The Math Was Never Going to Work
The summer after my sophomore year of high school, I worked a farm job, off the books, for a farmer who paid cash under the legal minimum. A year later I dropped out of high school entirely — a separate story, for separate reasons. I want to talk about both of those things, because together they say more about Florida’s current plan to replace deported farm labor with high schoolers than either one does alone. I’ve actually done the job they’re describing, and the math has never once penciled out.
What the job was actually like
The legal option available to me was retail — the kind of job where you get maybe fourteen hours a week, broken up across four or five different shifts, none of them long enough to be worth the trip. The farm gave me sixty, seventy hours a week, seven days, sunup to sundown, all summer. On paper the farm paid a flat cash rate under minimum wage. In practice it didn’t matter — a lower rate times five times the hours beats a legal rate you can barely get scheduled for, and it still landed close to what a legal paycheck handed you after everything got taken out of it anyway.
But the honest reason I took the job wasn’t the money. It was that I hated my home life and would do almost anything to not be there. Sunup to sundown labor was a better deal than being home, full stop. That’s not a small detail — it’s the actual reason, and I don’t think it generalizes to very many other fifteen-year-olds.
I should also say plainly that I knew I was breaking the law, and I did it on purpose. Nobody tricked me into it. At that age, the statute capping how many hours a minor could work felt like a rule written for someone else’s problem, not mine — an abstraction next to what I actually wanted, which was as much distance from home as I could get. I wasn’t naive about it. I just didn’t care.
The work itself: picking tomatoes by the bushel. Picking watermelons, which is brutal in a way that’s hard to explain until you’ve done it — you’re in a line of people throwing thirty-pound melons hand to hand to a guy standing on a flatbed truck, who catches them and drops them into a kind of temporary cardboard bin. Bagging potatoes off the back of a digger. Washing potatoes. All of it in full sun, all day, every day.
The farmer didn’t take just anyone. He’d interview kids, and then run the dogshit out of them the first day specifically to see who’d quit. Almost nobody wanted the job once they understood what it was, and almost nobody who took it could keep it. I stuck it out. I’m an outlier for that — an extreme one.
Here’s what I can say for certain, because I watched it happen: that farm was literally across the street from my high school. Zero commute, zero excuse of distance. Out of roughly 500 of us, two boys worked there. That’s it. That’s the real-world take rate when the job is as physically close as a job can possibly be.
I should be honest about who those two of us were working alongside, too, because it matters. We weren’t part of a crew of high schoolers. The rest of the crew was adults — mostly people having a hard time of it, the same kind of white trash I was. I’m not going to sell you a story where they were secretly wise about it, or knew something I don’t; I wasn’t curious enough at that age to ask why grown men and women were doing the same brutal, low-paying summer work I was, and I still couldn’t tell you. But none of them were immigrants, and as far as I could tell none of them were itinerant workers passing through, either. They lived nearby, same as me. Which is its own kind of answer to “let teenagers do it”: even on a farm with no immigrant labor in the mix at all, right across the street from a school of 500 teenagers, two of us was still the going rate. If that’s what you get where there’s no immigrant workforce for kids to be an alternative to, I don’t see the case for expecting more of them somewhere there is one.
I want to be precise about the timeline here, because it matters for the argument. That farm summer came a full year before I dropped out — its own thing, from the summer after sophomore year, not the reason I later left. I dropped out at the end of junior year, for reasons I don’t think I need to get into in detail; the short version is a discipline problem at the end of that school year meant I couldn’t go back to my own school, and starting over somewhere else for senior year, without any of my friends, wasn’t something I was willing to do. What matters for this essay is what I did next. I didn’t go back to the farm. I enrolled in community college instead.
Sit with that for a second, given what this whole debate is about. I already knew exactly what the job entailed. I’d already proven I could do it, and do it well, for an entire summer — hours no legal job could have given me anyway, underage the way I was. I was, by any fair account, a fuckup that year. And when it actually came down to a real choice between more school and going back to the fields, I picked more school. If the kid who already had the calluses, already knew the money worked out fine, and had already earned an outlier’s reputation on that farm didn’t go back to it, it’s hard to believe very many other kids would choose to go in the first place.
I’m telling you all this because I keep seeing a policy proposal that assumes my summer was normal, or at least replicable at scale, by kids who never did it once, let alone twice. It wasn’t, and it isn’t.
The proposal, four years running
Since 2023, Florida has run the same experiment on a loop. SB 1718 cracked down on undocumented workers and, more or less immediately, farmers started reporting they couldn’t find enough labor — crops were going unharvested from the strawberry fields of Plant City to the tomato groves of Homestead. The legislature’s answer, HB 49, passed in 2024: kill the 30-hour weekly cap for 16- and 17-year-olds, let them work seven days straight during the school year.
That apparently wasn’t enough. In 2025, SB 918 and HB 1225 tried to drop the working age to 13 and strip more hour restrictions — it died in the Senate, but not before records showed DeSantis’s own office emailing lawmakers the bill language and talking points directly, background material from his staff stating flatly that the 2024 law “did not go far enough to relieve the burdens of employment for this group.” In 2026 they came back with a different mechanism entirely — HB 221 would have let minors waive Florida’s state minimum wage for months at a stretch under the label of “work-based learning.” It died in committee too.
Four sessions. Same underlying idea each time: why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when teenagers used to work at these resorts, college students should be able to do this stuff. That’s DeSantis, verbatim.
The numbers were never close
Here’s the thing nobody running this experiment seems to have done: the arithmetic. Estimates of Florida’s immigrant farm workforce vary a lot depending on who’s counting — UF/IFAS puts crop and nursery labor at around 105,000 statewide, the Farmworker Association of Florida estimates 300,000 undocumented farmworkers live in the state, and immigrants make up 65.4% of the state’s agricultural workforce overall. Florida has roughly 880,000 high schoolers total. Depending which of those labor estimates you use, replacing the immigrant ag workforce with teenagers statewide would mean somewhere between 3% and 34% of every high schooler in Florida — not just the ones near farm country, all of them — dropping what they’re doing to pick produce. That range is already a tell: even the people making the case can’t agree within an order of magnitude on what the actual gap is.
But the statewide number understates it, because this labor isn’t spread evenly across the state. It’s concentrated in a handful of places, and in those places the math isn’t embarrassing, it’s absurd. Immokalee — the town that grows the large majority of America’s winter tomatoes — has a peak-season farmworker population estimated at 15,000 to 20,000 people. The town’s one high school has about 2,000 students, total, all four grades. You could send every single kid in that building to the fields and you’d still be short by a factor of seven to ten. In Hendry County, U.S. Sugar alone employs more than 2,500 people — more than the roughly 2,400 total high schoolers enrolled in the entire county. There’s no version of “let kids work more hours” that closes a gap that size. There aren’t enough kids.
We already ran this exact experiment, in 1965
This isn’t hypothetical, either — it’s been tried, at the federal level, with the government actively recruiting for it. After the Bracero program ended in 1964, the Secretary of Labor tried to recruit 20,000 high schoolers to fill the harvest gap it left behind. About 18,100 signed up. Only around 3,300 actually showed up to work, and most of them quit within weeks. In California’s Salinas Valley, two hundred teenagers quit after two weeks, one of them telling a reporter, “we worked three days and all of us are broke.” It was called the A-TEAM. It was a well-documented failure and nobody tried it again for sixty years — until now.
That tracks with everything I watched happen on the farm I worked. The interview-and-haze-them-on-day-one filter my farmer ran wasn’t cruelty for its own sake, it was triage, because he already knew from experience that almost nobody who signed up would actually stay. Multiply that by a state instead of one farm and you get the A-TEAM.
Meanwhile, the raids keep the gap open
None of this is theoretical or settled history, either — it’s still happening, right now, faster than the legislature can pass bills about it. Operation Tidal Wave, the joint state-federal sweep that launched April 21, 2025 with 1,120 arrests in its first week alone — ICE’s own press release called it the largest joint immigration operation in Florida history — never wound down. It passed 10,000 total arrests by January 2026, and by March 2026 the statewide count for just Jan 20–Oct 15, 2025 alone had reached 20,629 arrests — nearly 77 a day, more than triple the roughly 20-a-day rate from the year before. That’s the exact population — farm labor — this whole debate is about, and there’s no sign of it slowing down two years in.
In November 2025, ICE and Florida Highway Patrol stopped a farm labor bus outside Immokalee at dawn, pulling around 35 tomato pickers off it on their way to a farm in Ave Maria. Witnesses said three minors were injured and hospitalized — dragged out and pushed to the ground. It was the middle of planting season, and the grower had been actively advertising for more workers because it couldn’t find enough. Actual minors, hurt, pulled off an actual farm labor bus, in the same town where the “let minors do this job” math already doesn’t work, in the same season the legislature keeps floating bills to make it easier for minors to do exactly that job.
Nobody checked whether it worked
Here’s what really gets me, more than the bad math: as far as I can find, nobody in the press has gone back and actually checked whether any of this worked. There’s no dataset anywhere of how many Florida teenagers actually took ag jobs under HB 49. What exists instead is a year-plus of coverage about the labor shortage getting worse — national agricultural employment down 155,000 workers since March 2025 alone, and roughly 95% of Florida’s berry farmers now leaning on the H-2A guest-worker visa program to fill the gap — with teenagers barely mentioned anywhere in it. What actually happened instead is the state leaned harder on H-2A, the legal guest-worker visa program — in other words, on more immigrant labor, just the legal kind.
The closest thing to anyone saying this out loud is dry, not pointed, and it comes from two separate groups of agricultural economists who spent 2026 studying this exact question. An NC State economist wrote in April that stricter enforcement against undocumented farmworkers “may well be offset by a comparable rise in H-2A workers,” potentially leaving the net farm labor supply “somewhat unnoticeable” — with H-2A issuances already past 300,000 nationally in 2024 and federal wage rules loosened in late 2025 specifically to push more of that substitution along. And a University of Florida paper modeling the actual production impact — up to $799 million in lost sales and nearly 11,750 jobs in the nursery and greenhouse sector alone, up to $307 million and 5,700 jobs in fruits and vegetables — laid out exactly three ways the industry might adapt: automation, expanded guest-worker visas, and losing ground to imports. Domestic teenage labor isn’t on either list. Two separate groups of economists modeled this crisis in the same year, and neither thought teenagers were worth including as an option. It just never got written up as what it actually is: the state’s own quiet admission that the teenagers were never the plan. To be fair, a clean “did it work” number doesn’t exist yet partly because it’s genuinely too early to measure — but a fix that needs years just to be evaluated was never the quick swap it was sold as.
And that’s the part that actually makes me angry, more than the policy itself. This is culture-war bullshit, and it’s bullshit you can catch with a calculator: there were never enough kids, in the right places, willing to do this job — not close, not by a factor of ten in the towns that actually needed them — and nobody with a bigger platform than mine has bothered to say so plainly. I did this job. I know exactly how few people want it, because I watched a farmer test for that himself, one kid at a time, one first day at a time. The numbers were never going to work. They still aren’t.
Research and drafting assistance for this piece, including source verification, was provided by Claude (Anthropic). All claims are linked inline to their sources throughout; the analysis and opinions are my own.