California's Illegal Immigrant Shortage

Farmers on the border who can’t find field hands are getting creative

Farmers rely on Mexican workers—who they say are more skilled than Americans—to harvest labor-intensive crops like asparagus, which must be sorted by length, bundled, and bound with rubber bands before packaging

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By James Nash

May 4, 2012 at 1:05 AM UTC

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This article is part of the May 7, 2012 issue of businessweek.

Conventional wisdom has long held that legions of Mexicans flood the U.S. every year, stealing American jobs and dodging taxes. That was the line of thinking that spawned stricter immigration laws in a handful of states over the last two years. Then, on April 23, just before U.S. Supreme Court arguments over one such law in Arizona, the Pew Hispanic Center released a study with a surprising finding: From 2005 to 2010, the think tank reported, the net flow of people between Mexico and the U.S. was zero.

J.P. LaBrucherie, vice president of LaBrucherie Produce in El Centro, Calif., says a labor shortage has “been a steady problem over the last 10 years,” limiting his peak-season hiring to 300 workers, rather than the 400 he needs. “You struggle,” says LaBrucherie. “You get behind on some of the work … and sometimes you can’t harvest as much as you want.”