California migrants losing jobs to mechanization

The switch to mechanical harvesting is taking a heavy toll on the Mexican migrants who fill most of the state's lowest-paying farm jobs. With machines picking more crops, the need for field hands is falling sharply. Where 50 men once were needed to harvest a field of raisins, five now suffice.  Even legal fieldworkers say they have never experienced such a tough year. There were more migrants, they complain, and jobs were all but impossible to find. Mechanization portends big problems for a region strained in the past two decades by the arrival of impoverished rural Mexicans. They are widely estimated to be coming to the United States at a rate of more than a half million a year, with a quarter to a third of them entering California. The challenge of absorbing so many newcomers is taxing the economic and social well-being of the valleys that produce fruits, nuts and vegetables for markets worldwide. "We're adding a lot of poor people into what's already a pretty poor area. It's a dangerous path," said Philip Martin, a migration specialist at the University of California Davis. California, the setting for John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" and Cesar Chavez's historic farmworker union movement, is experiencing the emergence of a worrisome strain of rural poverty. It exists alongside the relative prosperity associated with the state's $25.7 billion agriculture business.  [more]