Comments made by experts hailing from California wine country have prompted Ideal Wine Company to ask this week; what could immigration reform mean for the US wine industry?
Fixing a Broken Immigration System
If you ask a politician on either side of the partisan divide, they will be the first one to readily admit that the US immigration system is broken. However, each time they try to fix it they find themselves unable to, because advocates from both parties disagree on how the immigration problem should be dealt with.
This inaction has now spurred President Obama to wade into the immigration debate, acting where Congress could or would not. He issued an Executive Order which could save over 5 million immigrants from deportation.
Stopping Skilled Workers at the Mexican Border
The Californian wine industry, easily the biggest in the land, depends on immigrant labour – documented or undocumented – to pick its grapes. That’s why some in the sector are now suggesting that Obama’s executive action could hurt, rather than help the Californian wine industry.
Experts in the region including John Aguirre, President of the California Association of Grape Growers, and Nat DiBuduo, president of Allied Grape Growers, are suggesting that the one of the measure’s components – stepping up law enforcement on the Mexican border – could deprive them of a skilled labour force.
The Onset of Mechanisation
According to Wine Searcher, DiBuduo argued that "agricultural labour is skilled labour, whether you're doing pruning operations or running equipment," further suggesting that "if we don't get more workers, we're going to force more mechanisation. But it takes skilled labour to run the machinery, and some tasks are not adaptable to mechanisation."
Aguirre noted that "we could see a bifurcation in vineyards between very large vineyards that can be mechanically harvested, and very small vineyards that can afford to hire enough workers." He went on to suggest that "the mid-sized vineyards could be pushed out of business."
Immigration Reform Has No Chance of Passing a Republican Congress
What DiBuduo and Aguirre are really suggesting is that the US needs to put comprehensive immigration reform in place if it wants to protect its most lucrative wine industry. With Republicans set to take control of Congress this January, that’s unlikely to happen any time soon.
