By Erin Krauss
This spring, the North Carolina Farm Bureau released a video-advertisement that encourages North Carolina lawmakers to think about the implications of harsh immigration enforcement policies on the agriculture industry. The NC Farm Bureau, founded in 1936, claims to represent 500,000 member families with ties to the agriculture economy.
The video’s message is clear: when agricultural states crack down on immigrant workers, there is a huge cost to farmers and the states’ economies overall.
Alabama is mentioned as an example; and recent events there make for a depressing situation. Last summer, AL enacted a harsh local immigration law that resulted in numerous consequences for the immigrant community. After the law went into effect, a mass exodus of community members fled the state causing a major blow to the state’s farm industry, which depends heavily on immigrant labor to be successful. Replacing these workers has proven to be virtually impossible.
As one AL farmer states in an interview on NPR: "That isn't the kind of job most of us want to do…I don't blame them for not wanting to do [it], but somebody's got to do it if we're going to keep eating for the price that we are eating at." The interview goes on to quote a farmer who recognizes that many farmworkers have come to make the US their home and have families and community here: "You got people's been living here 25 years. They've raised families here, they've got a residence; they've made a life here… I've got very good friends, almost like family, that's been working for us for years and years. I don't think that's right."
Here at home, North Carolina has been facing it’s own set of proposed anti-immigrant legislation. Beyond instilling fear, anger, and magnifying a strong sense of dehumanization in the immigrant community; these kinds of immigration laws threaten to bring the local agriculture industry to a halt. How would NC presume to be any different or be any more prepared than Alabama was to deal with the consequences of ostracizing and criminalizing an already undervalued workforce? The success of North Carolina economy depends heavily on agriculture (it provides 22% of the state’s income), and it could not survive without the workers that keep fruits and vegetables moving from the fields to our tables.
Farmworkers, farmworker advocates, and the farm owner community don’t always agree. But this year, the concern about draconian immigration enforcement and the inevitable devastation of NC agriculture is one concern that many stakeholders share. Although farmworker advocates have long recognized that farmworker justice cannot be achieved by way of immigration advocacy only (fair treatment of farm workers is a labor rights issue that should be recognized as such for any population working in the fields), there is no denying that immigration law *does* effect the farmworker community and the agriculture industry in North Carolina.
We must think deeply about the multiple impacts (economic & humanitarian) of immigration laws, and in doing so, perhaps we will begin to finally recognize the human element behind immigration enforcement & the human element that has always existed behind the production of our food.