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One farm belonged to Ellen Jenkins, who grows tomatoes on 50 acres an hour north of Birmingham. Jenkins had about 10 acres left to harvest when HB 56 went into effect, and with the strawberry season at hand in Florida, most of her workers decided to collect their checks and leave early. Jenkins is a recent widow, and she'd been having trouble running her farm alone. As an experiment to see whether Alabamians would indeed fill the void immigrants had left—and, more importantly, to help Jenkins—Spencer put the call out.
Every day for about a month, Spencer trucked unemployed Alabamians—out-of-work plumbers, electricians, dishwashers, construction workers—to Jenkins' farm. Each morning before leaving, Spencer would stand in front of the dozen or so who'd gathered at his office and give his "straight talk," describing the day ahead. "I tried to make it as unpleasant a talk as I could," he said, "so that people wouldn't arrive with expectations." Many would just walk out.
Over the course of the monthlong experiment, about 75 Alabamians worked on Jenkins' farm; 15 of them showed up more than once; only 3 lasted the entire month.
"A Mexican can honestly make $200 to $300 a day at the height of tomato season, but that's based on $3 per box," Spencer said. "The workers we took up there couldn't come close. I'm going to be generous and say $20 a day was average. I actually was proud to see how hard they did work, but they couldn't live up to the efficiency, and therefore the speed and production, that Mexicans could."
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