ANALYZING THE EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION REFORMS ON AGRICULTURE

Abstract

hanges to U.S. immigration laws and policies could alter the supply of foreign-born labor to all industries, including agriculture. As of March 2010, unauthorized immigrants accounted for 5.2% of the U.S. civilian labor force, according to estimates by Passell and Cohn (2011). In crop agriculture, this proportion is much higher: 48% of hired farmworkers are unauthorized, according to data for 2007-09 from the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) (Carroll, Georges, and Saltz, 2011). Similar survey-based data are not available for the livestock and animal product sectors, although unauthorized immigrant workers are certainly present in those sectors as well. To better understand how changes in the supply of foreign-born labor might affect agriculture, we use a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the U.S. economy to evaluate two different scenarios: (1) a 156,000-person increase in the number of temporary nonimmigrant farmworkers, such as those now admitted via the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program, and (2) a 5.8-million-person reduction in the number of unauthorized workers in all sectors of the economy, including agriculture. These figures were chosen to represent possible policy-induced changes to the supply of labor but do not represent an assessment of the effects of any specific legislative proposal. A CGE model is well suited for this type of analysis because it takes account of linkages between factor and product markets in all industries, allowing us to quantify the potential effects of changes in immigration policy on domestic demand for U.S. agricultural output, on the U.S. labor market and wage costs to agriculture, and on exchange rates and international agricultural trade. In this article, we summarize the main findings of our modeling work and discuss the evolving economic context for foreign-born farm labor in the United States. A more detailed discussion of our modeling results may be found in a recently published report by USDA’s Economic Research Service (Zahniser, et al., 2012). An analysis of the status of current legislative proposals relating to immigration and agriculture may be found in Martin (2012).