Good Intentions Gone Awry: IRCA and U.S. Agriculture

Philip L. Martin

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1994, vol. 534, issue 1, 44-57

Abstract: Agriculture has been the major side door and backdoor through which unskilled immigrants have entered the United States for the past half century. If the 1980s' immigration patterns continue in the 1990s, up to one-fourth of the working-aged U.S. immigrants who arrive during the decade may have their initial U.S. employment in fruit and vegetable agriculture. Immigration reform was expected to reform agriculture's revolving-door labor market. By legalizing the farm workforce, it was hoped that legal workers who did not have to compete with a continuing influx of illegal aliens could force farmers to improve wages and working conditions. Farmers, in turn, would stop planting labor-intensive crops in remote areas and expect the U.S. government to admit or tolerate the entry of immigrant workers to harvest them. The immigration reforms have proven to be a case of good intentions gone awry. Instead of a legal farm workforce, 20-40 percent of today's farm workers are unauthorized. Most farm employers did not make adjustments to retain newly legalized farm workers; instead, more farmers sought newly arrived and often unauthorized immigrant workers.

Date: 1994
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716294534001004 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:534:y:1994:i:1:p:44-57

DOI: 10.1177/0002716294534001004

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().