A United South Carolina

From Farm Press Blog:

With the issue of migrant farm labor hitting a fever-pitch in the Southeast — especially in states like Alabama and Georgia — it might be a good time to take a step back and consider the contributions of immigrants to American agriculture.

In a recent article in The New Yorker magazine about authentic Southern cooking, writer Burkhard Bilger makes the interesting point that the nineteenth century was a great “Age of Experiment” in American agriculture.

“Three-hundred years of immigration had brought over every conceivable crop — rice from China, quinoa from South America, groundnuts from Africa — and farmers found ways to grow them all,” writes Bilger.

In this same article, David Shields, a professor at the University of South Carolina, says there was a “frenzy” of agricultural research at the time. “They took the carrot culture of Flanders, the turnip culture of Germany, the beet culture of France, and they tweaked them to create this extraordinary myriad of vegetables and grains,” says Shields.

This “extraordinary myriad” is what has given us the rich diversity of crops that we enjoy today. Yet, even as we consider such contributions, in a nation that was built with immigrant labor, some of our states are now viewed as being openly hostile to the entire concept of immigration.

The troublesome trend started in Arizona, where lawmakers were convinced they could do a better job than the federal government of keeping out undocumented immigrants. Georgia and Alabama followed suit, and Florida might consider its own version of “immigration reform” in 2012.

So far, the results of these state laws have been disastrous, and you can read more about it in the pages of this issue of Southeast Farm Press. Such “reforms” have been especially harmful to farmers, more specifically vegetable and fruit producers who rely heavily on immigrant labor to complete their harvest each year.

The reasoning from lawmakers was that these were “job” bills; that illegal immigrants were taking jobs away from U.S. citizens and that stricter enforcement would help to lower the unemployment rate. Either these legislators did not do a thorough-enough job of researching the issue or they simply ignored the facts. (more…)

Filed under: Alabama, Arizona, Arizona-copycat laws, immigrant community, Migrant Workers, South Carolina | Tagged: agriculture, crops, David Shields, farm, farmer, Georgia, produce | Leave a Comment »