possibilities. Starting with these premises, the essay is subdivided into four sections. The first describes the Mexican export model in the context of
Mexico-U.S. integration under neoliberalism and NAFTA. The second presents some revealing data on the consequences of the new migratory
dynamics. The third addresses the dialectic between Mexico’s export growth and international migration, and the final section reviews the responses of
the migrant community. THE MEXICAN EXPORT MODEL AND THE DYNAMICS OF INTEGRATION Mexico is typically considered a
case of successful economic integration because it exports manufactured goods (CEPAL, 2002): it is Latin
America’s number-one exporter and occupies thirteenth place worldwide. The rigorous, even fundamentalist
application of neoliberal recipes backed up by NAFTA has helped to make the economy one of
the world’s most open (Guillén, 2001) even though its export platform is focused primarily on the
United States. The fact that 90 percent of its exports consist of manufactured goods is purportedly a sign of the country’s advanced export
profile. Of that 90 percent, the so-called disseminators of technical progress make up 39.4 percent (CEPAL, 2002; Cimoli and Katz, 2002). The
optimistic assessment of this integration, which is related to the notion of open regionalism promoted by CEPAL (1994;
Baumann et al., 2002), is mainly a distorted view of reality. In fact, an analysis of Mexico’s new export
profile indicates the importance of the maquiladoras,1 whose exports multiplied 26 times between 1982 and 2004,
eventually amounting to more than half (US$87,548 million) of total manufactured exports. Additionally, we
observe a process of “disguised assembly” in other areas of manufactured exports such as the automotive industry (Cypher,
2004; Delgado Wise, 2004; Fujii, 2000; Carrillo and Ramírez, 1997; Carrillo, Mortimore, and Estrada, 1998). Between 1993 and 2000, the
proportion of temporary imports in the export total was almost 80 percent (Dussel, 2003). Another
component of this dynamic is the disproportionate interfirm commerce, estimated at between 65 and
75 percent (Arroyo, 2003; Durán and Ventura-Dias, 2003; Baker, 1995). The shared production scheme that is essential
to interfirm commerce does not carry equally shared profits, and export prices are 34 LATIN AMERICAN
PERSPECTIVES © 2006 Latin American Perspectives, Inc.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Downloaded from
http://lap.sagepub.com at YORK UNIVERSITY on June 18, 2007 artificially
established by the same firms without declaring
earnings. Net profits are transferred out of the country while the jobs created are subsidized at
the expense of the Mexican economy. The facts regarding the Mexican export model contradict
the notion of free interplay among market forces proclaimed by neoliberal orthodoxy. What is worse,
the model plunders investment resources that might otherwise revitalize the Mexican
economy. Needless to say, the fragility and the structural volatility of the export sector are subject to the ebbs
and flows of the U.S. economy and, above all, the phases of a static and short-term comparative
advantage, as in the case of a cheap workforce. Recently Mexico experienced an important decrease in the growth of
manufactured exports because of the U.S. economy’s loss of dynamism and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (Huerta, 2004). Although
the maquiladora has since 1990 been the center of the Mexican export model (Fujii, Candaudap, and Gaona, 2005), it has experienced a decline since
the end of 2000 because of reduced demand in the United States and the competition of regions with lower wages than Mexico such as China and
Central America. This has propelled the relocation of maquiladoras and affected relative wage increases for those operating in Mexico (De la Garza,
2004). In order to understand Mexico’s integration with the United States it is necessary to
consider what it is that the country really exports and demystify the notion that it possesses a
buoyant export manufacturing sector. What the nation exports is in fact labor inputs that do not
leave the country (Tello, 1996). The purported growth in the export manufacturing sector is nothing
more than a smokescreen, serving to obscure the contraction of part of the Mexican economy,
which is compelled to serve as a labor reserve for foreign capital. The kind of specialization that takes
place in this kind of integration is clearly linked to the direct export of Mexican labor to the United States. The
result is an incalculable loss for the country. The maquiladora implies the net transfer of
profits abroad. For its part, migration forces Mexico to absorb the costs of the reproduction and
training of the workforce and deprives the Mexican economy of the chief force required for
the accumulation of capital. THE NEW U.S.-MEXICO MIGRATORY DYNAMIC We must not lose sight of the fact that, in general terms,
international migration has its historical roots in economic, political, social, and cultural factors (Castles, 2003). Although Mexican labor
migration to the United States dates back to the nineteenth century, it now exhibits unprecedented vigor. One need
only point out that in the past 34 years (1970–2004) the Delgado Wise / MIGRATION AND IMPERIALISM 35 © 2006 Latin American Perspectives, Inc.. All
rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Downloaded from http://lap.sagepub.com at YORK UNIVERSITY on June 18, 2007
Mexican-born population in the United States has multiplied thirteenfold (CONAPO, 2004). This figure
calls into question the alleged benevolence of the integration process in which the country is
immersed. The unprecedented growth of the Mexican-born or Mexican-origin population residing in the United States—as an expression of the
exponential increase in migration— can be clearly appreciated from Figure 1. The contemporary proportions of this phenomenon may be summarized
as follows: The
United States has the highest immigration rate in the world, and Mexicans constitute
the largest group (27.6 percent according to CONAPO, 2004). The Mexican-descended population residing
in the United States in 2004 was estimated at 26.6 million people, 10 million of whom were
Mexicanborn migrants (legal or not). There is no other diaspora of equal magnitude in the world
(CONAPO, 2004). The annual average number of Mexicans who left their country and established residence in the United States in 2004 was estimated
at 400,000. According to UN estimates for the 2000–2005 period, this makes Mexico the main source of migration in the world, followed by China
(390,000) and India (280,000) (United Nations, 2004) (Fig. 2). Remittances received by Mexico in 2004 amounted to US$16.6 billion (Banco de México,
2005). This is the highest rate worldwide, followed by 36 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES Figure 1. Mexicans Resident in the United States, 1990–2003
Source: CONAPO (2004). © 2006 Latin American Perspectives, Inc.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Downloaded from http://lap.sagepub.com at YORK UNIVERSITY on June 18, 2007 India (27 percent less) and the Philippines (36 percent less ) (United
Nations, 2004). This quantifiable growth is accompanied by some significant qualitative transformations: Practically
every place in
Mexico registers some international migration; 96.2 percent of municipalities have some kind of
connection with migration (CONAPO, 2004). At the same time, and despite the fact that it remains concentrated in a handful of states,
the Mexican population in the United States is now distributed across most of the country. There is an expansion of migratory
circuits toward the eastern and central-northern parts of the country, where some of the most dynamic centers of industrial restructuring are
located. There has been a steady increase in the educational level of Mexican migrants over the past decade (Fig. 3). In 2003, 34.9 percent of Mexican-
born U.S. residents 15 and older had more than a high-school education. This rate increases to 49 percent when the whole population of Mexican origin
is taken into account (CONAPO, 2004). In contrast, the Mexican average in 2000 was 27.8 percent (INEGI, 2000), which means that, in general terms
and contrary to common assumptions, the number of qualified workers leaving the country is larger than the
number that remains. It must be pointed out, however, Delgado Wise / MIGRATION AND IMPERIALISM 37 Figure 2. The Twenty Largest
Developing Country Recipients of Remittances Source: United Nations (2004) (figures are for 2002). © 2006 Latin American Perspectives, Inc.. All rights
reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Downloaded from http://lap.sagepub.com at YORK UNIVERSITY on June 18, 2007 that
compared with other groups of immigrants in the United States the Mexican contingent has the least schooling. This
illustrates the
serious educational deficit that persists in the country and is accentuated by the implementation
of neoliberal policies (OCDE, 2005). The higher-education figures for U.S. residents in 2004 included 385,000 Mexican-born individuals and
1.4 million people of Mexican origin. Eightysix thousand of the former had graduate degrees, while the figure for the latter was 327,000 (CONAPO,
2004). This suggests that the loss of qualified professionals has become an important problem. The country has little
need for a qualified workforce, and there are practically no requirements regarding scientific and technological knowledge under the prevailing
assembly model. In the United States 36.2 percent of Mexican workers are in the secondary sector (i.e., manufacturing) compared with 27.8 percent in
Mexico. These numbers challenge the stereotypical view of the migrant as an agricultural worker and
highlight the fundamental changes in the trans-border labor market. Only 13.3 percent of migrants work in the primary sector (raw materials). Also,
Mexicans are the U.S. immigrant group with the greatest industrial participation and the lowest average income (CONAPO, 2004). 38 LATIN AMERICAN
PERSPECTIVES 20.0 30.0 40.0 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 Years High School Diploma and more Figure 3. Level of Education
of Mexican Emigrants Source: CONAPO (2004). © 2006 Latin American Perspectives, Inc.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized
distribution. Downloaded from http://lap.sagepub.com at YORK UNIVERSITY on June 18, 2007 Finally, these changes have transformed the pattern of
migration: what was once a circular flow is now characterized by the preeminence of the established immigrant and includes variants such as larger
female and family-member participation.2 THE DIALECTICS OF EXPORT GROWTH AND INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION The particular dialectic between
the supposedly successful export sector and the rest of the economy calls into question the two concepts that have been employed to explain the
inclusion of underdeveloped economies in the classical Latin American theory of economic development. The “structural dualism” functionalist
approach (Germani, 1974) is not applicable, and neither is the concept of the “enclave” (Cardoso and Faletto, 1974) that has been resurrected to
explain Mexican-U.S. integration (Calva, 1997: 71–101). Both these concepts wrongly assume that the successful sector and the rest of the economy are
cut off from each other and can be analyzed separately. On the contrary, the relative
success of the export sector is based
on the pauperization of the rest of the economy. The export thrust of the Mexican economy
requires certain macroeconomic conditions that are achieved through the constriction of
internal accumulation, particularly the shrinking of public investment spending, the state’s
abandonment of strictly productive activities, the sale of public enterprises and control of the
fiscal deficit, and attractive interest rates for foreign capital, which result in a reduction of the
economy’s domestic activity. Social inequality deepens, generating an ever-increasing mass of
workers who have no place in the country’s formal job market. This is why a third of Mexico’s
population belongs to the informal economy, which ultimately feeds the vigorous migratory
process. The contradictory migration and growth dynamic generated by this context can be synthesized as follows: First, international
migration is accompanied by certain “positive” elements that benefit the Mexican economy. On the one hand,
migrants’remittances are a source of currency for the nation. With the decline of other sources of external financing (foreign debt and direct foreign
investment) and the loss of dynamism for the maquila industry’s exports, remittances become a crucial foundation for the fragile macroeconomic
balance that characterizes the contemporary neoliberal model.3 On the other hand, by reducing the pressures on the labor market and social conflict,
migration functions as a sort of escape valve given the diminished jobgenerating structural capacity of the economy. In this sense, the family and,
Delgado Wise / MIGRATION AND IMPERIALISM 39 © 2006 Latin American Perspectives, Inc.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution. Downloaded from http://lap.sagepub.com at YORK UNIVERSITY on June 18, 2007 above all, remittances help to cover the
social costs and minimal infrastructure previously supported by public investment, aiding in the subsistence of many Mexican households (García
Zamora, 2003). They tend to moderate the distributive conflict between the state and the society’s most vulnerable groups, to some extent alleviating
poverty and marginalization. All of this ultimately constitutes a paradox: migration unintentionally
operates as a crucial support for the neoliberal system, providing it with a certain “stability”
and a “human face.” Second and more important, migration constitutes a loss of valuable
economic resources and the export of potential wealth. The exporting of a workforce implies transferring to the
receiving country a wealth whose reproduction and training costs are absorbed by all Mexicans . Third, in contrast
to the case of the labor force that is exported indirectly (via maquilas), emigrants who establish themselves in the United
States spend a very significant part of their wages there, with consequent benefits for the U.S.
economy. Mexican consumers residing in the United States in 2003 contributed US$395 billion to
the U.S. economy (CONAPO, 2004). This amount significantly contrasts with the remittances sent to
Mexico, which amounted to US$13.4 billion. Fourth, from a fiscal point of view, Mexican migrants’contributions to the U.S.
economy exceed the benefits and public services they receive in exchange (Anderson, 2005) and thus contribute to the social security of U.S. workers.4
Fifth, although it is difficult to measure their precise impact, the pressure exerted on the labor market by migrants negatively affects wage rates in the
U.S. economy, particularly in the fields or sectors in which they work. A recent study reveals that the gap between Mexican migrants’average income
and the established minimum wage in the United States has decreased in the last 25 years. Measured in constant 2000 prices, migrants’ average
income declined 38 percent during that period, from US$11.70 to US$7.20 per hour (Papail, 2001). The paradox lies in the fact that this situation
parallels the changes in migrants’profiles previously described—that is, their higher educational levels and increased presence in the manufacturing
sector. Still, despite Mexican migrants’ contribution to the reduction of production costs in the U.S. economy, their impact is limited to certain areas of
the labor market and does not affect the majority of U.S. workers. In fact, there is no correlation between the flow of Mexican migration and the
unemployment rate in the United States (see Fig. 4), which suggests that the migrant workforce has instead helped to satisfy the existing demand in
certain areas of the U.S. labor market.5 Finally, there is a new trend that calls into question the medium- and longterm viability of this pattern in the
present integration model (along with its 40 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES © 2006 Latin American Perspectives, Inc.. All rights reserved. Not for
commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Downloaded from http://lap.sagepub.com at YORK UNIVERSITY on June 18, 2007 benef icial impact on the
U.S. economy and its role in Mexico’s macroeconomic and social “stability”): depopulation. In
the last half of the 1990s, 755 of
Mexico’s 2,435 municipalities (31 percent) had a negative growth rate, and there are also signs
of an abandonment of productive activities and a diminution of remittances per family. This new
scenario undermines the basis for future migration and thus its socioeconomic function. This shows the perverse relationship
between the Mexican export sector and international migration. Thus, Mexico is responsible for the reproduction
and training of the workforce, and the United States exploits this resource to restructure its industry and
reduce its production costs. This process is sustained by wage differences and the accompanying
sources of resource transfer. Overall, the resulting dynamic can hardly be perpetuated in the face of one-sided
migration and depopulation. This calls attention to the competitive limitations of a short-term
strategy that depends for restructuring on a cheap workforce. THE MIGRANT COMMUNITY AND THE CHALLENGES
OF NEOLIBERAL GLOBALISM To conclude, it is important to point out that the migrant community is increasingly less
isolated, dispersed, and disorganized. As a contradictory by-product of historical development and the maturation of migratory
networks, individual migrants are becoming what Miguel Moctezuma (2001) describes as a collective binational and
transterritorial agent. This process is Delgado Wise / MIGRATION AND IMPERIALISM 41 Figure 4. Unemployment Rate in the United
States, 1994–2004 Source: U.S. Department of Labor (2004). © 2006 Latin American Perspectives, Inc.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or
unauthorized distribution. Downloaded from http://lap.sagepub.com at YORK UNIVERSITY on June 18, 2007 taking shape through a
broad network of clubs (more than 700 at present), associations, and federations operating in several
states of the United States and a multiplicity of alliances and coalitions with a national and
binational perspective. In this sense, the migrant community shows an incipient development toward
superior organizational schemes. Among their characteristics are relatively permanent formal organizations, the
strengthening of cultural identity, belonging, and acts of solidarity involving home communities,
the establishment of lines of communication with various public and private institutions both in
Mexico and in the United States, and substantial financial potential (made up of collective funds that transcend
the characteristic limit of individual or family remittances) devoted to social work and, eventually, local and regional
development projects. One of the most significant demands made by migrant communities has been full
exercise of the rights of Mexican citizens abroad, particularly the right to vote, which the Mexican Congress approved on
June 28, 2005. This demand was a direct consequence of 1998 constitutional reform regarding the maintenance of Mexican nationality and
incorporates three issues that counter the ideology and practices of neoliberal globalism: the
strengthening of national identity, contrary to the disintegrative and disarticulating tendencies
inherent in globalism; a collective impulse toward local and regional development that opposes
the destructive impact of the internal market and the neoliberal basis of production; and
democracy from below that decries the breach between the political class and civil society
exacerbated by neoliberal “democracy” (Petras and Veltmeyer, 2001: Chap. 6).
--xt: Link
A pathway to citizenship is a way to incorporate subjected peoples into the
empire
* b ˆ ete noire – Something vigorously disliked
A close examination of earned citizenship demonstrates that, while ideologically heterogeneous, it is predominantly
neoliberal and punitive in orientation; it disciplines the putative citizen through expectations of
economic productivity and moral self-governance and under threat of various sanctions. 1 The
neoliberal and punitive aspects of the framework cast the undocumented in a deficit position. In
doing so, earned citizenship implicitly subscribes to the core claim of restrictionists 2 — namely, that
undocumented immigrants have committed moral transgressions that require some form of
moral recompense. Such an approach is empirically flawed because it ignores the complex, structural causation
of undocumented migration, and it is conceptually flawed in that it locates legalization within the restrictionists’ terms of the debate.
However, an examination of earned citizenship is productive not only to enhance an understanding
of recent proposals for legalization, but also to illuminate the larger structure of prevailing citizenship practices. Earned cit-
izenship begs the question of why some should have to demonstrate their worthiness for citizenship
while, for most, citizenship is conferred merely by the accident of birth. By highlighting the prevailing practice
of unearned citizenship, earned citizenship exposes the moral instability of the contemporary
citizenship structure as a whole, and imperils the citizenship claims of all Americans. Ultimately,
mapping these contours of earned citizenship and its relationship to citizenship more generally may enable the development of alternative moral
Earned citizenship emerged as a
frameworks for justifying and advocating legalization of the undocumented population.
reaction to the political fallout of the last large-scale legalization program, the Immigration
Reform and Control Act of 1986 (“IRCA”). 3 Although that program successfully regularized the
status of approximately three million people, it failed to halt the employment of undocumented
workers or the future flow of undocumented migrants. 4 Its many shortcomings cast a deep and
persistent shadow over future immigration reform efforts. Derided as an “amnesty” — a
something-for-nothing giveaway that, according to its critics, not only rewarded past law-breaking but incentivized future
immigration violations by implicitly promising future legalizations — IRCA is the b ˆ ete noire of immigration reform
history. That reputation has created a political imperative to differentiate future reform efforts.
Earned citizenship is, according to its advocates, “not amnesty.” While citizenship via naturalization or previous
legalization programs such as IRCA has long been earned in some sense, in that any substantive requirements for citizenship could be construed as
earnings, the contemporary earned citizenship regime is materially different. The new regime’s foremost focus
on earning rationales
and requirements renders citizenship as a prize for performance rather than a status of equality.
IRCA sought to wipe clean the population of undocumented immigrants in one fell swoop, by quickly converting their status from undocumented to
lawful permanent residents in wholesale fashion. In contrast, earnedcitizenship front-ends many naturalization-like
requirements and creates a long period of probationary status for millions of individuals during which these
requirements must be satisfied. Earned citizenship holds out lawful permanent residence and
citizenship thereafter as a capstone achievement for successful societal contribution and
integration. Whereas IRCA was built on a prior understanding that lawful permanent residence is preparatory for citizenship as a basis from
which an individual could build the competencies necessary to naturalize, earned citizenship creates an intermediate, precarious status in which
individuals must perform their economic, civic, and cultural contributions to the nation before even advancing to lawful permanent residence. As a
result, citizenship is tested more stringently and progressively over a period of years. Moreover, unlike IRCA — whose end goal arguably was lawful
permanent residence — earned citizenship is a regime that, as its name implies, contemplates citizenship,
integrates that goal into the regime, redefines its substantive requirements, and redistributes
those requirements across a lengthy period of performance The terminology of earning seeks to shift
the discourse of immigration reform away from the pejorative of reward for bad behavior and
toward the attribute of merit. But the move is not merely rhetorical; unlike IRCA, which had minimal requirements and a short path to
lawful permanent residence, 5 earned citizenship proposals construct new and lengthy periods of probationary lawful residence; impose substantial
work, language, and civics requirements, as well as the payment of fines, as conditions for obtaining permanent residence; punish the failure to satisfy
the probationary terms with the threat of deportation; and make citizenship unavailable for more than a decade. 6 Earned citizenship regimes thus
construct a long, multi- stage, and precarious pathway to citizenship punctuated by performance benchmarks that must be met to advance from one
station to the next or even to remain in the same station. While appealing in many respects for its emphasis on individual merit and its basic goal of
liberal enlargement of the circle of belonging, earned citizenship is ideologically heterogeneous and conceptually complex. A
close
examination of the most robust earned citizenship proposal to date, a 2013 comprehensive
immigration reform bill, 7 reveals that the framework is by turns communitarian and assimilationist, but
predominantly neoliberal and penal. Through a system of penalty and reward, earned citizenship promises to
incorporate the undocumented immigrant, but demands economic, cultural, and civic
conformity in return. The substantive requirements of earned citizenship conjure and project an
idealized citizen who is, fundamentally, a neoliberal actor, one who through economic and moral self-
sufficiency is deemed worthy of reward. By conditioning benefits upon such performance,
earned citizenship thus disciplines the previously unruly immigrant. The emergence of the earned
citizenship regime tracks broader shifts in the rhetoric, substance, and ideology of social welfare policy. Specifically, federal welfare reform of
the 1990s, which transformed federal assistance to poor families from an entitlement to a performance-based, “welfare-to- work” program, anticipates
the framework of earned citizenship, which arrived on the scene only a handful of years later. In both cases, provision of a social good — financial
assistance or legal status — is conditioned upon an individual’s satisfaction of neoliberal performance
metrics. And in both cases, those metrics reflect a neoliberal conception of citizenship, whereby
worthiness is measured by economic productivity and moral rectitude. But the neoliberal aspects of
earned citizenship, combined with its punitive provisions, place undocumented individuals in a
starting position of moral deficit that recapitulates the moral framework of immigration restric-
tionists. Earned citizenship requires each applicant for legalization to demonstrate that she is worthy of citizenship. Although its political goal is to
incorporate several million individuals into the polity, earned citizenship begins with the principal argument of
immigration restrictionists — namely, that the large, undocumented population is the product of
individual decisions to violate the nation’s immigration laws; it is such moral deficit that necessitates the earning of
citizenship by each undocumented person. Thus, while deeply motivated by the political imperative to differentiate from amnesty, earned citizenship
nonetheless yokes itself to the logic of amnesty’s central argument. This epistemic
error traps earned citizenship within
the discourse of amnesty, and more troublingly ignores the complex causation of undocumented
immigration. Rather than recognize the role that government acquiescence, private sector
incentives, and global economic and governance developments have played in the
production of the large undocumented population, 8 earned citizenship reduces the problem to
the aggregation of several million individual, agentic decisions to break the law. Echoing the social
construction of welfare recipients, 9 this is a pathological understanding of undocumented immigration. Such
an “individual responsibility” ap-proach ignores the structural features of migration and unfairly allocates the entirety of the moral burden for
undocumented immigration to immigrants themselves. Earned citizenship thus imposes individual responsibilities for collective failures and conceives
of citizenship as a reward for good behavior rather than an imperative of equality. The earning of citizenship, based upon performance metrics, is
incom- patible with an Arendtian understanding of citizenship as a fundamental bulwark against societal, territorial, and legal dispossession. 10 If we
understand juridical citizenship, or citizenship as status, as an indefeasible claim of belonging and concomitant state protection, then from a moral
standpoint barriers to citizenship should be low. 11 And yet, earned citizenship pulls in the opposite direction, as it is by design a far more complex
system for citizenship acquisition than previous legalization programs. A sustained focus on earned citizenship reveals an even deeper conceptual
difficulty, one which is not internal to the debate over legalization but rather extends to the larger structure of citizenship. The very
notion of
earned citizenship forces consideration of what constitutes unearned citizenship. In fact, for the
majority of people in the United States (and the world), citizenship is unearned. The principal forms of citizenship
transmission — jus sanguinis (citizenship by descent) and jus soli (citizenship by territorial birth) —
ultimately confer citizenship based on the accident of birth. Such a citizenship regime suffers from a
fundamental tension, as citizenship promises equality but its distribution is morally arbitrary. By
endorsing behavioral bases for citizenship acquisition for some but not others, earned
citizenship exacerbates this tension. Such asymmetric application of behavioral requirements to
citizenship transmission is morally unstable, and invites pernicious social and political practices in order
to justify the asymmetry. The predominance of birthright citizenship practices creates an imperative to avoid their moral indictment,
even as earned citizenship focuses attention on them. This can be done in at least three ways. First is a process of moral
differentiation, whereby aspiring citizens are demeaned such that birthright citizens are
correspondingly exalted. Earned citizenship’s location of undocumented persons in a place of moral deficit exemplifies this approach. So,
too, are complementary strategies of criminalization and racial- ization of immigrants, which have the
collective effect of debasing the moral claims of belonging of immigrants. Second, the problem of unearned
citizenship could be mitigated through a leveling down of birthright citizenship. This would involve the importation of behavioral requirements for
citizenship into the requirements for birthright citizenship. Such
an approach is evident in the persistent attacks on
territorial birthright citizenship, themselves grounded in an invented, narrative of the “anchor
baby,” a quasi- criminal figure and the object of racial contempt. Similarly, proposals for citizenship-stripping would
impose behavioral requirements on citizens even after their status was secured, effectively rendering citizenship probationary rather than a permanent
status of equality. Earned citizenship echoes this approach as well, as it features a lengthy probationary period before citizenship may be secured.
The rhetorical, epistemological, and physical implications of “earned

citizenship” reinforce
The political
rhetoric of earning has shaped both the substantive content of immigration reform
proposals and the normative claims underwriting them. This Part begins with a description of the most recent earned
citizenship proposal, as it best illustrates the defining characteristics of such legislation. In order to counter the something-for-nothing reputation of
IRCA legalization, earned citizenship is premised on the notion of exchange: immigrants must do
something in order to merit legalization and eventual citizenship. This principle of reciprocity is
encoded in a legalization process that establishes intermediate economic, civic, and cultural
benchmarks that must be satisfied over a number of years in order to advance from one stage of the process to the next and ultimately to
culminate in full citizenship. As the subsequent discussion demonstrates, these substantive requirements, their sequencing, and the
system of penalty and reward that they constitute reflect a conception of citizenship acquisition
that is by turns communitarian and assimilationist, but overwhelmingly neoliberal and penal. A.
Description: S. 744 as a Paradigm of Earned Citizenship Although the earned citizenship rubric has been used to describe at
least five different bills over the past decade, 68 there are several core characteristics that define the framework. S. 744, the Border Security,
Economic Op- portunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, a 2013 bill that passed in the Senate and had the President’s support but was never
brought to the House floor, 69 plainly embodies these features. The bill represents the most mature form of earned
citizenship and is the closest that such legislation has come to passage. And while the Trump presidency has
closed the window on progressive immigration reform for at least some years, S. 744 may yet serve as a benchmark for future
reform efforts should the political pendulum shift again. Following the three-legged architecture of IRCA, S. 744
sought to bolster border security 70 and interior immigration enforcement, 71 prevent unauthorized employment, 72 and create pathways
for legalization for the large undocumented population. 73 Unlike IRCA, the bill also sought to revise significantly
the programs for lawful permanent residence and temporary, nonagricultural worker programs. The bill
contains three legalization programs — one for agricultural workers, 74 one for DREAMers, 75
and a third, general legalization program that is the focus of the discussion that follows. Each
program was also subject to a series of exclusions. 76 Like many of its predecessors, the S. 744 legalization
program proposed a multi-staged process: from undocumented status, to Registered Provisional Immigrant (RPI) status, to lawful
permanent resident (LPR or green card) status, to citizenship. In order to proceed from one stage to the next, an individual would have to meet criteria
that fall into four principal categories: continuous presence; the payment of fines, fees and taxes; employment and education; and English language
and civics knowledge. First, subject to certain exclusions, 77 the program would grant RPI status to individuals who have been continuously present in
the United States for at least two years, pay a fine and application fee, and pay outstanding federal income taxes. 78 RPI status is renewable after six
years, but only if the individual can demonstrate the satisfaction of certain employment, income and education requirements, the payment of taxes,
an application fee, and a penalty. 79 Renewal is necessary in order to progress because only upon ten years of RPI status may an individual transition
from RPI to LPR status. The transition to LPR status also requires that the individual has maintained continuous presence in the country; pays an
additional penalty, additional application fees and tax liabilities; once again satisfies employment, income and educational requirements; meets
English language and U.S. civics education requirements; and does not otherwise become inadmissible by committing a crime or engaging in other
prohibited conduct. 80 Fi- nally, after three years in LPR status, the individual may apply for U.S. citizenship according to the ordinary requirements of
naturalization. 81 Thus, there are four distinct stages at which an applicant must satisfy certain substantive standards: initial RPI application; RPI
renewal; adjustment from RPI to LPR status; and naturalization. The employment, income, education, English-language, and civics requirements
necessary to transition from RPI to LPR status form the core of the earned citizenship regime and as such are worthy of further description. First, in
order to renew RPI status, an immigrant must demonstrate that she is regularly employed throughout the 10-year RPI period, without a period of
unemployment of more than 60 days; 82 or that she has an income or resources of at least 125% of the federal poverty level; 83 or that she is enrolled
in secondary or higher education or certain other educational programs. 84 Second, upon ten years in RPI status, an RPI seeking to adjust to LPR status
must demonstrate that she continues to satisfy those same employment, income and educational requirements, and in addition, must either satisfy
the English language requirements currently necessary for naturalization or be enrolled in a course of study to achieve sufficient knowledge of English
and U.S. history and government required for naturalization. 85 While this structure and content bear some similarity to IRCA legalization — that, too,
had a provisional status prior to lawful permanent residence and requirements relating to continuous presence, language, education, and fees — the
statutes differ in several respects. First, whereas IRCA’s eligibility requirements were nearly all retrospective, a key feature of S. 744, and earned
citizenship more generally, is prospective performance. Second, provisional status under IRCA was for a relatively short duration (18 months) 86 and
largely administrative; its purpose was to quickly register all those who satisfied the initial residency requirement for legalization and to channel them
into what would be a bureaucratically more complex application process. In contrast, the provisional status under S. 744 is a minimum of ten years,
and does not merely serve the administrative registration function, but introduces a lengthy period of probationary status. Third, the substantive
requirements that must be met in order to transition out of RPI status and into lawful permanent residence are far more significant: although IRCA had
similar English language and civics requirements, it contained no employment or higher education obligations. Finally, although IRCA legalization
required the payment of a fee, earned legalization requires both fees and penalties, the latter often coupled with an explicit acknowledgment that the
applicant has violated U.S. law. 87 Relatedly, only S. 744 requires the payment of all outstanding, assessed federal tax liability, as well as payment of
taxes during the RPI status. Critically, a failure to meet the requirements necessary to advance from one stage to the next may leave the immigrant in a
precarious status and may subject her to removal. For example, failure to meet the requirements necessary to renew RPI status would deprive the
immigrant of lawful status. An immigrant who meets the renewal requirements but is unable to satisfy the additional obligations necessary to adjust to
LPR status would be able to continue renewing RPI status, but only so long as she continued to meet the renewal requirements; by virtue of the work
requirements, such an individual would effectively become part of a guest worker program, susceptible to removal whenever she should cease to
meet the employment requirements for RPI renewal. Prolonged precarity thus is an essential feature of the earned citizenship regime. Some but not all
of the requirements of earned citizenship are recogniz- able from other citizenship practices. For example, the assimilationist requirements (regarding
English language and U.S. civics) are equivalent in substance, although accelerated in time, to the requirements for naturalization and can be plausibly
defended on the grounds of national cohesion and democratic participation. 88 It is reasonable to assume that those either born in the United States or
to U.S. citizens are likely to be assimilated into the cultural and civic aspects of American life by virtue of their upbringing and thus to exclude such
children from having to demonstrate that they have done so. 89 Likewise, a duration of residency requirement is inoffensive so long as it is not unduly
long, as it may serve as a reasonable measure of attachment to the nation-state. 90 Such a metric is familiar to statutory provisions for jus sanguinis
citizenship, 91 and may be unnecessary for jus soli citizens because most will live where they are born. In contrast, the work and penalty provisions
reflect considerations unique to legalization of undocumented immigrants, and find no analogue, implicit or explicit, in prevailing citizenship
practices. B. Competing Ideologies of Earned Citizenship A closer examination of the substantive requirements of S.
744 illuminates a set
of competing ideologies — neoliberal, 92 communitarian, assimilationist, and penal — that
underwrite earned citizenship. Taken together, these illustrate how earned citizenship not only shifts the political framing of the
legalization debate, but premises legalization on a normative conception of the idealized citizen. 1. Neoliberalism and Work as the Measure of
Worthiness At the core of earned citizenship is the long period of provisional status and the work, education, civics, and
English-language requirements necessary to obtain permanent lawful status. Such a contractualism is a
familiar feature of neoliberalism, 93 all the more evident from the prominence of economic
earning in the earned citizenship rubric. By virtue of the work requirements (for which education is an
acceptable alternative), earned citizenship heavily weights economic performance in its worthiness
calculus. As discussed above, provisional status is tantamount to a guest worker program with a
pathway to citizenship. The requirement for regular and gainful employment of the undocumented immigrant is complemented by the
obligation that she not be subject to the public charge ground of inad- missibility — that is, that she not require public assistance. 94 Relatedly, the
provisional status immigrant is excluded from nearly all forms of social welfare, including health care under the Affordable Care Act. Taken together,
these features of earned
citizenship posit economic self-sufficiency as a moral value establishing
worthiness. The requirements that the provisional status immigrant satisfy her tax obligations and
not become inadmissible on crime-related grounds further reinforce a neoliberal expectation of
individual responsibility and economic and social self-regulation. 95 The immigrant who
successfully earns her citizenship thus matches neoliberalism’s “underlying moral image of the
individual [a]s one of the autonomous, free, rational and self-regulating citizen[s] who
disciplines her/his nature under the influence of the civilization processes s/he underwent.” 96
In this regard, then, earned citizenship’s pathway to citizenship is a pathway to neoliberal belonging. The
focus on economic performance may be understandable given that the undocumented population is principally the product of labor migration, and an
economic conception of immigration features prominently throughout the American system; many permanent and temporary visa categories are
based upon employment and subject to some evaluation, however imperfect, of labor market needs. 97 But legalization has never previously been
based upon individual economic performance (even as economic arguments have been made about the overall effect of large-scale legalization). 98
More- over, the earned
citizenship regime does not credit past economic contribution or recognize
the structural nature of migrant labor as a feature of the late-capitalist American economy. Rather,
earned citizenship requires that the worker-immigrant clock in as if for the first time and
establish not her identity as a laborer, but her neoliberal bona fides. 99 Aversion to the charge of amnesty
provides a historical explanation for why contemporary legalization proposals look different than IRCA, but it does not provide an ideological account of
the turn to either economic performance or individualized earning. Instead, the conditioning
of social benefits upon
individualized demonstration of one’s worthiness, particularly in the workplace, finds a recent
antecedent in federal welfare reform. Indeed, the neoliberal citizen projected by the requirements of earned citizenship bears a
striking resemblance to the citizen imagined by the welfare-to-work requirements adopted by Congress in 1996, 100 and earned citizenship bor- rows
heavily from the same ideological underpinnings and programmatic structure of welfare reform. A comparison of the two further illuminates the deep
structure of earned citizenship. Welfare, work, and worthiness long have been inextricably linked. As Joel Handler and Yeheskel Hasenfeld have
demonstrated, competing norms of labor market regulation, charity, ideological commitments to
work, and traditionally gendered family structure 101 animate welfare policy such that it is “a
policy about morality” that hinges upon a distinction between the worthy and unworthy
poor. 102 Those who are worthy are excused from work and provided public assistance, while those deemed unworthy are either denied aid or have
that aid conditioned upon participation in the labor market. Fail- ure of the able-bodied to work is deemed a moral failure rather than a material one.
Work thus becomes the currency of worth, and the imposition of work requirements on welfare
recipients serves to reinforce moral and ideological claims of the dominant society. 103 Work
requirements have been a part of welfare policy since the 1960s, but they came to predominate in the 1990s. As the moral debate over
welfare, dependency, and family structure intensified from the 1960s through the 1980s, and
the figure of the undeserving welfare recipient — a black, single mother gaming the system (Reagan’s
“welfare queen”) 104 — took hold among a white middle class, work requirements increasingly
became the preferred policy tool for adjudging worthiness. This culminated in 1996, when the main federal
assistance program for families, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (“AFDC”), ceased to operate as an entitlement and was replaced with
Temporary Aid to Needy Families (“TANF”), a time-limited program in which aid is conditioned upon satisfaction of work requirements. 105 While
other aspects of the federal welfare reform law aim to promote marriage (and therefore reduce out-of-wedlock birth) and strengthen child support
obligations of fathers, the primary ideological and programmatic feature of the law was work. 106 TANF eviscerated the promise of baseline
subsistence as a social right, as weakly expressed as that promise was in the form of AFDC. Instead of offering class-wide financial support on the basis
of categorical eligibility criteria, TANF created a performance- based system for establishing individual moral worth. The catchphrase for reform,
“welfare to work,” 107 captured the notion of a pathway not only from poverty to self-
sufficiency, but from moral failure to social respectabil- ity. Work was both the method and the
goal, a process and an identity. The goal and the identity were full and unstigmatized membership in society — in
other words, citizenship. The figure of the neoliberal citizen is plain in welfare reform. Each individual
head of household must demonstrate her ability to self-regulate; the state largely withdraws its
support from the individual and the family, in favor of the market; and market-based
performance is understood not only to provide economic support, but to cure moral defect.
Work is rendered not merely economically significant but morally transformative, and because it is time-limited, the period of
public assistance becomes transitional. The shiftless welfare recipient is rendered economically productive and morally upstanding. In exchange for her
labor, stigma is lifted and the welfare recipient moves from the margins to the center of society. As Joel Handler has observed, welfare-to-work
programs reverse the logic of T.H. Marshall’s liberal conception of social citizenship. 108 In Mar- shall’s classic formulation, social rights represent the
triumph of status over contract as a baseline of protection such that support is granted by the state to its citizens rather than by employers to its
workers. 109 As a historical matter, Marshall argued, the acquisition of rights was staged, beginning with civil rights, proceeding to political rights, and
culminating with social rights. 110 By this account, citizenship is “a device of societal integration” 111 in which individuals participate merely by virtue
of their citizenship. As Marshall wrote, “social rights imply an absolute right to a certain standard of civilisation which is conditional only on the
discharge of the general duties of citizenship. Their content does not depend on the economic value of the individual claimant.” 112 By conditioning
social welfare eligibility on individual performance as welfare-to-work programs do, social citizenship flows “from status to contract,” 113 turning on
its head Marshall’s supposition that the content of social rights is independent of individual economic contribution. Achieving social citizenship is “an
obligation, not a right; an effort of the individual, not of society.” 114 Just as welfare-to-work replaced a system of unconditional support premised
upon a commitment to social rights with a rubric of conditional relief based on individual performance, so, too, does earned citizenship represent a
turn from citizenship as status to citizenship as contract. In both instances, citizenship — whether social or juridical — must be earned, and the earn-
ings structure is market-based and full of exclusionary potential; ostensibly a framework for social inclusion, each system excludes those who fail to sat-
isfy performance standards. Earned citizenship is hardly the first time that immigration and welfare policy have intersected. Long before the emergence
of the welfare state, U.S. immigration law has been an instrument of class regulation. Gerald Neuman has written, “Perhaps the most fundamental
function of immigration law has been to impede the movement of the poor.” 115 Since 1882, federal immigration law has excluded from admission
individuals deemed likely to become a “public charge,” 116 but the exclusion of immigrants — including lawfully admitted immigrants — from welfare
benefits has become a special preoccupation since the 1990s. Beginning with California’s Proposition 187, which sought to exclude undocumented
immigrants from education, 117 welfare, and other public services, the trope of welfare-consuming immigrants imposing an unfair burden on states
gained prominence through much of the decade. 118 In 1996, the same
year that Congress enacted federal welfare
reform, it excluded legal immigrants from most public benefits for a period of five years — the
same period of time that lawful permanent resident status must be maintained in order to
naturalize. 119 The earned citizenship regime of S. 744 extends this form of social exclusion. The bill
would exclude individuals from eligibility for most public benefits until they either accrue five
years of lawful permanent residence status or become U.S. citizens; they are ineligible for the
duration of their time in provisional status. Thus, the exclusionary period would run for a minimum
of thirteen years. The Affordable Care Act deviates from this model in some respects. For example, legal immigrants qualify for marketplace
insurance without the five-year waiting period, but the five-year bar continues to apply to those who might otherwise benefit from Medicaid ex-
pansion. 120 With respect to undocumented immigrants, the model is undis- turbed: they are categorically ineligible for ACA benefits, and under S.
744, they would not become eligible until they transitioned from provisional to lawful permanent immigrant status. 121 Thus, S. 744 imposes a ten-year
bar for ACA benefits, literally doubling down on the social welfare restrictions of the 1990s. 122 The exclusion from social welfare programs until
completion of the provisional status period renders social rights a core component of what is to be earned. 123 Although eligibility for benefits does
not technically require naturalization, by delaying eligibility until such time as an individual is either eligible to naturalize (in the case of public benefits
programs) or on the verge of eligibility (in the case of the ACA), these forms
of noncitizen exclusion effectively redefine
the substantive content of citizenship itself. It follows, then, that a key technology of earned citizenship
is to ensure that citizenship itself is meaningfully differentiated from mere lawful residence.
Social welfare policy thus threatens to impoverish the noncitizen but enrich the citizen, thereby
reinforcing citizenship’s central contradiction: the promise of belonging for some through the
exclusion of others. 124 Citizenship is rendered a prize that not only must be earned, but which is deemed valuable enough to in fact earn.
The analogy between welfare reform and immigration reform is inexact for at least two reasons. First, the principal moral defect ascribed to welfare
recipients has always been their failure to participate in the labor market. As such, work as curative of moral failure is congruent with this
understanding of welfare in a way that is inapposite to immigration reform. Indeed, while stereotypes
of the lazy, welfare-
cheating immigrant have recurred periodically, 125 today the image of the undocumented worker (albeit one
who undermines U.S. worker wages and workplace conditions) predominates. Second, the understanding
of citizenship at issue in each context differs; in the welfare context, work offers a pathway to social citizenship, in Marshall’s sense of that term, 126
while in the immigration context, work promises juridical citizenship. Thus, welfare reform conditions full membership for those already a part of the
polity, whereas immigration reform seeks to enlarge the circle of membership to those excluded by law. These differences notwithstanding, one can
see in both examples the construction of an individualized process for determining the allocation of a social benefit and the use of market value as the
principal determinant of worthiness. 2. Communitarianism and Assimilation Despite this predominantly neoliberal bent to earned citizenship, other
ideologies also animate the legalization regime. While the English language requirements might be read into a framework of economic self-sufficiency,
they and the civics knowledge
requirements more squarely advance communitarian goals of
preparation for and participation in civic life in the United States, along with assimilationist
demands for a particular aesthetic of belonging. 127 English language is understood not only to
enable employment advancement, but also to integrate the immigrant into local cultural life. 128
English language and civic knowledge are further understood to prepare the immigrant for responsible, collective, democratic decision-making in the
form of voting, and communitarian accountability in the form of jury duty. These practices, reserved for U.S. citizens, help to constitute democratic val-
ues as not merely a part of the national governance structure, but as features of national identity. Knowledge of English language and American civics
serves as a proxy for an ongoing process of assimilation in which cognitive knowledge translates to values-
based commitment. Thus, the individualized nature of earned citizenship’s work requirements is complemented by requirements of
cultural and civic assimilation into the community. “Earning one’s citizenship then amounts to a thoroughly
individualized cultural conversion to the communitarian ideal of a nation defined by a bounded
set of values.” 129 The cultural and civic assimilationist demands for citizenship acquisition are familiar in U.S. law. Indeed, the language and
civics requirements of S. 744 are essentially identical to existing naturalization requirements, 130 and some version of those requirements has existed
since at least 1906. 131 Similarly, the
Immigration and Nationality Act requires that a naturalization
applicant be “a person of good moral character, attached to the principles of the Constitution of
the United States, and well-disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States.” 132
There is, then, some degree of path dependency to the legal regime of earned citizenship. Such path
dependency notwithstanding, the economic performance requirements that predominate earned citizenship are innovations in U.S. immigration law.
But these, too, can be understood in assimilationist and communitarian terms. As argued above, the principal contribution of the
work requirements of earned citizenship, and the economically productive citizen they imagine,
is itself cultural. The earned citizenship regime thus highlights economic success as a feature of cultural
assimilation, and ele- vates economic productivity as a national value to be transmitted through
law. The more traditional requirements of cultural and civic assimilation in S. 744 are complemented by newly articulated expectations of economic
productivity such that the neoliberal, assimilationist, and communitarian ideologies converge. 3. Penalty and Rectification Earned
citizenship is also explicit in its penal goals. For example, S. 744 requires the payment of a $1000 fine in
order to transition from undocumented to provisional status, an additional $1000 fine to
renew that status, 133 and yet another $1000 to adjust from provisional to lawful permanent
resi-dent status 134 — significant financial burdens for a principally impoverished population. 135
Advocates trumpeted the penalty component of S. 744 as further evidence that earned citizenship is not amnesty. 136 The requirement to pay fines
reflects an acquiescence to the charge that undocumented immigrants bear a moral and legal culpability for their immigration status. Payment of
fines begs the question of what conduct is being sanctioned; the unstated answer is the act of unauthorized entry or overstay. The base charge of
“illegality” by reform opponents is thus implicitly conceded, such that immigrants must “get right with the law,” as President Obama stated, “before
they can get in line and earn their citizenship.” 137 This notion of first rectifying past unlawful conduct before benefiting from legalization is extended
in the requirement to pay assessed back taxes. Rather than a penalty, this requirement responds to the free-rider dimension of the amnesty charge.
Earned citizenship’s lengthy provisional status period might also be understood in penal terms. The minimum ten-year period from initial registration
to lawful permanent residence is effectively probationary. A probationary period can be understood in prospective terms as a process of graduated
incorporation, as in the employment context. The five-year period of lawful permanent residence prior to becoming eligible to naturalize fits this
understanding. But as in the criminal context, probation can also be understood as the tail to a sentence, and as such, an element of punishment. 138
The requirement to meet performance standards in order to advance from provisional to permanent status suggests that provisional status fits the
gradual incorporation model of probation. And yet, the duration
of the provisional status period — a minimum of
ten years — coupled with the penalties for non-compliance with the terms for maintenance of
status, as well as the public benefits ineligibility discussed above, suggest that the goal is ex-
clusionary rather than incorporative. If nothing else, the length of the provisional status period reminds us once more that
even as it promises a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented individuals, earned
citizenship is built upon an architecture of exclusion. C. Earned Citizenship’s Faulty Epistemic Assumptions About
Undocumented Immigrants The predominantly neoliberal bent of earned citizenship, combined with its
penal and disciplinary measures, constructs an understanding of undocumented immigration

that is conceptually flawed. Deeply motivated by the political imperative to differentiate from amnesty, earned citizenship
nonetheless yokes itself to the logic of the legalization-is-amnesty argument — namely, that the
undocumented population is the result of individual violations of the law, and more
profoundly, a moral transgression of the rule of law. Because the moral story of earned citizenship begins
with immigrants in a deficit position — it is the fact of deficit that necessitates a regime of earning — it has already
committed to the restrictionists’ epistemic understandings of the immigration “problem.” The
problem is understood as originating in individual transgression, and therefore, as requiring a demonstration of individual moral worthiness. The
original sin of immigration violation is atoned for through the moral test of earned
citizenship. Thus, rather than transcending the amnesty charge, earned citizenship remains trapped within its logic. By accepting as its starting
point the restrictionists’ account of the origins and nature of the immigration problem, earned citizenship suffers from two conceptual limits. First,
despite its fines, long path to citizenship, and array of work, language, and civics requirements,
most restrictionists still equate earned citizenship with amnesty. For them, the earning
contemplated by S. 744 and similar measures is either too meager or will never be sufficient to
remedy the rule of law transgression. This objection is strengthened by the overtly political goal of
earned citizenship to legalize the vast majority of the undocumented population. Although a regime of
earning connotes selectivity, the political success of the program in the eyes of its proponents depends upon it being relatively permissive. And yet, the
more permissive it is, the more it fails to overcome the amnesty objection. Moreover, while earned citizenship was constructed
so as to counter the amnesty charge, its focus on individual culpability and moral worth
reinscribes a discourse of amnesty. Earned citizenship thus is defined and delimited by the terms
of its antithesis: amnesty. In light of the lack of political success of earned citizenship to date,
one might expect future political bargaining to render the conditions for legalization more
stringent in order to win sufficient support for passage. Earned citizenship is a flexible and capacious framework that, through calibration of its
constituent elements, may be rendered more or less inclusionary. De-pending on the politics of the moment, it could be
bargained either up or down; lacking any intrinsic political valance, the very nature of the earned
citizenship rubric lends itself to such bargaining. Even in the current, Trump-induced moment of hostility to immigration,
we may expect the language of earning and merit to shape immigration discourse, but for the earnings levels to be set so high as to be
fundamentally exclusionary. 139 The second
limit concerns the source and nature of the large undocu-
mented population in the United States. By relying upon a regime of individual merit, earned
citizenship tacitly accepts the restrictionists’ claim that the undocumented population is the
result of millions of individual decisions to disregard U.S. law. Echoing the social construction of welfare recipients,
this is a pathological understanding of undocumented immigration: undocumented immigration is the
product of the moral failings of those who entered without inspection or overstayed their visas. Earned citizenship promises to redeem those moral
failings through a neoliberal program of moral worthiness: fines, work, self-reliance, education, and assimilation. But it
is na ̈ ıve to
understand the creation of the undocumented population as the aggregation of so many
individual moral failings. Such an “individual responsibility” approach ignores the structural
features of migration and unfairly allocates the entirety of the moral burden for undocumented
immigration to immigrants themselves. A more accurate appraisal would take account of the
historical and contemporary practices that have produced the category of undocumented
immigrant and the large, contemporary undocumented population. Far from an organic social category,
undocumented status, or illegality, is a legal construction with its origins in racial exclusion. 140
As Hiroshi Motomura, Ste- phen Legomsky, and others have described, illegality has been constructed through a history of
racial restriction on lawful immigration, employment- based immigration preferences that have
failed to meet employer demands for low-skilled labor, and government acquiescence to large-
scaled undocumented labor through selective enforcement. 141 “In short, unauthorized migration to the United
States is a story of labor and race, and of de facto government policy that tolerates and acquiesces in unauthorized migration.” 142 The moral
story is further complicated by the role the United States has played, in many parts of the world, in creating
or contributing to conditions that motivate or even compel migration. 143 While there is a specificity to
undocumented immigration in the United States, the rapid growth of the population in the past two decades and
the concentration of undocumented workers in low-skilled work is emblematic of global trends.

As Saskia Sassen has convincingly demonstrated, contemporary unauthorized immigration is not merely the
product of the exercise of state sovereignty. Rather, it is constitutive of a system of de facto

transnational labor regulation, a logical and necessary companion to the deregulation of
capital and goods that characterizes globalization. 144 “Immigration is at least partly an outcome of the actions of the
governments and major private economic actors in receiving countries.” 145 One might view these arguments regarding past and present state prac-
tices as implicitly factored into earned citizenship as evident from the fact that a legalization program is being proposed at all. By this account, earned
citizenship is a moral framework for public consumption but does not express the complete moral calculus of immigration reform. But if this is true, it
exposes a further weakness of earned citizenship. By leaving the full moral basis for legalization unarticulated, it renders earned citizenship newly
vulnerable to suspicion as a stealth amnesty program. The incongruity between public policy and its stated rationale, of conferring citizenship solely
by dint of earning, may undermine public confidence in the measure, thus jeopardizing not only the prospects for its legislative enactment, but its per-
ceived legitimacy assuming a bill is in fact passed. And yet, a more complex causal story would render the earning rubric incongruous; if the source of
the large undocumented population is attributable to structural explanation, then why should legalization turn upon individual performance of
worthiness? In sum, earned citizenship is ideologically loaded. Significantly neoliberal and penal, and inextricably linked to restrictionists’ moral claims
regarding amnesty and blameworthiness, it implicitly endorses a pathological understanding of undocumented immigration that is at odds with
earned citizenship’s inclusive ambitions. But beyond these problems with earned citizenship, a deeper problem lurks: earned citizenship imperils the
moral claims of the vast majority of people for whom citizenship is unearned.
--xt: Impact
The plan reinforces feudalism in Mexico. Incremental increases in wages or

conditions of migrant laborers collapse Mexico’s only chance at economic
independence
Gonzalez & Fernandez, 79 – Program in Comparative Culture University of California at
Irvine (Rosalinda M. and Raul A. , “U.S. Imperialism and Migration: The Effects on Mexican
Women and Families,” Winter 1979,
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/048661347901100410) //kq
*We do not endorse imperialist language in this article

While the mass migration process from Mexico has much in common with mass European migration to the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries, its
most distinctive characteristic setting it apart from these earlier migrations is that it occurs when the United
States has clearly
become a country dominated by finance capitalist interests which furthermore also exercise
dominance over Mexico, the labor-supplying country. For this reason, it is essential to understand the nature of
imperialism and how it shapes and determines the process of Mexican immigration. It is our contention that
one of the principal results of imperialist-domination over Mexico and Latin American countries
is the perpetuation of semi-feudal and backward forms and relations of production. This thesis has
important consequences for understanding the contemporary process of mass migrations. It is not sufficient, however, to examine this process of
migration merely at a general level. Migration does not involve men alone, as is often assumed when the subject is treated “in general.” Since the
beginnings of Mexican immigration, it has involved whole families, as well as single men and single women. And the recent period of documented and
undocumented Mexican immigration has seen an increasing proportion of female and family migrants.2 Because
of imperialism’s
perpetuation of semifeudalism in Mexico, the bulk of these immigrants are of rural or of peasant
origins. This has very important implications for an aspect of the migration process that is
seldom examined: the reproduction of labor-power. It also has important political implications because of the dual class
character of the migrants involved.3 3 Thus, we begin from the proposition that Mexican immigration cannot be understood
unless it is studied in the context of imperialism; that the experiences, and the significance of Mexican migration cannot be
understood without taking into account what is happening to women and families; that it is not sufficient to look at migrant labor in the production
process in the host country, but one must also look at production and the reproduction of labor-power of the families of migrants in their home
country. Finally,
we argue that the particularities of the relation of national oppression, of
precapitalist production and precapitalist reproduction of labor power, and of uneven
development imposed by imperialism, create a situation within the imperialist country (the
U.S.) wherein the exploitation of immigrant labor recreates pre-industrial forms and relations
of production, to-wit, bound labor, the revival of the domestic industry, child exploitation, etc.
Finally, the historical, economic, and political implications of this for understanding the present stage of imperialism, for understanding migration, and
for understanding the contemporary experiences of immigrant women and families are discussed. 1. THE CONTEXT OF MEXICAN MIGRATION TO THE
U.S. Imperialism and Uneven Development The theory of imperialism of Lenin and the realities of imperialist oppression today comprise both the
exploitation of wage-labor as well as national oppression ; in the case of Mexican immigrants and their descendents in the Southwest it is particularly
important to take note at the outset that this double situation exists, as it becomes crucial for political activity. This
is a situation that
arises from the uneven character of development between countries in the era of imperialism.
The particular characteristics of the U.S.-Mexico border region are one manifestation of the more
general questions of imperialism and uneven development. The separation of the world into
poor debtor nations and rich creditor nations is not a natural phenomenon. Before the onset of the 20th
century, there were nations and territories that had not been brought into the world market. These were not yet “rich nations” and “poor nations.”
Because of this, the relationship of Mexico to the U.S. can only be understood in terms of the
specific effects that imperialism has had on countries of the Third World, and, in particular, Latin
America.4 4 The development of capitalism in Latin America has coincided with the domination of
the region by U.S. imperialism. The political alliances forged between imperialist countries and
ruling landholding aristocracies, usually led to a preservation of backwardness in these countries (in
order to safeguard the landholders’ property and class position); but at the same time the export
of capital to these nations led inevitably to the development of local capitalist relations of
production (primarily in the extractive, transportation, and export industries where foreign
monopoly capital penetrated). This paradoxical result is but the consequence of real contradictions specific to capitalist development
in the imperialist stage.s 5 The economic advancement of dominated countries is the initial effect of
imperialist penetration. But the tendency of imperialism is not to improve the living conditions
of people who live in backwardness, but to safeguard profit-making outlets. Imperialism is
monopoly, and as such, it opposes the appearance of new competitors in the world. Thus, it encounters the
great contradiction: once capitalism is started in a backward country, its internal dynamic moves it
toward the destruction of all obstacles - and at the same time imperialism has to oppose this
internal dynamic since it represents a constant threat to its monopoly.6 6 Thus, while the policy
of imperialism in the backward countries is designed to permit sufficient development in
industry and other sectors that will allow a market for capital, foreign imperialist investment,
and the maintenance of the international commodity markets, it is also geared to the
preservation of feudal remnants in agriculture as the guarantee of the preservation of existing
land tenure structures and the power of the local bulwark of imperialism, the large
landholders. In Latin America, for example, U.S. imperialism’s promotion of the policy of import-substitution and, later,
policies relating to the export of manufactured products and regional integration, did not
generally allow any decrease in the landowners’ power.’ Even “agrarian reform programs” were designed
during the sixties to guarantee and protect the interests of the landowners and the market for
agricultural products of U.S. monopolies.8 Industry Agriculture Under Imperialist Domination The effects of imperialist
capitalism in the development of the economic structures of currently oppressed countries can best be illustrated through comparison of the historical
pecularities that arise in industry and agriculture with actual circumstances. Nineteenth century capitalism is associated
with the development of the home market; this home market for capitalism grew on the basis of
the growth of the social division of labor, i.e., the separation of extractive industry from
manufacturing, of manufacturing from agriculture, of industries into various production phases,
etc. In this process, the principal element was the rapid development of production of means of
production which outstripped the increase in articles of consumption. The evidence on the development of
industrial production in Latin America shows contrariwise that the home market has not developed, with the
structure of industry today not significantly different from before WWII: the production of articles
of consumption predominates, as the massive U.S. investment since WWII has not been in the sector
of means of production. The agricultural sector thus remains as the country’s economic backbone. The general effect of the
nonmonopolistic (“competitive”) capitalism of the 19th century was the elimination of backward forms of social production. Free competition
eliminated barriers to free trade and to production based on wage labor in country after
country. In the twentieth century on the other hand, monopolies in industry, the presence of which brings about a constant rise of prices in the
whole economy, intensify the problem of “effective demand,” i.e., the poverty of the masses, and serves to reinforce backward forms of social
economy that prevail in Latin America (independent craftsmen, peasant subsistence forms, domestic servitude, etc.). In terms of industry, even
nationalization does not guarantee full and independent economic development. Much of the domination of U.S. monopoly banks and industrial
corporations in Latin America has been obtained through a process of take-over of enterprises that were originally national. The legal facade of
nationalization_thus allows foreign finance capital to continue to subvert local production for its own parasitic interests. Secondly, a large amount of
industrial production is for export, primarily among giant, U.S.- dominated concerns, with much of the remaining industrial production serving to satisfy
the sumptuary consumption of a few; third, the need for foreign inputs that has been created by the dependence imposed on local industry is so great
that if the economic ties with the U.S. were broken industrial production would come to a virtual standstill.9 Prior to the 20th century, the effect
of
capitalism upon agricultural production has been the history of the revolutionary transformation
of relations and methods of production which led to phenomenal increases in productivity. In
much of Latin America today on the contrary, the relations of production in the country have
not been substantially transformed and there is widespread use of precapitalist economic
arrangements, feudal share-cropping, etc. The following effects are generally perceivable: 1)
concentration of agricultural production and land in fewer hands; 2) forcing of poor peasants
onto ever tinier and more crowded miniplots; 3) persistence of backward forms of production;
4) continuing breakdown of the peasantry; 5) increasing shortages of basic agricultural products;
and 6) increasing problems of malnutrition.’° Even the investment that has taken place in
agriculture has only meant the intensification of production in already existing capitalist
enterprises. Gail Omvedt points out how much the much-heralded “Green Revolution” resulted in failure: ... the failure of the
“Green Revolution” to achieve its proclaimed goals of increasing over-all agriculture productivity is by now clear: this failure means (in class terms) that
the old social structures on the land have been modified but not transformed, i.e., there is a
greater dominance of rich peasants along with landlords and there is a “capitalist penetration,”
even “capitalist enclaves” of agriculture but “semifeudalism” remains the primary aspect of
agrarian relations .... Technological change (the forces of production) will stagnate unless there is an abolition of landlord power and
semifeudalism (the relations of production) and the “Green Revolution” is empty in the absence of agrarian revolution.” Thus capitalist
penetration in agriculture in the last fifty years has not meant the elimination of backward forms
of production, but merely their juxtaposition to modern capitalist methods,12 The distinguishing
characteristic about capitalist development in many poor countries is that throughout the 20th century, they have developed as
neocolonies of (primarily) U.S. imperialism. The term colony has a very specific economic meaning; it refers to an area,
country, region, etc., which does not have, by design, a self-sufficient economic life. This
definition of an economic colony aptly describes many countries today and this colonial pattern of
economic relations with the U.S. has become accentuated throughout the 20th century. Thus,
the term neocolony, which takes into account the legal fiction of political independence, seems
to be appropriate. Imperialism & Migration Lenin had noted that: One of the special features of imperialism
connected with the facts we are describing, is the decline in emigration from imperialist countries and the
increase in immigration into these countries from the more backward countries where lower
wages are paid. 13 The development of neocolonies of imperialism in areas that are still feudal or
semifeudal has important effects also in terms of rural-to-urban migration and fertility. The increased
work force in urban centers has not been accompanied by the kind of changes in agriculture which would enable these nations to be even partially
self-sufficient in terms of their own food needs. As people have abandoned the countryside due to the expansion of
semifeudal latifundios and/or capitalist monopolies, the agricultural areas have not developed so as to meet the
food requirements of an increasingly non-food-producing urban population. On the contrary, they have continued to meet
the needs of imperialism for raw materials, especially agricultural raw materials. Regardless of the degree of “capitalist
development” suggested by the percentage of wage workers in the population, it is evident that a much lower level of such
development is concealed behind the facade of capitalist industrialization that takes place under imperialist
domination. The effects of imperialism on the population are not limited to a problem of internal
migration, but have altered what had been assumed to be a permanent pattern of fertility change in the transition to
capitalism. Sociology textbooks explain that, in general, rural families tend to have a higher fertility ratio because
children, especially males, can become important economic assets for the peasant family; history
shows that the migration of peasants to urban areas produces a sharp drop in the size of families. As we have suggested before, the slow
structural change and the persistence of backward forms of production in the countryside has
led to a slow process of semiproletarianization in the rural areas of Latin America. A large number of
peasant families in Mexico and Latin America find themselves unable to subsist on their tiny
plots, and while holding on to the land, must migrate and hire themselves out for a wage. This
process of semiproletarianization as it occurs in Mexico has been dubbed “permanent primitive
accumulation” by one author’4, i.e., capitalism develops so slowly, the reliance upon backwardness is so strong, that several
generations of people find themselves in the transitional situation of migrating
peasant/semiproletarians. There is no a priori reason to believe that these families would curtail their offspring; quite the contrary,
wage-work would suggest that not only male but also female children would represent an economic asset to families under
these conditions. A recent study has shown that the effects of imperialism upon the rural areas of backward countries are leading to increases in the
family size of semiproletarian families. 15 Thus, while capitalism has always been popularly equated with a decrease in family size, the same may not be
true for capitalism in its monopoly stage. II. THE GENERAL EFFECTS OF MIGRATION TO THE U.S. ON MEXICAN WOMEN AND FAMILIES
AT: No Link (Ahmad)
Ahmad concludes liberal legalization still fails

As the previous discussion illustrates, the strategies of moral differentiation and selective incorporation of earnings requirements, mitigate the
asymmetry between earned and unearned citizenship, but at significant risk of unfounded moralizing and racial contempt of immigrants. A third ap-
proach would reduce the corrosive effect on unearned citizenship by liberal- izing the earnings requirements for legalization, thereby ameliorating the
corrosive effect on unearned citizenship. Such an approach might abandon the language and structure of
earning entirely, so as to avoid the morally uncomfortable and normatively unjustifiable distinction between earned and unearned citizenship,
as well as the pernicious tendencies that frequently characterize defenses of unearned citizenship. While one might expect different bases for
citizenship acquisition as between those territorially present at birth and other citizens on the one hand, and immigrants on the other, 211 a leveling up
approach would interro- gate and minimize those differences; the acquisition of citizenship, and not just the terms of citizenship once obtained, should
be subject to moral inquiry. 212 If “the idea of citizenship is ‘isonomy’ ” 213 — that is, equal rights achieved through symmetric application of law 214
— then this same principle should apply to citizenship acquisition. There may be good and practical reasons that identical rules cannot apply as
between citizenship-at-birth and subsequently acquired citizenship, but incongruityin citizenship acquisition may taint
the equality of citizenship once acquired. This is especially true where, as in the case of earned citizenship,
the path to citizenship features a long, probationary period during which lawful status is
precarious. For this reason, such dissonance should be minimized wherever possible. The asymmetric application of an earnings regime in the
context of legalization runs counter to this goal of equal citizenship. Moreover, a more expansive legalization program is consistent with the Arendtian
view of citizenship as a prerequisite for securing basic rights. 215 A requirement to demonstrate one’s worthiness for rights protection is incom- patible
with the human rights understandings of citizenship. While the existence of jus soli and jus sanguinis regimes of citizenship obviously cannot preclude
rules for naturalization, 216 an understanding of citizenship as the essential prerequisite of equality counsels that the barriers to citizenship for those
who are members of the society be kept low. Rather than relegating immigrants to an uncertain fate for a decade or more, such a citizenship approach
would accelerate the full incorporation of immigrants into the polity so as to reduce social stigma, economic vulnerability, and insecurity as to
residence, while promoting full and meaningful social and political participation. A rapid and unencumbered path to citizenship is, then, a path to
equal citizenship. 217 The difficulty with such a liberal legalization program is that even as it mitigates the
baseline problem of jus soli and jus sanguinis, it presents its own baseline quandary: what is the
source of claim for citizenship, and what are its limits? Without answering this question, the bogeyman of open bor-
ders looms even more potently than the charge of amnesty. The earned citizenship framework attempts to resolve the
problem through its elaborate system of worthiness metrics, but as discussed here, it does so at
significant cost. It is possible that earned citizenship ultimately will prove to be a polit-ically viable framework for resolving the status
of the current undocumented population, but it remains normatively unsustainable, and thus invites con-
sideration of alternative approaches to legalization

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Farmworkers Aff

The economic impact is enormous and can reverse slow growth.

Using the USDA study, it quickly becomes clear that the

Further automation of the workforce will cause leadership turnover

Leadership turnover causes great power wars.

Unresolved labor shortages make it impossible for small farms to exist.

Large industrial farms destroy the environment and causes extinction.

Under the U.S. Department of Justice’s new immigration enforcement guidelines,

The impact on food prices is enormous

Food prices are skyrocketing now.

US agricultural production key to global food supply.

Those wars go nuclear.

Dangerous agricultural working conditions create an environment for antibiotic

ABR diseases cause the apocalypse.

workforce with the Trump administration’s increasing number of arrests of unauthorized

A path to citizenship is key to solving—the guest-worker, H2A system fails; A

Current immigration restrictions drives up prices and inflation– effects are

Falling immigration rates cause an agricultural workforce shortage.

Continued labor shortages in agriculture negatively impacts the GDP

Higher tariffs mean we need more foreign farmworkers now to prevent

Immigrant workers solve worker shortages

Other industries rely on agriculture, making it critical to the economy

Agricultural productivity is key to economic growth

It is seen that increased

Ag Industry key to jobs and economy

Agriculture makes up 1/5 of the economy, 28 percent of American jobs, and a

Ag decline would decrease GDP, employment, and increase spending on food

Agricultural production is vital to economic growth

Strong Californian economy bolsters country-wide military-industrial

Decline leads to Trump lash-out

Economic-induced decline leads causes nuclear war

The conclusions reached in this thesis demonstrate how economic

Slow growth leads to nuclear war

Mechanization leads to food insecurity

That forces farms to invest in machinery

Higher wages cause automation of low-skilled jobs

Specifically, Californian companies are reacting to wage increases with

Wage increases cause ag automation

Automation is the only option – status quo shortages decimate farmers

High farm wages push automation and technological advances

Farm Mechanization hurts small farms

High rates of leadership turnover cause great power wars

Trump retaliates – Goes global – No de-escalation

Industrial agriculture is the largest factor contributing to global climate change

At the same time, agriculture – especially intensive agriculture, characterised by monocultures

It's one of the biggest factors in climate change

Industrial ag is the main source of climate change

If we don’t do the plan food production will go down drastically

Food shortage leads to an increase in violence

Food shortage causes nuclear war

Food shortages causes disease spread and international wars

Food shortages cause global instability--best studies prove

Food shortages trigger nuclear escalation

Impact defense doesn’t apply---it’s based on historical examples that had

US policy is key to global food security-

US ag decline leads to global food crises

US feeds the world

US exports key to global food securirty.

Food prices are increasing now

Food prices are rising now

Undocumented workers working for low wages threatens food security

Legalizing the undocumented agricultural workers would protect our nation’s

Employers threaten undocumented workers with deportation to force them

Employers threaten undocumented workers with deportation if they complain

MSFWs = migrant and seasonal farmworkers

MSFWs = migrant and seasonal farmworkers