Migrant Guest Worker 2

When I was younger and the part of the world in which I grew up was still a truck-farming area, as opposed to a grain-farming area, the migrant stream that came through every year numbered in the tens of thousands. It tripled the population of the county during harvest time.

(Indeed, for three summers I worked with the “Migrant Clinic,” a state and federally-funded project that actually provided medical and dental services to the migrants. My buddy and I did the paperwork and dragged the clinic–which was housed in a house-trailer–from one site to another.)

Ratty, broken down labor camps littered the area, with no toilets other than privies, running water only at a faucet somewhere in the central area of the camp, and, with luck, screens on the windows.

The business model was simple. The farmer dealt with a “labor contractor” (crew leader). The crew leader provided the labor.

The farmer paid the crew leader.

The workers generally got paid, well, not much of anything. You see . . .

It was a mobile company town–everything the workers got they were charged for–food, transportation, whatever. At the end of the week, through some miracle of accounting, the workers owed the crew chief more than their wages. (The descendants of those accountants are now preparing the Current Federal Administrator’s next budget proposal, but that’s another story.)

And God help the worker who tried to get away. If he got away from the camp, where was he? Stuck in the middle of a Jim Crow community with no money, no resources, no one to turn to, and, likely, no bath for a week. He was lucky to make it to the bus stop before he got caught. And, if he were Mexican, he probably didn’t speak enough English to ask for help.

Now, the farmers knew this was how it worked. Hell, I learned how it worked from the farmers. It was sort of common unspoken knowledge.

But they needed the labor. So they turned pretty much just decided not to know what they knew.

(And how often does that still go on, as we turn our backs on the evil around us?)

And the crew leaders knew the farmers knew, but the crew leaders realized that, as long as the crops got picked and no fuss was made, things would be okay and they could move on the the next stop.

And the workers, well, for many of them, it was the only life they knew. They had no way out.

Well, we don’t have many migrants any more. Mechanization has made obsolete the great migrant streams that used to flow up the US on the East Coast, in the Mississippi Valley, the western Midwest, and the West Coast.

But we still have H-2 Guestworkers.

And, guess what? Not much else has changed.

(Aside: not all the crew leaders were bad–there were a few who came through each year with pretty much the same crews and who treated them fairly–but they were rare. I do remember one fellow who deserted his crew to run away with a carnival. The next year he was back with the crew. He said of the carnival, “Man, every vehicle they had was stolen–that was no place for me!”)