Ga’s farm-labor crisis playing out as planned
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
7:22 am June 17, 2011, by Jay
After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants
out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87
is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.
It might be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced
to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and
other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state
officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to
Georgia’s largest industry.
Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV
cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks
later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal ordered a hasty
investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all
this had come as quite a surprise to him.
The results of that investigation have now been released. According to
survey of 230 Georgia farmers conducted by Agriculture Commissioner Gary
Black, farmers expect to need more than 11,000 workers at some point
over the rest of the season, a number that probably underestimates the
real need, since not every farmer in the state responded to the survey.
In response, Deal proposes that farmers try to hire the 2,000 unemployed
criminal probationers estimated to live in southwest Georgia. Somehow, I
suspect that would not be a partnership made in heaven for either party.
As an editorial in the Valdosta Daily Times notes, “Maybe this should
have been prepared for, with farmers’ input. Maybe the state should have
discussed the ramifications with those directly affected. Maybe the
immigration issue is not as easy as ’send them home,’ but is a far more
complex one in that maybe Georgia needs them, relies on them, and cannot
successfully support the state’s No. 1 economic engine without them.”
According to the survey, more than 6,300 of the unclaimed jobs pay an
hourly wage of just $7.25 to $8.99, or an average of roughly $8 an hour.
Over a 40-hour work week in the South Georgia sun, that’s $320 a week,
before taxes, although most workers probably put in considerably longer
hours. Another 3,200 jobs pay $9 to $11 an hour. And while our
agriculture commissioner has been quoted as saying Georgia farms provide
“$12, $13, $14, $16, $18-an-hour jobs,” the survey reported just 169
openings out of more than 11,000 that pay $16 or more.
In addition, few of the jobs include benefits — only 7.7 percent offer
health insurance, and barely a third are even covered by workers
compensation. And the truth is that even if all 2,000 probationers in
the region agreed to work at those rates and stuck it out — a highly
unlikely event, to put it mildly — it wouldn’t fix the problem.
Given all that, Deal’s pledge to find “viable and law-abiding solutions”
to the problem that he helped create seems naively far-fetched. Again,
if such solutions existed, they should have been put in place before the
bill ever became law, because this impact was entirely predictable and
in fact intended.
It’s hard to envision a way out of this. Georgia farmers could try to
solve the manpower shortage by offering higher wages, but that would
create an entirely different set of problems. If they raise wages by a
third to a half, which is probably what it would take, they would drive
up their operating costs and put themselves at a severe price
disadvantage against competitors in states without such tough
immigration laws. That’s one of the major disadvantages of trying to
implement immigration reform state by state, rather than all at once.
The pain this is causing is real. People are going to lose their crops,
and in some cases their farms. The small-town businesses that supply
those farms with goods and services are going to suffer as well. For
economically embattled rural Georgia, this could be a major blow.
In fact, with a federal court challenge filed last week, you have to
wonder whether state officials aren’t secretly hoping to be rescued from
this mess by the intervention of a judge. But given how the Georgia law
is drafted and how the Supreme Court ruled in a recent case out of
Arizona, I don’t think that’s likely.
We’re going to reap what we have sown, even if the farmers can’t.
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Love it...I wonder who the Georgia farmers will vote for next time...
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