David G. Gutiérrez: America has harvested immigrant labor while rejecting immigrants for more than 100 years

The combination of wildfires that have ravaged California together with the coronavirus pandemic is being called a "disaster inside a disaster." Among those experiencing the greatest impact of these dual catastrophes are some of the people most essential to our economy: farmworkers.

COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has ravaged agricultural areas like the Salinas Valley, while fires raged just miles from it. Agricultural workers, a significant percentage of whom are undocumented, continue to work in smoke-filled air, under heat advisories and in conditions ripe for the spread of the virus.

While Americans depend on undocumented immigrant labor to put affordable food on their tables, the first stimulus bill signed by President Donald Trump not only excluded all undocumented immigrants from relief funds, it actually denied aid to 1.2 million American citizens simply because they were married to undocumented immigrants. While some might debate whether there are moral or social obligations to help support undocumented laborers in the country, there can be little doubt they are essential to preserving states' food supplies and economies, particularly during this pandemic.

Two industries considered essential to our economy, meatpacking and agriculture, are fueled by immigrant labor. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, immigrants comprise the overwhelming majority of the estimated 2.7 million farmworkers in the U.S. and only about half of them are documented. Roughly half of meatpacking workers are also immigrants, many undocumented.

A disproportionate number of immigrants work in other critical front-line occupations like health care, food production and transportation. At the same time, undocumented workers performing these critical jobs have no access to employer-provided health care, unemployment, disability or other safety net programs.

While undocumented workers may not be here legally, they are still taxpayers. In 2019, undocumented workers comprising an estimated 10% of California's workforce paid more than $2.5 billion in federal, state and local taxes.

The first coronavirus relief bill denied any aid to undocumented immigrants, effectively finding these millions of workers both "essential" and "illegal." The pandemic has revealed a fundamental contradiction in U.S. immigration policy: critical reliance on immigrant labor, while, at the same time, vilifying and calling for the exclusion of immigrants.

The desire to harvest immigrant labor while rejecting the immigrants themselves has been a constant for more than 100 years of American history. The case of Mexican immigrants makes this especially clear. In the early 1900s, the U.S. needed low-wage Mexican laborers for factory and agricultural jobs. To fill the seemingly endless thirst for cheap labor, Mexicans were exempted from immigration quotas and they toiled in the lowest sectors of a segmented labor market, with few rights and little pay.

The demand for labor evaporated with the collapse of the U.S. economy in 1929. Mexicans and Mexican Americans became scapegoats and pariahs, and were targeted by repatriation programs. Los Angeles lost one-third of its Mexican population — people who were not only legally present in the United States, but, in many cases, were citizens — to deportation and repatriation.

In response to labor shortages in the wake of World War II, the U.S. welcomed Mexican immigrants back to perform low-paid, back-breaking labor. The Bracero Program, a U.S.-Mexico guest worker program operating from 1942 to 1964, brought more than 4 million Mexican men to the U.S. These cycles of deportation efforts and guest worker programs speaks to the pliability of immigration logic, simultaneously perceiving Mexicans as resources and liabilities.

Our reliance on guest labor programs and undocumented workers while, at the same time, we ramp up deportation programs, implicitly tells both legal and undocumented immigrants that we want them as laborers and nothing else.

We hire immigrant laborers to do the work American citizens will not do, often at subpar wages and in dangerous conditions, and then refuse to support them in the face of a crisis. The wildfires and the coronavirus pandemic have combined to expose inherent clashes between capitalism, immigration policy, public health and morality.

Molina is an author and professor of American studies and ethnicity at USC. Gutiérrez is an author and professor of history at UC San Diego who lives in Carlsbad.

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