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Legislation And Regulation Favor Agribusiness, Farmworkers: An Overview of Health, Safety, and Wage Issues

Author: Reynolds, Kathleen
Date Published: 1998


For generations, California's onion and lettuce fields, the cotton farms of Texas' Rio Grande Valley, and the chili fields of New Mexico have provided employment for migrant farmworkers pulled north from Mexico by the lure of higher U.S. wages. Under the U.S. government's bracero program (1942-64), 3.3 million Mexican nationals were shuttled north across the border to work and bused back to Mexico when the harvest season was over. Today, changes in Mexico's agricultural sector produce much the same effect, as do clauses in U.S. labor and immigration laws designed to provide U.S. agribusiness with low-cost labor. As a result, farmworkers in 1998 continue to wrestle with the same challenges that they did in 1948-extreme poverty, isolation from the communities where they work, and political disenfranchisement. It is difficult to pin down with certainty the exact number of migrant farm laborers working in the U.S. today. Depending on which government agency's definition, methodology, and count you accept, their numbers range anywhere between 1 and 5 million people. The demographic characteristics of the farmworker population are hazy as well. Different surveys have found that between 70% and 94% of the group is Latino, and that anywhere between 20% and 50% are undocumented and in the U.S. illegally. Most research does concur that the majority of migrant farmworkers are male, Spanish-speaking, of limited education, and born in Mexico; but a growing number of workers are native peoples, from either Guatemala or southern Mexico. Adult farmworkers typically have completed eight or fewer years of formal education.

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