 A skeptical reader
wondered how the Trumpish crackdown on unpapered immigrants might hurt Illinois
agriculture, as I argued it would in “Absolutely
ridiculous.” More than 70 percent of the farm workers in Illinois may be
immigrants, and many of those can be assumed to be undocumented, but how many
people can that mean? Migrants aren’t needed to work corn and bean farms.
Very true. But migrant labor
is important to specialty producers in Illinois — canning vegetable
farms, dairy and sod farms, fruit orchards and nurseries. Plus, kids don’t de-tassel corn fields like
they used to, so seed outfits like Monsanto have to hire migrants to do
that chore.Â
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This article appears in Mar 16-22, 2017.
