Immigrant Workers in Texas Could Fill Farm Vacancies, but They're Trapped in the Valley

Last edited Tue Oct 24, 2017, 11:22 PM - Edit history (1)

For the last two years, Bernie Thiel has watched yellow squash rot in his farm fields outside of Lubbock. The crops weren’t diseased, and they weren’t ravaged by pests or pelted by hail, he said. There just wasn’t anyone to pick them. Though Thiel has consistently lowered the acreage he plants to squash — from 160 acres seven years ago to 60 acres now — his aging immigrant workforce just can’t keep up anymore. And there’s no one to replace them.

“It’s very, very frustrating because we can move this product. The demand is there,” Thiel told the Observer. “The labor is just not available.”

Along with squash, Thiel also grows other labor-intensive crops, such as zucchini, tomatoes and okra, which must be hand-picked. He has 35 employees working six or seven days a week. It’s hard, backbreaking work that most Americans aren’t willing to do. That’s why he, like many farmers, largely relies on immigrant labor to get the work done.

But there’s a problem: Between 50 and 70 percent of immigrant farmworkers are in the country illegally. Texas is home to an estimated 1.6 million undocumented immigrants, and many of those who are available to work on farms live in the Rio Grande Valley, near the Texas-Mexico border. Though large populations of immigrants are clustered in Houston and other urban areas of the state, many already work in non-agricultural industries.

Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/immigrant-workers-texas-fill-farm-vacancies-theyre-trapped-valley/