Senior Fellow Michael Clemens is quoted in a Washington Post piece on why Americans won't take agricultural jobs and the need for immigration.
When I talked to him about the economic effects of immigration last month, Center for Global Development migration expert Michael Clemens mentioned that he was working on research on agricultural migrant workers. That research is finally out, in the form of a report released by CGD and the Partnership for a New American Economy, a pro-immigration reform group started by Michael Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch.
Clemens’s study focuses on the agricultural industry in North Carolina, and more specifically on the North Carolina Growers Association (NCGA), which supplies manual laborers to North Carolina farms. The NCGA is the nation’s largest user of the H-2A guest worker program, which is designed with agricultural workers in mind. Under that program’s regulations, Clemens explains, NCGA “must submit an application to the US Department of Labor proving that it has actively recruited US natives and native workers will not take NCGA jobs.”
That data is interesting, because it describes the labor market before any immigrant workers are recruited. That, as Clemens says, “allows us to assess the willingness of native workers to take farm jobs before they can even be offered to foreign workers, meaning that this study does not miss any impact caused by people who self-select out of an area or occupation because of competition with foreign workers.”
That willingness, he finds, is basically nonexistent. Every year from 1998 to 2012, at least 130,000 North Carolinians were unemployed. Of those, the number who asked to be referred to NCGA was never above 268 (and that number was only reached in 2011, when 489,095 North Carolinians were unemployed). The share of unemployed asking for referrals never breached 0.09 percent.
The obvious counterargument to this analysis is that there are, by definition, no jobs Americans won’t do no matter what. If agricultural labor paid $100 an hour, people would be lining up to take these jobs. So the alternative to foreign work, by this line of reasoning, isn’t that these jobs are just disappearing, but them being offered at a higher wage.
It’s not so clear that’s the case here. For one thing, Clemens looks at a labor market where employers are only using legal labor, which under the H-2A regulations means they have to pay the same wage to native and non-native laborers (a wage set by the government, according to the type of work and the geographic area where it’s being done), and thus can’t benefit from paying lower wages to migrant workers. If even under that standard, Americans aren’t applying for the jobs, even when they have automatic preference over foreign workers, that tells you Americans are really avoiding them.