Plus Ca Change 0
Steve Hallock in the Philadelphia Inquirer points out that, in the eyes of some, the presence of brown people has long presaged the end of the Republic:
It continued: “For the most part they were and are agricultural workers: ‘following the fruit,’ as the saying is in California: picking cotton; harvesting wheat; gathering perishable crops from one ocean to the other. … They include many migrants who permanently leave their homes in search of better opportunities elsewhere, as the ‘Okies’ and ‘Arkies’ went to California during the Thirties.”
The editorial is from a 1950 edition of the New York Times. It is now 60 years since its publication. It’s also 109 years since the federal government first studied the migrant-worker situation and declared it a problem, 94 years since the Industrial Relations Commission published a report on the plight of migrant workers (many of them immigrants),
and 60 years since President Harry Truman appointed another commission to study the situation.