The Ventura County farm bureau estimates as many as 36,000 field workers bring in the county's crops of citrus, avocado and strawberries in peak harvest season, and that 95 percent of them are foreign-born.
Ranch owner Ellen Brokaw said immigrant labor is essential to Ventura County's farms.
“There's no way that we can take care of and pick our crops without immigrant labor,” she said.
She said she has advertised widely for US-born workers, as part of rules tied to a guest worker program. But they usually don't seem to want the job.
“It's hard work, and it's not very well-paid,” she said. Starting pay is $12 to $13 an hour. “Sometimes some people apply, but almost never do any of them stay.”
With a gross domestic product worth $2.448 trillion, California has the largest economy in the US, and the sixth-largest in the world. It's also the state with the most immigrants, more than a quarter of its population. These two facts are not unrelated — but the way immigrants build that economy is more complex than it seems.
Betty Yee, California state controller, said undocumented immigrants’ labor is worth more than $180 billion a year to California's economy — about equal to the 2015 gross domestic product for the entire state of Oklahoma. Labor from undocumented immigrants is fundamental not just to agriculture here, but to child care, restaurants, hotels and construction.
https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-03...umented-workers-help-grow-economy-theres-cost
