OPINION: Backbreaking jobs on chile farms explain labor shortage
Aug. 6—If I believed Republican state legislators, I'd think they had pinpointed something fresh and alarming. They've been buzzing about a shortage of workers to harvest New Mexico's famous chile crop, as if that's a recent development.
The Republicans claim a bump in unemployment benefits is leaving growers without enough people who are willing to get down in the dirt to pick the fruit of New Mexico's sun-splashed lands.
Their simplistic explanation glides across the historical record without ever laying a glove on it.
The Republican lawmakers are pitching a twist on an old story, one that often casts someone in government as a villain of chile harvests. I reached my conclusion after reviewing 50 years of news stories about the chile business.
What's clear from my head-hurting, eye-reddening experiment is that chile farms had worker shortages decades before the coronavirus pandemic led to a short-term increase in unemployment benefits.
March 1990 — Farmers in the Lower Rio Grande Valley tell U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici much of their chile crop will die in fields for lack of workers. They say the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 is the culprit. It ended a cheap and plentiful supply of farmworkers from Mexico. The system was tightened to prevent exploitation of foreign workers. Why not hire unemployed Americans instead? They don't want to pick chile, the farmers say.
November 2008 — The New Mexico Chile Association asks state legislators to give farmers a $200 tax incentive for each harvested acre of chile. Farmers say they need the subsidy to cover labor costs. Two Democrats introduce identical bills in the Senate and House of Representatives to provide the chile growers with tax credits totaling $2 million a year — exactly what the industry sought. Both bills would die in 2009, in the midst of the Great Recession.
March 2010 — Charlie Marquez, a lobbyist for the chile association, states the obvious about harvesting season. "We don't have an adequate American workforce, so we have used this immigrant workforce." He says ongoing difficulty in hiring immigrant pickers caused production declines. New Mexico went from 35,000 acres of chile harvested in 1993 to 11,000 acres in 2009. Harvested acres declined to 7,900 in 2019 but climbed to 8,500 last year, according to a survey by the New Mexico Department of Agriculture.
September 1970 — Farmers in Las Uvas Valley tell the New Mexico State Employment Service they're shorthanded at a critical time. Newspapers print an appeal for workers to harvest green chile. The pay is piece-rate, 24 cents for a 24-pound bucket.
February 1986 — Luna County announces an ambitious goal. It wants to become the largest chile-producing county in New Mexico. Businesspeople say there's an obstacle — a lack of workers from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Farmers want the government to grant more worker permits for immigrants. They complain the process is slow, as the U.S. Labor Department has to clear any farmworker from outside the country.
The last four years in New Mexico were filled with debate about then-President Donald Trump's wall on the border with Mexico. Crime was Trump's theme, and it was effective politically. He might not have won the presidency in 2016 without his demagoguery about brown-skinned immigrants.
Inside the state Capitol in Santa Fe, a less inflamed atmosphere than a Trump stump speech, many debates have centered on New Mexico's chile industry. One was how to protect it from false advertising in which any faraway cannery could claim its chile came from Hatch. More often, the raging topic was the difficulty of harvesting green chile with so few workers.
The lobbyist for the chile association once told legislators most pickers were Mexican nationals, about 60 years old. Younger people, whether from Mexico or New Mexico, had little interest in the grueling, sweaty job of harvesting chile.
Forget for a moment about Trump, his wall and the pandemic. American workers have had no interest in picking chile for at least 50 years, probably much longer. Immigrants who were hungry did the dirty work.
New Mexico chile would not have become an international brand without them. It's something worth remembering the next time someone rages, inaccurately, of course, about open borders.
There was a time when every politician in the state would have been happy with a revolving door at harvest time. Workers from another country were welcome as long as they picked the chile fields clean.
Ringside Seat is an opinion column about people, politics and news. Contact Milan Simonich at
msimonich@sfnewmexican.com or 505-986-3080.
