2006.05.17: May 17, 2006: Headlines: COS - Paraguay: Agriculture: Farmworkers: Ethnology: Immigration: Calaveras Enterprise: Paraguay RPCV Rick Mines worked for the Department of Labor until 1999, and his enduring contribution was developing the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS)
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2006.05.17: May 17, 2006: Headlines: COS - Paraguay: Agriculture: Farmworkers: Ethnology: Immigration: Calaveras Enterprise: Paraguay RPCV Rick Mines worked for the Department of Labor until 1999, and his enduring contribution was developing the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS)
Paraguay RPCV Rick Mines worked for the Department of Labor until 1999, and his enduring contribution was developing the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS)
Mines has continued with ethnographic surveys since leaving the Department of Labor. He’s allied with advocacy groups and recently the California Endowment sent him to Mexico for a farmworker survey. He said whatever policy is being hammered out in the Senate right now should try to preserve the immigrant family unit; there’s a social cost that comes with having a largely Mexican male work force in the country without their wives and children. But the most important thing at issue, Mines said, was the overall cost that comes with having a democratic society retain a contracted workforce without any voting rights.
Paraguay RPCV Rick Mines worked for the Department of Labor until 1999, and his enduring contribution was developing the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS)
Rail Road Flat man lets data do the talking
By Keli Dailey
Wednesday, May 17, 2006 10:23 AM CDT
Last night, President Bush used the weight of his office to press the public and principals in the immigration debate to support his vision for reforms. But you don’t have to be the chief executive to influence Congress. You could be Rick Mines.
“President Bush has a little more influence than I do, though,” Mines joked one afternoon in his office, the small barn outside his Rail Road Flat home that he shares with his wife, District 2 Planning Commissioner Holly Mines.
It’s not that Mines himself has the power to influence programs and policies affecting immigrants. Leave that to his agricultural surveys.
Since a 1977 dissertation for his doctorate in agricultural economics the University of California, Berkeley, Mines has tracked the relationship between Mexican migrants and an industry dependent upon their labor.
Adventures with language and romance in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1955, gave him an affinity for Latin America, he said, and by 1966 he was part of the early wave of Peace Corps volunteers in rural Paraguay, before heading back to school and starting a family.
Then came the amnesty year, 1986, when President Reagan legalized an estimated two million people through the Immigration Reform and Control Act, and another million through the Special Agricultural Worker program.
In 1988, the U.S. Department of Labor tapped Rick Mines to track this population’s progress and find out if the nation had enough farmworkers. If there had been a shortage, a guest worker program would be instituted, allowing immigrants only a brief stay in the country.
But there were plenty.
There are also plenty of reasons to find out who makes up this work force.
“Data can make a difference sometimes and often it’s needed to point out parameters,” Mines said. Government agencies spend almost a billion dollars on migrant programs every year, Mines said, providing health and education support to an essential labor force in one of America’s most volatile markets.
Agriculture owes a huge debt to immigrant labor, Mines said. During World War II, America was keenly aware of its need for fieldworkers and created a guest worker program that allowed millions of Mexican men to stay in the country for a few months and earn a living. The Brasero program, as it was called, lasted into the 1960s.
Twenty years later, Mines was brought in to check on the health of this labor supply.
But immigrant farm laborers are hard to tracknthe work is seasonal, as the crops are picked and packaged and disappear, so do the workers.
“There is no information about farmworkers that is reliable because the Census Bureau and the current population survey, the Agricultural Census and Decennial, are done at the end of March beginning of April when the workers are back in Mexico,” Mines explained.
“It’s a downtime.”
And the threat of deportation gives incentive to people in the country illegally to remain but shadows to a federal headcounter.
So the population the U.S. Census reflects isn’t the same one we see when we drive by the pickers along the highway, Mines said.
Mines worked for the Department of Labor until 1999, and his enduring contribution was developing the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS). This system of collecting details about work hours and wages is done through 3,000 farmworker surveys per year. The mass of data that makes up the NAWS, some 35,000 records, has been a building block for senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain’s comprehensive approach to immigration reform. A section of their proposal, under the heading “AG Jobs,” is drawn from NAWS. They’re using the information to determine who the farmworkers are and who should qualify for legalization.
Mines has continued with ethnographic surveys since leaving the Department of Labor. He’s allied with advocacy groups and recently the California Endowment sent him to Mexico for a farmworker survey. He said whatever policy is being hammered out in the Senate right now should try to preserve the immigrant family unit; there’s a social cost that comes with having a largely Mexican male work force in the country without their wives and children. But the most important thing at issue, Mines said, was the overall cost that comes with having a democratic society retain a contracted workforce without any voting rights.
“In the Los Angeles school system, a third of the kids have undocumented parents, and they can’t participate in school board elections. They don’t have a say in how they’re children are educated,” he said.
“We’re becoming like Greek society, where there are citizens and slaves. The slave couldn’t vote, and his children cannot enter into society and become citizens. It runs counter to the democratic ideal.”
That’s why he supports another amnesty bill similar to the 1986 one. But times are different.
“The debate was a lot different then than it is now, partially because that law was passed and it didn’t stop illegal immigration. The population of undocumented in the country is higher now than it was then,” he said. “And the atmosphere back in 86 was not nearly as anti-immigrant as it is today…the idea of criminalizing (them) was not even brought up.”
Contact Keli Dailey at kdailey@calaverasenterprise.com.
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Story Source: Calaveras Enterprise
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Paraguay; Agriculture; Farmworkers; Ethnology; Immigration
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