I’ve recently seen a few news stories about a growing conflict in Colorado over the availability of migrant farmworkers to tend and harvest various crops such as peppers, onions and watermelons.
Last year, the Colorado General Assembly passed a number of immigration-related bills, including one of the strictest Real ID laws in the country, and a law that requires a valid ID to be presented to receive social services — laws which sort of pair up in an obvious manner.
Now, farmers and advocates of illegal immigrants are offering dire predictions concerning the impact of these laws on agriculture in the state. According to an Associated Press story by Chase Squires, an estimated 10,000 migrant farmworkers, both legal and illegal, work Colorado crops during the course of the year. However, a State Labor Department employee, Larry Gallegos, is quoted as estimating that their numbers will be down by as much as 40% — a shortfall of 4,000 workers. (Presumably, these 4,000 would be drawn only from the illegals, raising the proportion of legal residents among the remaining 6,000.) The AP story gives the example of farmer Phil Prutch, who last year could not hire the usual five to twenty farm workers to harvest his peppers, fifteen acres of which he appears to have left rotting in the field as a sort of object lesson. (The article does not make clear if those were his only fifteen acres last year, or if he has replanted any of his remaining 235 acres with peppers this year, hoping for better luck.)
Thus, as the AP story explains, the State of Colorado is proposing to alleviate the problem somewhat by allowing these farmers to hire “low-risk” prisoners, at just a little more than what they had been paying the illegals — perhaps $10/hr, compared to the $8-9/hr they’d been paying. The inmates would get the going jailhouse labor rate of 60¢/hr, while the State would pocket the rest as an offset to their prison costs. It is unclear whether any taxes are involved. The farmers, while apparently welcoming the availability of some contract labor, do seem a bit concerned about the ability of urban criminals to, for example, tell an onion from a weed (and, I presume, care). One interesting thing is this quote:
“We’re very excited about it,” Corrections Department spokeswoman Alison Morgan said. “We probably have 4,300 to 4,500 inmates who would qualify for this.”
In other words, they think they can almost exactly make up the predicted shortfall. Gosh, that’s lucky. It’s also stated that Arizona has had a similar program for over ten years.
Another aspect of this is hinted at in this article by Dan Frosch in the New York Times. Quoting:
The Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition estimates that there are 150,000 illegal immigrants in Colorado, many of them involved in agriculture.
For what it’s worth, the Pew Hispanic Center estimates between 225,000 and 275,000 “Unauthorized Migrants” in Colorado; Pew’s numbers do include non-Hispanics, I don’t know about the Colorado group’s numbers.
Now, a lot of what I see in those articles sounds like posturing on all sides. The illegal migrant and worker advocates are are clearly upset about the political attack on the status of those for whom they advocate. The farmers are upset about the possible loss of cheap, temporary labor that typically shows up on their doorsteps at around the right time, knowledgeable about the job and ready to go. The Department of Corrections sees an opportunity for budgetary offsets, and the human rights groups are upset about the potential abuse of the prisoners at the expense of the illegals. And this is all in addition to the debate over Real ID, which has a privacy component beyond just the immigration and terrorism issues. And we haven’t even begun to get into things like unemployment, wage depression and labor displacement. I expect that the truth in all of this is buried pretty deeply.
However, I’m just wondering. Here, threatened with the loss of a few thousand illegals and feeling the pressure from a politically active constituency, the State is hatching plans to use prisoners to compensate — just about one for one — for that loss. If the laws ever manage to do what they appear to be designed to do — drive off most of the illegals, and drive the rest further underground — and the losses grow from four figures to six, how is the State going to deal with that? I think that this is a question that one can — and should — ask, regardless of one’s opinion of whether getting rid of the illegals is a good or a bad thing. Because there are likely to be negative consequences — especially in the short term — and thus if it is to be done it will take a lot of political will.