Our Produce Harvests are “Graying”
I claim New Mexico as one of my several “homelands.” Thus, a story about how chile farmers are confronting the aging of their work forces caught my eye. This time of year is when the air in New Mexico grows more pungent with the smell of fresh green and red chiles roasting in road-side stands. From the Albuquerque Journal:
“New Mexico’s chile fields are graying. The generation of farmworkers on which producers have long depended are aging out of the workforce. Farmers say local youth are loathe to take their place picking delicate green chile under a scorching sun, while tough border security and a lack of immigration reform has kept Mexican workers away.
Growers across the nation from Washington to South Carolina have long complained of a labor shortage, and they often blame their distance from the border with Mexico, which for decades supplied this country’s agriculture workforce. But New Mexico’s Hatch Valley – an hour’s drive from the Mexican border – is in the same boat, even though a skilled picker can make considerably more than the guaranteed state minimum wage of $7.50….
Juan Carlos Soto hunches over knee-high chile plants at the Adams farm in the Hatch Valley, where green fields of chile, corn and pinto beans stretch to the base of the brown Uvas mountains. He came to the U.S. illegally as a farmworker in 1984, he said, and earned citizenship through the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted amnesty to millions of undocumented foreign workers but did little to change the framework for legal immigration of workers going forward.
Soto carefully snaps long green chiles off their stems with eye-catching velocity – a skill that only experienced chile pickers have, farmers say. ‘This is where I have worked my whole life,’ he said, explaining that he taught his daughter to work the chile fields but adding proudly that she became a nurse. ‘The youngsters want to work in the shade.'”
For more of the story, read “Chile Farmers Face an Aging Workforce.” And before you dismiss this story as just about green chiles, remember that in many regions of our country, long-term care industries also depend on immigrant work forces — another reason for getting serious about creating fair, safe avenues for legal immigration.