Dr Sarah Taber

Japanese immigrants in the 19th & early 20th centuries came to the US in large part for manual farm labor in California. Sound familiar?

Japan had much more advanced horticulture than the US at that time, so these immigrants weren't just bringing brute labor. They were bringing a lot of basic how-to's of commercial farming that built the foundation for California's success as an agricultural powerhouse today.

Japanese immigrant farm laborers American Dream'd so hard, many families were able to save money to buy their own land and start farming for themselves.

"The California Farm Bureau was quoted by The News, saying that Japanese farmers were responsible for 40 percent of all vegetables grown in the state, including nearly 100 percent of all tomatoes, celery, strawberries and peppers." http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist9/harvest.html …

The Central Valley used to be peppered with Japanese family farms. Not anymore. What happened to them? WW2's Japanese internment.

Japanese internment was a land grab by white farmers. Full stop.

"The average value/acre of all West Coast farms in 1940 was $37.94, whereas that of Japanese farms was $279.96... 3/4 acres of Japanese farm lands were devoted to actual crop production, whereas only 1/4 acres of all farm land in the areas was planted in crops."

Check out those numbers. Japan's farm traditions were based on maximizing use of space, so they made more $ per acre. That tends to drive up land prices. And rising land prices tend to make people whose farming skills can't keep up feel very nervous.

So. Japanese farmers' success came from having tight management skills, and that threatened their white neighbors. White farmers had a choice: level up their game, or play dirty.

Let me reiterate: given a choice between being good at their job and lobbying the gov't to make their problems go away, US farmers chose the second option. This is a classic move that those in the farm industry will still recognize.

They weren't even trying to hide it. Japanese internment was about white good ol' boys being jealous of successful immigrants.

There was a downside though. Remember how Japanese American farmers were growing nearly half the country's produce? And the US war strategy was "an army marches on its stomach, so we need super solid supply chains for food"?

It turns out putting most of the country's skilled farmers in jail ... didn't help with making food. Once internment started, food shortages quickly followed.

So yeah, victory gardens were less "plucky nation pitches in with the war effort" and more "oh wow we systematic racism-ed so hard that we punched a hole in the economy. Do we admit we the mistake and fix it? Nahhhh, let's foist the consequences off on civilians."

What does this have to do with #DREAMers? Like Japanese families in the early 20th century, a lot of US immigrant population today is families that came to work on farms. And they've been here just long enough to actually get established and really start building a life.

The US was kind of ok with immigration as long as it was get in, work for really cheap, get out. But we're at a demographic turning point where a critical mass of immigrant families have reached some upward mobility and established themselves en masse.

*farm immigrant families

And here's the part that most people don't know, unless they work in some really specific parts of the farm economy. Most of the US thinks of "immigrant farm workers" as grunt labor. And yes, most of the brute force work on farms is done by Latinx immigrants.

But 1st and 2nd generation Latinx immigrants are also the *knowledge base* in modern US agriculture. I'm gonna tell you guys a secret. A lot US farmers don't actually know that much about farming. They know a lot about writing checks to Latinx contractors, who know how to farm.

The US farm industry isn't just dependent on Latinx immigrants for labor. They're dependent on Latinx immigrants for knowing HOW to farm. How to manage a harvest, how to run a packinghouse, how to keep a fleet of farm vehicles running.

And I bet you money that scares the hell out of a lot of white people. Not the farmers, funnily enough. The actual farmers tend to be a lot more at peace with it than the rest of the rural/suburban white population.

(Don't get me wrong, they still mostly voted for Trump. Even though they knew his immigration policies are deadly for farms. They vote for conservatives and just expect things to magically turn out immigration-friendly anyway.)

The thing is, farmers aren't the influential voting bloc they used to be. The new wrinkle entering the immigration debate right now, IMO, is private prisons.

Prison labor's been used in the US for manufacturing for quite some time. But it's making significant new inroads into farm labor. Especially now that it's becoming harder for immigrants to work in the US, farms are turning to inmate contracts.

Prisoners working on a farm is a little different from manufacturing. In manufacturing, folks are locked down in a building. It's pretty easy to control your workers.

But farming is outdoors and, nowadays, super mechanized. That means to get anything done, you have to be able to give someone tools or a tractor and have a reasonable expectation that they'll use them for work. Instead of, say, murdering the foreman and running off.

You also need people with farm work experience. Farm work is an art. You just don't get productive labor out of stoners. I say this as someone who's personally supervised convict farm crews made of people in for minor drug charges. It's... just a mess all around.