New law threatens Yuma lettuce harvest

YUMA, Ariz. — A new Arizona law that takes effect today — at the peak of the lettuce harvest — could devastate the Yuma-area produce industry, which fills 80 percent to 90 percent of the country's salad bowls from November through April every year.

The law threatens to take business licenses from companies caught twice knowingly hiring undocumented workers.

Yuma-area farmers, who say they only hire documented help, don't know if the law will flush out hundreds of laborers whose documents are false, or if it will have no effect.

What they do know is that they need an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 workers a day. Labor has been a problem for years, the situation continues to get tighter, and the law will not help, they say.

Growers say that the worker shortage has been worsening because of immigration checks and because the work force is aging.

Farmers have been responding in a variety of ways: Planting less in Yuma County, paying more — up to $15 to $18 an hour this season — and keeping workers in the fields for longer hours. They also are turning, reluctantly, to a cumbersome federal program called H-2A that helps them hire foreign workers legally. Talk grows of planting more in Mexico.

Last year, growers estimated a 20 percent to 30 percent shortage of workers, according to Paul Simonds, spokesman for the Western Growers Association, an agricultural trade group.

John Boelts, a vegetable grower and president of the Yuma County Farm Bureau, said the labor shortage drove up lettuce prices a couple of dollars a carton.

In response to the sanctions law, growers say all they can do is enroll in E-Verify, a free online federal program that checks names and identification documents to ensure that new employees are eligible to work, and check and recheck documents.

Graciella Villarreal, 31, a Yuma resident who has been cutting lettuce for seven years, believes the law will have a big effect on the economy and leave lettuce uncut in the fields. Workers have been talking about the law, she said. "There's a lot of people without documents."

Under this cloud of uncertainty, the harvest began as usual in mid-November. Dozens of buses deliver Mexican-American and Mexican workers daily to the fields of lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower and other produce spread throughout the communities of Yuma, Somerton and San Luis.

The work has been mechanized to a degree, but men and women constantly bend up and down to select and cut the lettuce heads. They grab a plastic bag from a bundle attached to their waists, wrap the lettuce and place it on a waist-high conveyor belt where other workers box the produce. The lettuce won't be touched again until it arrives at the grocery store or other business.