When the Bracero Program Ended, California Built a Tomato Harvester

The year is 1964. A room full of California growers hears that Congress will not renew the program that has supplied their harvest crews for two decades. They say what everyone in every industry says when a cheap input is threatened. We are finished. The crops will rot. The fruit will go to Mexico. Tell the children to find another line of work.

And then a machine rolled into the field. It looked like a steel dinosaur. It cut the plant, shook the fruit loose and sorted the red from the green, and it did the work of a whole crew of hand pickers. The industry did not die. It grew. This is the story of how, and it is one of the best lessons in American economic history that nobody teaches.

The setting: a wartime bargain

To understand the end of the Bracero program you have to understand its beginning.

In August 1942, with the country at war and millions of men in uniform, the United States and Mexico signed an agreement that allowed Mexican workers to come to the United States on temporary contracts to work in agriculture. The Spanish word bracero comes from brazo, arm: a man who works with his arms. The arrangement was meant as an emergency measure for the duration of the war, and it was set up with rules. Workers were to receive a contract with a stated wage, with housing and a guarantee of work, and with the Mexican government as a party to the agreement.

The war ended and the program did not. Growers had found it useful, and in 1951 Congress passed Public Law 78, which put the program on a statutory footing during the Korean War. It ran, with renewals, until the end of 1964. Over its life, the program brought millions of labor contracts to American farms, by one museum estimate some two million Mexican men, many of them returning more than once, concentrated in California, Texas, Arkansas and other states, and it became the single biggest source of seasonal farm labor in the Southwest.

I want to say a word about the people, because the standard retelling gets lost in policy. These were men who left families, crossed a border and worked long days in fields, often in conditions that fell far short of what the contract promised. Their wages were low, their housing was frequently poor and the enforcement of the contract's terms was weak. Investigators, church groups and labor advocates documented abuses. None of that is a slight on the workers. It is an indictment of a system that put a large pool of dependent labor in a position where the employers had nearly all the power.

The argument against the program

Now the opposition, which came from an unusual coalition.

Organized labor opposed the program, on the ground that it depressed farm wages and undercut domestic workers. Church groups and other critics attacked it for its abuses. A sociologist and labor organizer named Ernesto Galarza spent years documenting what he saw as the program's use as a tool to break strikes and keep wages down. Their argument was the one economists would recognize: when employers can draw on a large pool of workers who have no bargaining power, wages stay low and conditions stay poor, and the domestic workers who might do the job at a decent wage are pushed out.

The program's defenders were the growers and their allies, who said the labor was essential and that domestic workers would not do the harvest. Sound familiar? It is exactly the claim that I take apart in Jobs Americans Won't Do Is an Argument About Wages, Not About Americans. In the 1950s the claim was tested at scale, and the result is the story of this post.

The program's critics won. Congress declined to renew Public Law 78, and the Bracero program ended on December 31, 1964.

The prediction: ruin

What did the growers predict? The standard answer in the trade press and in congressional testimony was that without the program, harvests would go unpicked, labor-intensive crops would disappear from the country and consumers would pay far more or buy from abroad. For the tomato growers of California, who raised crops for canning and for paste, the labor needs were especially acute, because the harvest was brief and intense. A field of ripe tomatoes has a window of days. If the crew is not there, the crop is lost.

Here is the part that matters. The prediction of ruin was made by people with a strong financial interest in being believed. That does not make them liars. It makes them witnesses with a stake, and the way to evaluate a witness with a stake is to check the claim against what actually happened.

The machine

The tomato harvester was not invented overnight in 1964. The work began years earlier at the University of California, Davis, in the late 1940s. A plant geneticist, G. C. "Jack" Hanna, worked on a tomato that was firm enough to survive a machine, with fruit that ripened at about the same time and a plant that held its fruit in a way the machine could handle. An agricultural engineer, Coby Lorenzen, worked on the machine itself. Together their research produced a prototype that cut the vines, lifted them and shook the fruit free, with a conveyor system that carried the tomatoes past sorters. A California manufacturer began building production machines around 1960.

So the technology was already in the pipeline when the program ended. I do not want to overstate the causation. What the end of the Bracero program did was change the economics. A machine that costs a lot to build and operate only makes sense when the labor it replaces is expensive or unavailable. As long as the program supplied a plentiful, cheap crew, the machine was a luxury. When the program ended, the machine became a necessity.

Adoption was rapid. Within a few years most of California's processing-tomato acreage was harvested by machine, and within about a decade the overwhelming majority of the crop was. The hand harvest for processing tomatoes essentially disappeared.

What happened to the industry

The prediction of ruin failed. California's processing-tomato industry did not shrink. It grew and became the dominant producer in the country, with higher output per acre and lower costs of production than before. Machine harvesting also changed the rest of the supply chain: growers bred and planted varieties suited to the machine, and processors adjusted to the way the crop arrived.

There is a second, less comfortable half of the story, and I will tell it because it is true and because fairness requires it. The machine was expensive, and only larger growers could afford it. A large number of harvest jobs disappeared, and the workers who had held them had to find other work. Critics at the time argued that publicly funded research had been put in the service of the bigger growers, and an author wrote a book in the early 1970s making exactly that case. They were not wrong that mechanization has losers.

So the honest lesson is not "machines are painless." It is narrower and more useful: the claim that an industry cannot survive without a particular supply of cheap labor is, over and over, a claim about the short term. In the long term the industry adapts, usually by changing what it does and how.

What the later research says

Here I must add some complexity, because the best recent research complicates the neat version of the story.

Economists who have studied the end of the Bracero program in detail have looked at what happened to farm wages and to crops across the country. One careful study published in 2018 found that the end of the program did not produce the large increase in domestic farm wages that its supporters might have expected. The reason, according to the authors, is that growers responded to the loss of the labor supply in other ways. For crops where machines were available or could be adopted quickly, such as tomatoes, they mechanized. For others, they changed the mix of crops they grew or reduced production. Wages did not rise much, because employers found ways not to pay them.

I think that finding deserves attention from both sides. It cuts against the simple claim that ending a guest-worker program raises wages for domestic workers. It also cuts against the claim that the labor is indispensable, since growers adjusted without the catastrophe they predicted. And it reminds us that an economy responds to a policy change in many ways at once, with machines, with crops, with prices and with the location of production.

The honest reading, then, is this. When the labor supply was cut, growers did not close up shop. They adapted. Where machines could do the work, they bought machines. That is the part of the story that stands. Whether the wages of domestic workers rose by much is a more complicated question, and I am not going to claim a result the evidence does not give me.

The political aftermath

The end of the program also changed the politics of farm labor in ways that are easy to forget.

In 1965, the year after it ended, farmworkers in the grape fields near Delano, California, went on strike, and the United Farm Workers movement under Cesar Chavez grew into a national force. The organizing was possible in part because the pool of workers that growers had been able to draw on at will was no longer there. A union cannot organize a workforce that the employer can replace with a new crew of contract laborers at any moment. Whatever you think of the union's later history, the end of the program changed the bargaining position of the people in the field. I discuss Chavez's own view of illegal hiring in Cesar Chavez Fought Illegal Hiring, a Part of His Story Rarely Told.

There is also a darker footnote. Alongside the guest-worker program, the federal government in 1954 conducted a large enforcement campaign against unlawful entry, widely known by a name that is now considered offensive. The campaign was heavy-handed, and it was run at a time when the same government operated a legal program meant to supply workers. The two went together: enforcement drove the unlawful workers out or into the legal program, and the legal program supplied the employers with a controllable workforce. It is a reminder that immigration policy built to serve a single industry tends to be a muddle.

What the story suggests

Now to the point. Here are the lessons, in order, because I think they are the reason to tell the story at all.

1. Prices drive innovation. When labor is cheap and plentiful, there is no incentive to invent a machine. When it is expensive or scarce, the incentive appears, and somebody builds one. The tomato harvester is an example of a general rule.
2. Warnings of ruin from interested parties should be tested, not trusted. The growers who predicted disaster were sincere. They were also wrong about the industry's future, because they were reasoning from the world they knew.
3. Adjustment is real but not painless. Mechanization raised productivity and also displaced workers, and critics said it favored the larger growers. A serious policy has to think about the people on the losing end, with training and with a gradual transition, not pretend that they do not exist.
4. A cheap-labor policy is a subsidy. It transfers money from workers, who earn less, and from the machine that was never built, to the employers who pay less. If you favor free markets, you should notice that a guest-worker arrangement designed to hold wages down is not one.
5. Public institutions matter. The tomato harvester came out of a public university. Research funded by taxpayers can make an industry more productive. It can also, as critics noted, benefit some groups more than others. A conservative should want that research to be accountable and its benefits widely shared.

These are not partisan conclusions. They are the conclusions of an economist, a farmer and a historian looking at the same set of facts. A conservative reading emphasizes the first and fourth: labor is a price, and subsidizing cheap labor is not the free market. A more cautious reading emphasizes the third. A responsible approach holds all five.

What it means for today

Every few years the claim returns: this industry cannot function without a supply of cheap labor, legal or otherwise. The agricultural industry has changed since 1964, and the crops, the technology and the legal programs are different. Some crops are still picked by hand, and no machine yet exists for them. A raspberry is not a tomato.

But the lesson of the tomato harvester is not that every job can be automated. It is that the claim of indispensability should always be met with a question: at what wage, and with what investment? An industry that has never had to answer that question does not know what it can do. The same question is the one I take up in the context of the current guest-worker program in Jobs Americans Won't Do Is an Argument About Wages, Not About Americans, and in the debate over enforcement of hiring rules, The Employer Who Hires Off the Books Is Breaking the Law, Not Helping.

I will add one more thing, and I mean it warmly. The men who worked those fields under the Bracero contracts did hard, honest work, and the people who built the harvester were doing honest work, too. The country owes both a little more thought than the slogans allow. For the broader constitutional frame, the power over naturalization and the power over commerce that Congress used to create and end the program, see One Uniform Rule, How the First Congresses Wrote America's Naturalization Laws.

The case in brief

1. The Bracero program, begun by agreement with Mexico in August 1942 and put on a statutory footing by Public Law 78 in 1951, supplied millions of farm labor contracts until Congress let it end on December 31, 1964.
2. Growers warned that harvests would rot, but California's processing-tomato industry mechanized, using a harvester and a firmer tomato developed at the University of California, Davis, and it grew.
3. Mechanization had losers: harvest jobs disappeared and critics said larger growers gained most, and a fair account says so.
4. Later research found that wages did not rise as much as expected because growers adapted by mechanizing, shifting crops or reducing production, which shows that claims of indispensable cheap labor are claims about the short term.
5. A guest-worker arrangement that keeps wages low is a subsidy to employers, and when labor is not cheap, innovation follows.

What you can do: visit the website of your state's land-grant university and look up its agricultural engineering research, then ask your state legislators how public research funding is helping farmers and farmworkers both.