The switch to mechanical harvesting is taking a heavy toll on the
Mexican migrants who fill most of the state's lowest-paying farm jobs.
With machines picking more crops, the need for field hands is falling
sharply. Where 50 men once were needed to harvest a field of raisins,
five now suffice. Even legal fieldworkers say they
have never experienced such a tough year. There were more migrants,
they complain, and jobs were all but impossible to find. Mechanization
portends big problems for a region strained in the past two decades by
the arrival of impoverished rural Mexicans. They are widely estimated
to be coming to the United States at a rate of more than a half million
a year, with a quarter to a third of them entering California. The
challenge of absorbing so many newcomers is taxing the economic and
social well-being of the valleys that produce fruits, nuts and
vegetables for markets worldwide. "We're adding a lot of poor people
into what's already a pretty poor area. It's a dangerous path," said
Philip Martin, a migration specialist at the University of California
Davis. California, the setting for John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of
Wrath" and Cesar Chavez's historic farmworker union movement, is
experiencing the emergence of a worrisome strain of rural poverty. It
exists alongside the relative prosperity associated with the state's
$25.7 billion agriculture business. [more]
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