Immigration And The Food Industry Essay

Two big topics in America today are the food industry and immigration/immigration policies. But are these two topics related? How are they related? Do they affect each other? Is the food industry safe to work in? Are these immigration policies fair? All of these questions connect and will be explained more later on. As it turns out, the majority of workers in the food industry are immigrants, and for a reason. They tend to be the main people who’ll accept those kinds of jobs because it's harder for them to find an actual decent job, especially compared to people who are already citizens. These jobs in the food industry are very labor intensive, difficult, and all for very low pay. As you can imagine, many immigration policies already make it very hard to maintain a life in America, which has affected many immigrants working in the food industry. Immigration policies in America have a major effect on our food industry. Workers in the food industry are mostly immigrants and are constantly getting exploited

“Immigrant farm workers make up an estimated 73% of agriculture workers in the United States.” (fwd.us, 2022). Many of the immigrant farm workers here used to be corn farmers in Mexico, but ever since the U.S. started subsidizing corn, “it's put more than a million and a half Mexican farm workers out of work.” (“Food, Inc.”, 2009). Almost all these workers are immigrants because ever since America made certain foods cheaper, it put workers in other countries (mainly Mexico) out of the business. After that, they typically ended up doing the same job in America. “If farmers lost their foreign-born workers, agricultural output would fall $30 to $60 billion.” (fwd.us, 2022). America now depends on these immigrant workers for this industry because they work very hard and are the majority of the workers. But where do these policies come