Poverty grinds down the quality of life of farmworker immigrants

Photo by Niala Charles.

Seasonal unemployment, low wages, lack of education and vulnerability of undocumented workers all combine to create a cycle of poverty that is difficult to break. Poverty is one of the primary causes of inadequate living conditions among immigrants who work as farmworkers in Ventura County.

The poverty line in 2015 is a $24,250 annual income for a family of four, according to the 2015 Federal Poverty Guidelines. Most farmworkers in Ventura County make less than $20,000.

“I’ve been to countries where they just leave (housing) to market forces, and you end up with shanty towns built up because you have people that can’t afford decent housing and end up improvising,” Moorpark City Councilmember David Pollock said.

Unemployment has been a constant struggle that many farmworkers face throughout the year. Hired farmworkers have historically experienced above average unemployment rates, partly because of the highly seasonal nature of agriculture, but also because of their limited English skills and low levels of education compared to the general population, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service.

“You can look at statistics about inequality or about immigration, and you can be shocked, but you won’t feel.”

Pepperdine University Professor of Hispanic Studies George Carlsen details the importance of meeting members of the immigrant community instead of just reading about them. (Video by Brandi Saldierna)

The farmworkers who are able to maintain steady work still constantly struggle to earn enough money to support their families. Migrant and seasonal farmworkers represent some of the most economically disadvantaged people in the U.S. According to the Farmworker Factsheet, 23 percent of farmworker families had total family income levels below the national poverty guidelines, compared with 14.5 percent for all Americans in 2013, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

A third of children with undocumented parents live in poverty, according to a study by David K. Androff, Cecilia Ayon, David Becerra and Maria Gurrola called “U.S. immigration policy and immigrant children’s well-being” in the Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare.

We enjoy the lowest cost per capita for food among any industrialized nations, and we do that because we don’t pay a living wage to people who harvest our food.

Roberta “Bobbi” Ryder
President and CEO for the National Center for Farmworker Health

High demand for low-wage labor forces many immigrants into difficult, low-paying jobs, according to the study.

The 2012 National Agricultural Worker Survey found that 83 percent of farmworkers said they were paid by the hour, 11 percent were paid by the piece, and 6 percent were salaried or had other payment methods. Using piece rate as a basis for payment is common in agricultural work when the crop being picked is easily weighed and measured. One reason employers prefer this form of payment is that workers are motivated to work faster during such a short window of seasonal crop harvesting.

The real average hourly earnings of non-supervisory farm laborers has been between $10.50 and $10.80 since 2007, and stayed at $10.80 in 2012, according to the Wages section of the USDA’s Economic Research Service. Real farmworker wages have risen 0.8 percent per year since 1990. The 2014 U.S. all-hired worker annual average wage rate was $12.07 per hour, up 2 percent from the 2013 annual average wage, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service. The 2014 U.S. field worker annual average wage rate was $11.29 per hour, up 2 percent from the 2013 annual average.

For the October 2014 reference week, the largest percentage increases in average wage rates for all hired workers occurred in the California, Delta (Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi), and Mountain (Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming) regions. While many farmworkers struggle with earning a decent wage, within the United States and U.S. territories, 36 states are required to provide worker’s compensation benefits while 17 states offer it as an option, according to the United States Farmworker Fact Sheet.

 

EDUCATION

Undocumented immigrants of all education levels receive a significant wage penalty, though the penalty decreases as education increases, according to Vincezo Caponi and Miana Plesca’s 2014 study in the Journal of Population Economics called “Empirical Characteristics of Legal and Illegal Immigrants in the USA.”

Education Level of Immigrants

Immigrants have high dropout rates, with a majority only receiving an elementary or middle school education.

By the time a migrant child is 12, he or she may work in the fields between 16 to 18 hours per week, leaving little time for school work, which leads to an extremely high dropout rate of 50 percent among migrant children, according to the United States Farmworker Fact Sheet.

The wage gap between native-born and foreign-born Mexican-Americans has increased over the years, from an 11 gap percent in 1970 to a 78 gap percent in 2007, according to Douglas S. Massey and Kerstin Gentsch’s 2014 study in International Migration Review called “Undocumented Migration to the United States and the Wages of Mexican Immigrants.” The study’s findings also indicate that undocumented immigrants earn approximately 20 percent less than documented workers, and that the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, with its criminalization of hiring undocumented workers, has pushed the wages of immigrants systematically downward from $11.45 pre-IRCA to $8.94 post-IRCA.

 

FINANCIAL SYSTEM

Pepperdine University Associate Professor at the School of Public Policy Luisa Blanco Raynal has found in her studies that high poverty among Hispanic immigrants has two interesting effects: 1) most immigrants (and Hispanic Americans in general) are unable or unwilling to save up money, and 2) they still tend to send most of their money back to their home country or give it to their family members who are in the U.S.

“One reason is related to income, the idea that this population has a lower income and don’t have enough to save,” Blanco Raynal said. “The other explanation is related to a distrust of banks. They are less likely to have checkings or savings accounts. Or instead of saving, they’d rather help their family, and they see that as an investment, where if they help them now, they’ll help them later.”

However, this has lasting consequences. Because many immigrants don’t know how financial conditions work, they often cannot plan for retirement, Blanco Raynal said, which leaves them in unstable predicaments when they can no longer work and have not contributed to Social Security.

In her study, “Retirement Planning Among Middle-Aged and Older Hispanics,” published by the Social Science Research Network this March, Blanco Raynal and her colleagues demonstrated family experiences and religion play a key role in saving and financial planning patterns. While some can save regularly, others cannot save because they live day-to-day, and they often refuse to ask their children for help. Similar results were found in her January 2015 study, “A Qualitative Analysis of the Use of Financial Services and Saving Behavior Among Older African Americans and Latinos in the Los Angeles Area,” published in Sage Journals.

“In the last focus groups that we’ve been doing here at the Malibu Labor Exchange, they will mention that living expenses are their largest expense, what they worry and struggle with the most,” Blanco Raynal said. “If you don’t have anything saved up, and you lose your job, there’s a high propensity to become homeless. It brings a challenge.”

Blanco Raynal said participants in focus groups in Malibu said the 2008 recession has also made it significantly more difficult to find jobs because many immigrants work in construction. While it has started to improve, she said they said it has not improved to how it was before 2008.

“Before the recession, they were able to save a little, and now it’s really hard for them to find full-time jobs, so a lot work part time,” Blanco Raynal said. “The ones in better shape have one or two days a week, and they try to find other work the other days.”