Migrant Labor Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

One of the most marginalized communities in the United States is that of the migrant and seasonal farmworkers who pick the crops that feed the most-fed nation on earth. The social problems that migrant laborers face are bound to their socioeconomic disadvantages. Farmworkers occupy the lowest-paid job category in the United States, with the vast majority of immigrant farmworkers barely surviving on their below-poverty wages.

Historical Overview

The history of migrant labor relates to the four major migrant streams that have shuffled workers to where the crops need tending. Over the past 20 years, scholars have identified migrant streams that are increasingly Mexican immigrant, and due to political pressures to fortify the U.S.-Mexico border, the short-term sojourners are increasingly settling in rural agricultural destinations.

As the agricultural industry concentrated and expanded in the early 20th century to meet rising U.S. consumer demand, large numbers of temporary laborers were recruited to meet the short-term, labor-intensive harvest schedules of highly perishable crops. Berkeley economist Paul S. Taylor detailed the crops associated with the various migrant streams of the 1930s (see Figure 1). Remarkably, the four migrant streams did not alter significantly until the late 1980s. The East Coast migrant stream originated in Florida and the Caribbean and originally brought former African American sharecroppers north to pick apples, cranberries, and strawberries. Later, African Americans were replaced by Caribbean migrants from Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Haiti, and other islands who were first recruited to pick sugar cane in Florida and then moved up the eastern seaboard to pick the New England fall harvest. The Appalachian/Ozark migrant stream was more regionally focused and more crop specific, so wheat, cotton, and fruit pickers each followed their own distinct routes. During the Great Depression, the number of Appalachian and white sharecroppers swelled, but their presence in the migrant stream predated the 1930s. The Midwest migrant stream originated in South Texas and Mexico and most often followed the railroad lines. San Antonio, Texas, became the home base for many sojourners along this Midwest migrant stream. The Pacific Coast migrant stream originated in the Imperial Valley of California and Mexico. Mexican migrants have picked Washington apples, Oregon hops, and Idaho potatoes for well over a century.

Recent Migrant Streams

Over the past 20 years, the increasing reliance on Mexican labor has resulted in a redrawing of the migrant stream map (see Figure 2) and the development of new Mexican migrant streams to all agricultural regions of the United States. Workers in the established migrant streams travel from Mexico, through the border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, to the Pacific Coast, Mountain States, Upper Midwest, and Atlantic Coast. A number of agricultural communities in California and south Texas also send migrant workers along these same routes, but it is primarily migrants directly from Mexico who now occupy all migrant streams.

A renewed grower utilization of the U.S. government’s H-2A temporary visa program accelerated and institutionalized this process. The H-2A program originated in 1952 to meet the labor demands of Florida sugar and tobacco growers along the East Coast migrant stream. It allowed immigrant workers to obtain temporary visas to enter the country for a limited period to harvest predesignated crops. The latest available data show that agricultural firms in all 50 states employ H-2A labor and that there were 45,000 visas issued in 2003, up from 42,000 in 2002. Tobacco is the largest single crop that employs H-2A workers (35 percent of total). Scholars and labor activists readily agree that Mexican workers are the main visa recipients. Today, the fields that feed the nation, and increasingly the world, are almost exclusively harvested by workers of Mexican origin, even as the number of workers employed in agriculture continues to decline.

Data from the 2000 census partially confirm the Mexican predominance in migrant farmwork, but because the category of “migrant worker” is no longer part of data collection, the general occupational group of farming, fishing, and forestry shows that less than 1 million workers occupy this job category, with 79 percent of that workforce males. More Latinos (2.7 percent of all Latinos) are employed in agriculture than are members of all other racial/ethnic groups combined.

Problems Affecting Migrant Workers

The wages associated with migrant farmwork are abysmally low; the California Institute for Rural Studies estimates that each farmworker earns approximately $6,500 per year. Though workers now receive the minimum wage (even though they have been exempt from minimum wage, workers’ compensation, social security, and collective bargaining rights as a result of their specific exemption from New Deal legislation), the chronic underemployment associated with seasonal labor results in such low wages that migrants must constantly move to find gainful employment. Because of the dangers associated with crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, migrants are attempting to settle permanently in the United States. However, the demand for agricultural labor continues unabated, so more undocumented immigrants and H-2A temporary visa holders are moving to tend crops.

Farmworkers are susceptible to life-threatening illnesses caused by exposure to occupational hazards as well as diminished quality of health associated with poverty. The United Farm Workers established the “Wrath of Grapes” campaign to publicize the dangers associated with pesticide exposure and the number of chronic illnesses, birth defects, and deaths that result from prolonged pesticide exposure. Farmworker children are particularly at risk for chronic conditions such as asthma, cancer, diabetes, tuberculosis, hepatitis, and many completely preventable “third world” diseases (such as polio and dysentery). Children are also vulnerable in terms of educational access, as many harvests conflict with school schedules; migrant children typically attend three or four schools in any given school year. Their frequent exposure to pesticides leads to a variety of health problems, including respiratory and nervous disorders, cancer, and asthma, which severely affect the life chances of migrant farmworkers, who collectively have a life expectancy of 54 years.

Bibliography:

Barger, W. K. and Ernesto M. Reza. 1994. Farm Labor Movement in the Midwest: Social Change and Adaptation among Migrant Farmworkers. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Chavez, Leo. 1997. Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society. 2nd ed. Fort Worth, TX: Wadsworth.
Guerin-Gonzales, Camille. 1996. Mexican Workers and American Dreams. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Mooney, Patrick H. and Theo J. Majka. 1995. Farmers’ and Farm Workers’ Movements: Social Protest in American Agriculture. New York: Twayne.
Taylor, Paul Schuster. 1940. Adrift in the Land. New York: Public Affairs Committee.
Vargas, Zaragosa. 2004. Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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