An “easement” is a legal construct that allows a property owner to sell another entity the right to use their land or part of it for a specific purpose, for example, to drive through on their way to another property. Easements also exist for powerlines, gas pipelines, and dozens of other uses. But there is another type of easement: a so-called Proscriptive Easement. Under this legal framework, if a landowner allows others to pass through their property unimpeded for a certain length of time, they have passively allowed an easement to be created. If that access is restricted, others who have historically used that easement have the right to sue to keep it open.
For the last forty years, the United States has applied a similar system to immigration: giving one group of people legal access to our country’s citizenship and the rights and privileges it conveys, while simultaneously passively allowing many more people to enter the country. The immigrants with no documents have many fewer rights. They are not “second class citizens” simply because they are not technically citizens at all.
Everyone in a position of power in the U.S. understands implicitly that we depend entirely on non-citizens to perform important and unappreciated jobs and contribute their wages to our economic growth. Anyone who makes statements to the contrary is either lying or willfully ignorant. The process to change this abomination of a system is necessarily political, yet politicians of both parties are terrified of the issue for varying reasons. Immigration is known as the “third rail of American politics”.
While slavery is often said to be our nation’s “Original Sin” — a unjust system that was already in place when the United States was born — the same cannot be said of immigration in 2025. Our modern nation now rests on a foundation of injustice born of inaction, cowardice, and complicity. In the mid-1800s, abolitionists fought against the “moral evil” of slavery; in the 2020s, the loudest voices speaking on immigration have been those demonizing the victims of our current “system”. A handful of people are protesting against the actions of ICE, but that is misdirected blame: immigration enforcement officials are simply doing the job we have tasked them with doing. Meanwhile, almost no one is publicly calling for an end to the system whereby peaceful, law-abiding members of our community are treated as criminals, thrown in jail, and expelled from the country that they now call home.
The non-system we have allowed to develop is uniquely pernicious in that the citizens in the best position to stand up for undocumented immigrants — their employers — are also criminals in the eyes of the law. Dozens of industries in the U.S. rely on immigrant labor. There is agriculture, of course, but also child and elder care, construction, food service and many others. Employers cannot knowingly hire undocumented immigrants. As a result, a vast economy has developed around creating and selling falsified documents that provide the illusion that everyone’s staff is 100% legally documented. To admit knowing that some or all of your staff are undocumented is to confess to a crime, but that doesn’t mean that most if not every employer who participates in this farce knows what is happening.
There is a persistent narrative on both the left and the right that anyone who employs undocumented people is exploiting them. But businesses must keep up the pretence that all their employees are legallly documented, which means paying prevailing wages and following workplace regulations. People who make openly false or ignorant statements about “greedy” businesses underpaying wages, failing to follow regulations or otherwise treating their employees in way that citizens would not tolerate are showing a classic displacement of guilt and responsibility: the customers of businesses that hire undocumented immigrants benefit just as much from their labor as the employers do.
Then there is the widespread myth that immigrants are collecting government benefits and costing taxpayers money. This is blantant lie on the level of Orwell’s “True is Fiction”: the vast majority of undocumented workers receive paychecks with payroll taxes withheld. Not just for Medicare, Unemployment Insurance and other mandatory taxes but also the employer’s share of payroll taxes paid on their wages. All of these go directly into state and federal coffers despite the fact that the workers whose labor paid for them are ineligible to receive benefits from those programs. Every single documented American benefits directly from these financial contributions, to say nothing of the numerous other contributions immigrants have made and continue to make to our communities and our economy.
California farmers have been on the forefront of efforts to legalize the undocumented people that are estimated to make up at least 40% of our workforce. But we can only do it through industry groups such as the California Farm Bureau, which provide protection for individual business owners who might otherwise be targeted by immigration authorities as a result of speaking out. Over the last 40 years, farmers have worked behind the scenes with lawmakers from both parties who recognize the injustice and absurdity of the current system. Collectively, we have advanced at least four separate bills that would have modernized, legitimized, or otherwise repaired our totally dysfunctional system. None of these bills were passed into law. The failure to do that cannot be laid at the feet of one or the other party, the opportunity existed for either or both parties to make it happen. Collectively, our leaders have chosen not to make it a priority. The current situation we are facing, with promises of mass deportation, is not an aberration but simply the logical progression of our collective inaction.
Whatever you might have seen on social media or in the news, to date, there has been little immigration enforcement on California farms so far. But that could change overnight. In the meantime, there are millions of hard working, law-abiding residents of our state who live in fear that they or their loved ones could be rounded up and sent “back” to a country they have not lived in for 10, 20, 30 years or longer.
While it might appear that our current President was given a mandate by voters to follow through on his promises of deporting millions of people, most citizens now oppose the effort that is currently underway. The pendulum on this issue may have finally swung far enough in the opposite direction that it will create an opportunity for meaningful reform of the dysfunctional system. That would be a win for everyone: immigrants, employers, and everyone else who benefits from their participation in our society.
During the Covid 19 pandemic, farmworkers — as as well as other undocumented immigrants — were assigned the label of Essential Workers. Nothing has changed about their work, or its importance to every American. They put food on our table every day, week and month of the year. They deserve to be treated as respected peers, not persecuted as criminals. Our collective failure to make this happen is a stain on the stated ideals of our country and we should be ashamed of ourselves.
Thanks,
Pablito