1986 Immigration Reform Push Had Profound Impact On Farmworkers

After Paulino Mejia crossed the border illegally into the U.S. in 1980, he picked grapes, peaches and other crops in California's agricultural heartland, lived in crowded rental housing, hid from immigration agents and sent paychecks to family in his native Mexico. His life, however, changed in 1986, when Congress agreed to allow immigrants who were in the country illegally to get legal status – with a special provision that focused on farmworkers. Mejia then stopped living in fear. He left agriculture to join a construction company that hired only legal workers, sent his two daughters to college and bought a house in Madera, near Fresno, instead of wiring money to Mexico. Unlike in 1986, growers and worker advocates say the current reform proposal would also ensure that a poor, illegal class of farmworkers isn't created again – by including a viable guest worker program that would allow for a flow of legal temporary workers into California's fie "Nobody knows the future, but if the past is any guide, the farmworkers who get legalized, many of them will leave agriculture pretty quickly," said Philip Martin, professor of agricultural and resource economics at University of California, Davis. More than 1 million farmworkers applied for legalization under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. After the corresponding drop in the number of farmworkers in the country illegally, federal data show that farmers failed to retain their legalized workers and turned again to hiring employees from the groups of people entering the U.S. illegally. Today, experts say, at least two-thirds of the nation's farmworkers are in the country illegally and those legalized thanks to the 1986 changes make up just 12 to 15 percent of the agricultural workforce...more