(Editor’s note: The following are excerpts from agriculture labor economist Philip Martin’s book “Importing Poverty: Immigration and the Changing Face of Rural America,” just published by Yale University Press):

… The farmworkers of tomorrow are growing up today somewhere outside the United States, making immigration policy a major concern of farmers, farmworkers and agricultural communities. … most of the newcomers in rural America have not finished high school. The question is whether these newcomers and their children will become a poor underclass …

The immigrants in rural and agricultural areas often lack both education and legal status. About 5 percent of the 150 million U.S. workers are believed to be unauthorized, but the percentage of unauthorized farmworkers is higher, topping 50 percent of seasonal workers on crop farms. The share of unauthorized workers in other farm-related industries, from food processing to meatpacking, is generally thought to be about 25 percent, which is five times the U.S. average.

U.S. farm labor and immigration policies did not anticipate a rising tide of poorly educated and unauthorized workers in rural America … policymakers in the 1960s anticipated a wave of mechanization that would eliminate most farm jobs, making it their primary responsibility to help farmworkers and their children transition to nonfarm jobs. By the mid-1980s, it was apparent that the number of farm jobs was stable and the share of unauthorized workers filling them was increasing. The response to the unanticipated increase in unauthorized farmworkers was an easy legalization program, which signaled to farmers that foreign workers would continue to be available. Increased planting and ineffective enforcement opened the floodgates and allowed Mexico’s rural poor to spread throughout North America …

Farmers have long worried about whether there would be enough seasonal workers available to harvest their crops. Over decades, they convinced themselves and the federal government that the solution was to reach over borders and find workers for whom U.S. wages were a godsend. The alternative, allowing wages to increase enough to attract U.S. workers, would likely have reduced the demand for farmworkers well before U.S. workers stormed the fields.

The major program through which farmers could obtain guest workers … H-2A, presumed that most farmers could hire U.S. workers to fill their jobs. However, in the exceptional circumstances when U.S. workers were not available, the U.S. Department of Labor would certify a farmer’s need for legal guest workers.

Certification satisfied sugarcane farmers in Florida and apple growers along the Eastern seaboard, where there were no farmworker unions and few groups opposing guest workers. However, growers in the Western states feared that the United Farm Workers and other unions would send workers in response to the recruitment efforts they were required to undertake, and they would be faced with the choice of hiring pro-union crews or being sued for not hiring U.S. workers. Thus, Western farmers insisted on a noncertification path to hiring legal guest workers …

Western senators … introduced bills that offered alternative guest-worker programs. Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, introduced the Agricultural Work Force and Stability Protect Act in January 1997 to shift the burden of recruitment of farm employers, as under the H-2A Program, to the government. Under Craig’s bill, farmers would submit job offers to local employment … offices. They would have to refer “specific individuals who are able, willing and qualified to work for the employer,” or issue a “certificate of need” that allowed the employer to employ guest workers. Craig’s bill made two other changes desired by Western farmers. First, it would have allowed farmers to offer their out-of-area U.S. workers and foreign workers housing allowance instead of housing … Second it, would have allowed farmers to pay guest workers the higher of the federal or state minimum wage or the “median rate of pay for similarly employed workers in the area of intended employment,” eliminating the third and usually higher minimum wage, the Adverse Effect Wage, that farm employers are required to pay guest workers.

Craig won support from other senators for this alternative guest-worker program, and reintroduced his bill … as the Agricultural Job Opportunity Benefits and Security Act of 1998 (AgJOBS) … AgJOBS included a trust fund to collect employer Social Security and unemployment insurance taxes on guest-worker earnings, and these funds would cover the cost of administering the guest-worker program. In a bid to soften opposition for worker advocates, guest workers admitted under AgJOBS who did at least six months of U.S. farmwork in each of four consecutive calendar years could apply to immigrant visas …

With farmers seemingly on an unstoppable drive for new guest-worker programs in Congress, both the Mexican government and some migrant advocates jumped aboard …The Mexican and think tank endorsements prompted Western farmers to have AgJOBS reintroduced in the Senate in October 1999, but with a new twist — earned legalization. A path to an immigrant visa would be created by allowing currently unauthorized workers to register with local (employer) offices. Registered unauthorized workers could then earn an immigrant status by doing at least 180 days of farmwork each for five of the next seven years … However, congressional Republicans who opposed “rewarding lawbreakers” with legal status, led by Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, block AgJOBS in the waning days of the Clinton administration..

The AgJOBs proposal has been pending in Congress since 2000 … The 2008 version… would allow up to 1.5 million unauthorized foreigners who did at least 150 days of farmwork during the 24-month period before enactment to apply for “blue-card” temporary resident status. Blue-card holders could travel in and out of the United States and obtain work authorization for their spouses, and secure legal status for their minor children. However, in order to become immigrants, blue-card holders would have to complete more farmwork over the next five years … pay application fees as well as a $100 fine and any income taxes owned on their earnings …

The key to the regularization of farmworkers and the rationalization of the farm workforce lies in the payroll taxes that were identified in several of the early versions of AgJOBS. Farmers currently avoid paying Social Security, Medicare and federal unemployment insurance taxes on the earnings of H-2A guests, and AgJOBS does not change those exemptions, making guest workers up to 20 percent cheaper than U.S. workers. This wedge between the higher costs of U.S. workers and the lower costs of H-2A workers is likely to favor the hiring of H-2A workers, especially as recruitment networks evolve. The result may be an even more apartheid-type sector of the U.S. economy, with older white farmers employing young and minority farmworkers.

Farm employers should pay the same taxes on the earnings of H-2A workers as they do on the earnings of U.S. workers. However, since H-2A workers are not generally eligible for benefits under the Social Security and unemployment insurance programs these payroll taxes finance, the funds collected could be used to accelerate the rationalization of farm jobs now employing farmworkers and refunded to guest workers who return to their countries of origin …

(Using payroll taxes to fund) mechanization research and providing guest-worker return bonuses could have desirable effects in both rural America and rural Mexico. In rural America, labor-saving processes ... that are already under way could be speeded up, reducing the need for foreign workers over time. In rural Mexico, return bonuses equal to 10 percent of U.S. earnings could provide the spark for developments that allow the children and grandchildren of guest workers to find opportunity at home ….

… Unlike other legalization proposals, AgJOBS would allow the families of farmworkers to become legal immigrants. This means that if a million rural Mexicans were legalized, the United States may end up with a quarter of Mexico’s 25 million rural poor.

Can the United States solve Mexico’s rural poverty problem by transferring many of them to rural America?

…. The status quo “works” in the sense that it provides the workers needed to get farmwork done, provides jobs and earnings for Mexicans who would otherwise have lower incomes, and provides customers for Main Street stores in rural communities that might otherwise depopulate. However, the status quo keeps agriculture on a low-wage and low-productivity trajectory that is exactly the wrong path for this critical American industry trying to remain competitive in the 21st century

The AgJOBS proposal would legalize many unauthorized workers and their families, but not change a farm labor system that has an enormous appetite for newcomers. Given the failures of the Bracero Program and immigration reforms in 1986, regularization and rationalization offer the best hope to avoid farm labor dilemmas of the future.

Philip Martin is a professor of agriculture and resource economics at the University of California at Davis and chairman of the UC Comparative Immigration and Integration Program.