meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
On Point | Podcast

Why American farmers rely on unauthorized workers

On Point | Podcast

WBUR

Talk Show, Daily News, News, Npr, On Point, Daily

4.23.5K Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

More than 40% of hired farm laborers in the U.S. are immigrants without legal status. President Trump campaigned on a plan for mass deportation. But even he admits -- the country can't survive without many of the undocumented workers he promised to remove.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at B.U. Qwestram School of Business. A recent episode explores the high stakes of the AI economy. Stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview. WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

0:26.3

This is on point. I'm Megna Chakra-Bardi.

0:30.1

Andrew Mickelson is a seventh-generation potato farmer in eastern Idaho.

0:35.4

He farms thousands of acres near Idaho Falls. And for most of the year,

0:40.5

Andrew doesn't need more than a few dozen people to run operations. But during the fall harvest,

0:46.6

he hires more than 170 temporary workers. We have three weeks where we give it everything we've got.

0:53.7

Six days a week, 12 plus hours a day, that's our window.

0:58.8

And if we don't get it done, the frost, the snow, the blizzards, you name it, we could end up losing those crops.

1:06.7

Andrew says when he was a kid, his high school would have harvest breaks so that students and teachers could help out in the fields.

1:15.4

But these days, he cannot find local people to run his machines or irrigate the fields.

1:22.6

Andrew offers a base pay of nearly $17 an hour.

1:26.6

That's almost $10 more than Idaho's minimum wage.

1:30.7

But when he posts job listings and local ads, he rarely gets local responses.

1:38.7

The unemployment rate in America is basically zero. And the people that are unemployed right now are not going to be the ones that are going

1:48.2

to show up on a farm and say, hey, sign me up for manual labor 12 hours a day.

1:54.0

We'll get a handful, but we're not getting people just showing up.

1:57.9

I'd rather that.

1:59.1

It's more efficient for me when I can find somebody

2:02.1

local or somebody that already has documentation to work in America, but they're not showing up.

2:09.5

And since Andrew can't find local people or workers who already have legal documentation, as he says,

2:17.4

many of the people who work for him during

2:19.9

that crunch harvest season are from Mexico, and they're in the country without authorization.

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WBUR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WBUR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.