Speech #890177509

Government regulations required some showing of efforts to recruit domestic labor as a condition of eligibility to import foreign labor. Nevertheless. by 1964 only about 3.500 domestic workers were employed in the pickle harvest at the midAugust peak. when 12.800 braceros were harvesting pickles. Heavy reliance on bracero labor for the pickle harvest had effectively excluded this crop from the established flow patterns of the domestic migrant labor stream. A few thousand migrants come into the State in late spring to harvest strawberries and smaller crops. Then large numbers of migrants arrive for the cherry harvest. which begins before the pickle harvest and reaches its peak after the pickle harvest has begun. As the cherry harvest tapers off. the migrants that it has employed mostly move into the tomato harvest in Michigan and adjoining States. A large proportion of these migrants return to the same farms year after year. Consequently. there was little prospect of drawing large numbers of domestic migrants from the regular stream to work in the pickle harvest. New sources of supply had to be sought within the State and thousands of new workers had to be induced to come to Michigan to meet the needs of the pickle growers. It is our impression that the 1965 recruitment effort for pickles was rather slow and uncertain at the beginning.