Aliens and the Apple Harvest

...Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd (D.-W.Va...

...By early July, according to James Cruz of the area's ETA office, Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland growers who prefer Jamaican workers had not submitted any adequate interstate recruitment requests...

...The Attorney General and his Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) presumably lack the expertise to determine the availability of domestic apple-pickers...

...A few federal courts have in the past upheld the Labor Department's definition of available workers and wage formula as possessing a reasonable relation to the 1952 Act...

...Late in August, the Department proposed to approve the entry of over 2,000 Jamaicans, and its lawyers expect the growers to fight for many more in the courts, where they have consistently succeeded...

...Assuming that the flow of illegal aliens from Mexico is slowed, as Carter hopes, growers in the South and West will lose a major source of cheap laborone that works in fear of arrest, does not enjoy the benefit of American laws, and is even more subject to the grower's caprice than legal aliens are...

...Second, the growers claim the Jamaicans are better motivated and pick apples quicker than Americans...

...With such strong incentives before them, and the political power of their associations across the nation behind them, the growers clearly cannot be stopped by lower-echelon Labor Department officials...

...the next year...

...The problem with the Easterners' argument even now, however, is that their professed inability to provide better wages and conditions is unproved and extremely questionable...

...What the secretary says almost always goes at INS, and during the last several years of recession and minidepression, Republican secretaries of labor have stated that there were not enough unemployed Americans willing to work the apple harvest...

...Meanwhile, 6.9 per cent of the U.S...

...One black Labor Department official calls the Jamaican apple picker a modern-day indentured servant...

...Only a Cabinet-level decision to faithfully enforce the Immigration and Nationality Act could have an impact...

...Yet Castillo speculated in .June that the President might offer an expansion of the temporary-alien-worker program to Mexico as a concession for increased cooperation in checking illegal immigration, and in exchange for a part of Mexico's undeveloped oil reserves, Carter himself last month cryptically calling for a review of temporary legal immigration, too...

...If this is so, it is probably because the conditions they leave make the plight of the American farmworker seem attractive...

...That is, to pick apples and make money...

...Several months ago, they forced the Department of Labor to hold hearings that stalled new regulations designed to aid the Department in matching orchards with citizens seeking employment...

...citizens cannot be found...

...By being on constant call, they give employers free rein to treat employes however they wish...

...The crop ripened, and overripened, and as Castillo put it, the smell of Presidio's onions went all the way to the White House...

...The price of domestic apples may well rise if picked by American hands, but any increase would surely be small...

...A large number of Northeastern growers, armed with court orders, have also refused to advance transportation costs to United States migrants...

...The apple-growers have their own reasons for favoring the islanders...

...Washington growers warned at June Labor Department hearings in Denver that if the government took away their illegals, they too would demand the next best thing legal temporary aliens...

...For the growers want the Jamaican workers badly and have been playing tough to get them...

...Thus an apple-grower requesting outside labor need merely offer an hourly wage based on the one that previously prevailed in his state, regardless of increases in the demand for labor...

...Intended to preserve American workers' jobs and bargaining power, the statute authorizes the Attorney General to admit temporary foreign labor only if capable, unemployed U.S...

...And if a worker dares to ask for improved treatment, the grower can insure his not being called to the U.S...

...But human beings are not Sony television sets and green apples...

...Employment Service, become unavailable...

...Unemployed Americans who would take jobs if the most affordable wages and working conditions were offered have not been considered "available...

...If the growers have their way again this year, 3,000 or more of these laborers will be British West Indiansmostly Jamaicansflown in from the Caribbean expressly for the harvest...

...The Immigration and Nationality Act notwithstanding, no one has asked them to demonstrate the accuracy of their claim...

...Unlike an American worker, the certified temporary alien cannot seek alternative employment in the U.S: Should he be ordered off his assigned orchard, he knows he will be shipped back where he came from...

...the Jamaicans are mostly young, single males who are easily housed and eager to return home, with their American dollars, as heroes...

...They say competition is too stiff, particularly from Washington state, with its controlling one-third share of the national apple market, and its reportedly heavy reliance on cheap, unregulated, illegal alien labor...

...They enter the United States legally, under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952...

...And some friends of the "wretched of the earth" suggest that the most wretched have a call on available jobs, irrespective of national boundaries...

...In fairness, it should be noted that the issue raises certain fundamental questions about the relation of the U.S...

...Furthermore, it is naive to believe that the economic development of Jamaica or the plight of its poor will be substantially altered by the temporary-alien program...

...Each year they therefore ask the Secretary of Labor to certify that natives are unavailable, and that the presence of thousands of foreign workers would not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of local farmworkers...

...Nevertheless, the Secretary of Labor probably could revise his certification standards without judicial interference, since it is a tenet of administrative law that Executive Branch departments enjoy plenty of leeway...

...Since temporary aliens can never become part of an American system, their social aspirations can find no constructive outlet in U.S...

...Along the Eastern seaboard, in the big apple-producing states of New York and the Virginias, and in New England, harvest-time is upon the growers, who will need thousands of seasonal farmworkers to pick the Mcintosh, Rome, York Imperial, and Golden Delicious apples...

...The new head of INS was Leonello Castillo, its first Spanish-speaking commissioner, an ex-social worker and a man universally viewed as a friend of the domestic migrants, many of whom are, of course, Hispanic...

...More generally, Department officials report that apple-growers in many states have bucked Washington's efforts to recruit Americans for this summer's harvest...

...Ernest Green, assistant secretary of labor for the Employment and Training Administration (ETA), had built an impressive record of commitment to this country's unemployed...

...The dollars that Jamaicans earn in the U.S...

...In any case, the growers may be expected to increase the pressure on the White House...

...Growers are required to recruit domestically before foreign labor can be certified for entry, and the search is supposed to begin in the spring, not afterward when most migrants have left their homes in Southern states to seek jobs further north...

...It runs $100-$200 to get from migrant camps in Florida to New England orchards, and many workers simply do not have that much money in hand...

...work force is unemployed...

...But the farmworkers' optimism is waning...

...More important is the fact that those hands would no longer be draining the tills of unemployment support: Workers would organize to improve the lot of America's large farm-labor force...

...The Jamaican apple-pickers are not illegal aliens (as are the people at the center of the controversy surrounding President Carter's recent amnesty proposal for outsiders who have found their way into this country and taken jobs...

...Humans are the agents of social change, and to effect change they must have the opportunity to organize themselves within defined social systems toward achievable goals...

...Mitchel Ostrer, who was an intern with the Center this summer, studies at Columbia Law School and Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School...

...Consequently, the most consistent position would be to oppose a work program for them, while supporting amnesty for illegal aliens, who can become citizens...

...agricultural unemployment hovers even higher, at almost 10 per cent, a figure that includes thousands of migrant workers forced to languish throughout the country...

...Some consumer spokesmen argue that barring cheaper foreign workers would raise supermarket prices...

...These temporary foreign hands impede the U.S...

...The Secretary of Labor would have to deny all requests for alien pickers unless it could be demonstrated that no Americans would take the jobs even if the growers offered the highest wages and best working conditions they could afford without destroying their market...

...fields...

...In addition, U.S...

...Refusing to recruit in South Texas, home of thousands of migrant farmworkers, local growers played chicken with the Federal government...

...are too insignificant to contribute to a transformation of Jamaican society...

...Michael C. Harper is an attorney with the Center for Law and Social Policy...

...for prevailing upon the Department to delay the codes...

...To date, though, Carter and company have given no sign that they are ready to reverse alien farmworker policy...

...The Jamaicans, by contrast, are brought in on chartered airplanes...

...After all, Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall, a former professor of rural economics at the University of Texas, had long advocated the reorganization of the American farm-labor force...

...The growers insist that they cannot afford to improve wages and working conditions...

...They come here with one thing in mind," Harry Byrd III said in Martinsburg...

...At the opening session in Martinsburg, West Virginia, grower Harry F. Byrd III personally thanked Senator Harry F. Byrd II p.-Va...

...Farmworkers had reason to hope that the new Democratic Administration would see things differently...

...And then there was former peanut-grower Jimmy Carter, the Chief Executive who had pledged to find jobs for all Americans who want them...

...For instance, family housing is not required, although its availability would undoubtedly attract native workers...

...The loss of jobs for Americans is not the whole story, though...

...and its labor force to the Third World...

...On the contrary, indications are that many more temporary foreign workers may soon legally join the Jamaican apple-pickers...

...Some Administration officials have contended that the Presidio affair is not a sign of things to come...

...Some free-trade advocates hold that world production is increased by the free international movement of apple-pickers as surely as by the free movement of apples...

...Should a large percentage of the Western illegals receive amnesty, as Carter has proposed, the Washington growers will be in much the same position as those in the East...

...to pick onions and melons in Presidio, Texas...

...As of mid-August, New York growers were still in court on the matter, further delaying recruitment...

...Similarly, growers need not provide working conditions better suited to Americans...

...Americans who ask for a nickel more, says David Williams, deputy assistant administrator of the U.S...

...Bowing to Texan congressmen, Carter asked Attorney General Griffin Bell to admit the aliens...

...First, the Social Security, unemployment insurance and off-job medical insurance are eliminated, along with the bothersome attendant paperwork...

...Until now, secretaries of labor have rejected this approach...

...This spring, INS decided to crack down on the border area where Mexicans had each year illegally crossed into the U.S...

...and Senator Jennings Randolph (D.-W.Va...

...In the end, the Administration must decide whether some proportion of American jobs will forever be relegated to an underclass, be it national or international...

...migrants often work in families...

...farmworkers' attempts to organize (as industrial workers did decades ago) and bargain for a living wage and decent working conditions...

...Instead, the focus has been on the labor pool willing to accept the customary wages-already pulled downward by the presence of aliens in the marketplace...

...Indeed, the Jamaicans comprise a malleable, subservient labor pool...