Immigration – A View from the Trenches

Tom Collishaw’s, CEO of Self Help, take on immigration and SJV workforce

When it comes to immigration policy in America, there are dishonest actors everywhere you look. It has been nearly four decades since the last significant attempt to reform our laws about who gets to enter our country and live and work here legally. While there is a broad consensus that our immigration system is “broken,” we are apparently powerless to do anything about it, given the current “us versus them” mentality in our politics.

Self-Help Enterprises was founded with a straightforward goal – to improve the living conditions of farmworkers and their families in the San Joaquin Valley. Over time, this original goal has expanded beyond housing to infrastructure and promoting sustainable and resilient rural communities in the face of water scarcity and other climate-related challenges. While farmworkers are no longer our sole target population, they remain a core constituency in the most fertile valley in the world.

And farmworkers, the lifeblood of our agricultural industry, are not served well by our lack of will when it comes to immigration reform.

By any measure, well over half of those who work in agriculture are undocumented. We at Self-Help Enterprises know this from direct experience. Two of our major housing programs funded by the federal government – the mutual self-help housing program and farm labor rental housing funded by the USDA – require documentation to participate in those programs and reside in that housing. Thirty years ago, documented farmworkers were part of long waiting lists for both programs. Today, the number of farmworkers pursuing homeownership in our mutual self-help housing program is dramatically lower as a percentage of participants, and we are struggling to fill our farm labor rental housing units, including at a beautiful new facility in Farmersville.

The reason is simple. There are plenty of farmworkers, but precious few who are documented.

Which means, of course, that someone is cheating. Because in America, the law says you must prove you are legally able to work in this country when you take a job – including an agricultural job. Growers will tell you that they get the necessary paperwork, often relying on others, such as labor contractors, to provide it. But it would be hard to believe that they don’t understand that games are being played.

One presidential campaign openly talks about deporting illegal migrants. This raises a simple question: who will do the farm labor? Or for that matter, clean hotel rooms?

Undocumented immigrants were tolerated for many years because these are overwhelmingly earnest, hardworking farm laborers who contributed in every way to the well-being of communities, not to mention the country, by doing the work other Americans are not seeking. These undocumented workers mostly work for agricultural businesses that ensure they pay taxes, even though they likely will never benefit from programs such as Medicare or Social Security.

The migrant stream has expanded in recent years to include those who are fleeing from failing countries or those being victimized by drug and human traffickers. Which of course has made it easier to demonize all migrants. But regardless of the rhetoric, there is no one in public life that supports “open borders.”

This is all too cynical to comprehend. We need real reform – including a reasonable pathway to citizenship – before this situation improves.

The only positive thing that came from the Covid era was that farm laborers were categorized for the first time as “essential workers.” Those of us who work with farmworkers know them to be amongst the hardest working, collaborative, family-oriented and law-abiding populations in our society. And they are fundamental to our way of life and the vibrancy of our communities.

Let’s insist that whoever we vote for be dedicated to solving this problem, even if it takes compromising with their sworn enemies. Our communities are counting on it.