Comments Elsewhere

toolpusher, you mistake my purpose. The point here is not to offer support either for the bracero program, or for the present situation (which is in some ways not as bad, and in other ways worse, for immigrant workers). Nor is it to suggest that there is some “natural” dependence of agribusiness on immigrant labor: economics is a matter of human choices, not natural forces. I’m well aware of how brutal and exploitative the bracero program allowed some farmers and ranchers to be, and how brutal and exploitative the current immigration regime allows bosses to be towards undocumented workers. (And, often, documented immigrant workers, too.)

The point here is that no-one is served by engaging in economic fabulism, and people who imagine that U.S. agribusiness did NOT make heavy use of immigrant labor prior to 1965—as mac in japan did above—are doing just that. Ever since there has been serious large-scale agribusiness in the United States there it has depended on immigrant labor, and the bracero program was one of the ways that dependency was supplied (for good or ill—and often for ill) during the post war period until 1964. (That some ranchers didn’t like it or use it is beside the point; enough did take advantage of the program to bring millions of Mexican immigrants across the border to live and work in the United States. My family knows it well; my dad spent the summer of 1964 picking tomatoes to help keep his mother’s family’s farm from going under after they could no longer find farmhands.)

I sympathize, and agree with, most of your criticisms of the situation that both the bracero program and the present immigration regime cause. I think that the present situation is shameful, and brutal towards immigrants whose only crime has been to work very hard to make a better life for themselves and their families. But I suspect that we disagree about the economics and the morality of some of the factors in the present situation. I do not think that a large immigrant population from Mexico is a “distortion” of the labor market; I think that the market distortion is the use of government intervention to ban peaceful immigrants from coming to live and work in the country (which, inter alia, gives employers of undocumented immigrants an immense amount of control over them and effectively relegates undocumented immigrants to a few sectors of the economy where the work is typically low-paying and the conditions brutal). Nor do I think there is any sense in blaming La Migra for not being harsh enough towards immigrants; the solution is to repeal the immigration laws, not to enforce them even more.