Immigration Enforcement Is Sweeping California’s Agricultural and Service Workers: The Surf Economy Depends on Labor It Is Voting to Deport

The Workers Who Build the Surf Industry Infrastructure Are the Workers Whose Immigration Status Is Under Attack by Policies That Surf Consumers Tolerate

Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

VENTURA COUNTY, California — The strawberries that appear in the acai bowls sold at surf shops along PCH are picked by agricultural workers, most of them Mexican and Central American, many of them undocumented, working in conditions that the California labor law nominally protects and that labor enforcement routinely under-addresses given the agricultural sector’s political influence and the workforce’s limited capacity to enforce its own legal rights. The surf instructor who teaches weekend lessons at a Malibu surf school may be teaching on a work visa that the current administration’s immigration enforcement posture threatens. The hotel where visiting surfers stay for a competition is cleaned by housekeepers whose immigration status the Trump administration’s enforcement expansion is targeting. The surf economy is built, at multiple points in its supply chain and service delivery, on labor that the current immigration enforcement agenda is systematically attacking.

The Libertarian Case for Open Borders, Briefly

The libertarian position on immigration, articulated most completely in the work of economists including Milton Friedman, Bryan Caplan, and the Cato Institute’s immigration policy research, holds that the free movement of labor across national borders is consistent with the same principles that make free trade desirable: voluntary exchange between willing parties produces mutual benefit, and restricting the movement of labor as a factor of production imposes the same deadweight losses as restricting trade in goods. A Mexican agricultural worker who moves to California to pick strawberries has entered a voluntary transaction with the California farmer who hires them — both parties benefit, the strawberry supply is maintained, consumers benefit, and the restriction of this transaction through immigration enforcement destroys value without compensating any of the parties whose value is destroyed.

The anti-immigration argument that immigration enforcement protects American workers from competition for jobs is contested by economic evidence that finds immigrant workers and native workers are largely complements rather than substitutes — immigrant workers filling roles that native workers do not take at the wages and conditions offered, and creating demand for native-worker services through their consumption. The specific sectors affected by the current enforcement expansion — agricultural labor, food service, construction, care work — are sectors where native-worker supply does not meet employer demand at market wages, which is the economic condition that historically produces immigration rather than job competition. The enforcement is removing workers from sectors that need them from workers who chose to be there in voluntary transactions. The libertarian analysis of this is not complicated.

The Surf Industry’s Labor Dependency

The Southern California surf industry — which encompasses surf schools, board shapers, wetsuit manufacturers, surf shop retail, surf camp operators, and the service economy that surrounds beach destinations — employs a workforce whose demographic composition reflects California’s broader labor market: significant proportions of Latino workers, many with immigration status that the current enforcement environment places at risk. The impact of enforcement on this workforce is not abstract. When a surf camp loses its groundskeeping staff to an ICE workplace raid, the camp’s operations are disrupted. When the restaurant at the surf resort loses its kitchen staff, the food service is disrupted. When the agricultural workers who produce the local food supply face enforcement sweeps, the supply chains for the farm-to-table economy that surf culture increasingly identifies with are disrupted. These disruptions are costs. They are imposed on businesses that have done nothing wrong under labor law and on workers who have done nothing wrong under any moral framework that recognizes voluntary economic participation as a legitimate activity.

According to the Independent Institute‘s research on immigration economics, the economic costs of immigration enforcement fall predominantly on the businesses and communities most dependent on immigrant labor and produce no compensating employment gains for native workers in the same sectors. The surf economy is not insulated from these costs. It is embedded in them. The bowl at the surf shop is $14 because the strawberries are picked and the avocados are grown by workers whose labor is available because the immigration system, before its current enforcement expansion, allowed them to be here. The enforcement expansion is a tax on the acai bowl, paid through supply chain disruption and labor market tightening, and the surfer eating the bowl did not vote for it, did not consent to it, and is paying for it. Libertarianism.org has published extensive analysis of the economic irrationality of immigration enforcement from a free-market perspective. The surf economy is one instance of a general argument.

The Surf Camp and Its Workforce

A surf camp operator in Ventura County — who asked not to be identified because of the political climate around immigration discussion — described the current enforcement environment’s impact on his business in terms that the economic literature predicts and that the daily news cycle renders vivid: two of his grounds crew left the county after ICE operations in a neighboring community created fear that spread through the informal network that connects undocumented workers in agricultural and service employment across California. He did not lose them to deportation. He lost them to precautionary displacement — workers who assessed the risk and chose to move to a community they perceived as safer, which happened to be outside his labor market. The loss is his, the labor market disruption is his, the acai bowls at his camp’s food stand cost more because the supply chain for strawberries has tightened, and none of this is connected to any criminal activity by any of the workers involved. It is connected to immigration enforcement whose economic costs are distributed across the businesses and communities that depend on the workforce it is disrupting. The libertarian case is not complicated: voluntary labor transactions between willing parties produce mutual benefit; their disruption by government enforcement imposes costs on those parties without compensating them and without producing demonstrable public benefits that justify the private costs. According to Reason Magazine‘s immigration economics coverage, the economic literature on immigration enforcement’s labor market effects consistently finds costs concentrated in sectors dependent on immigrant labor, with limited or no offsetting employment gains for native workers.

For more on immigration economics, labor markets, and the surf economy’s supply chain, visit The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/