Migrant Farm Worker Quotes

But who gets to think that way? Who gets to celebrate this cosmic view of life? Not the migrant farm worker. Not the sweatshop workers. Certainly not the homeless person rummaging through the trash for food. You need the luxury of time not spent on mere survival. You need to live in a nation whose government values the search to understand humanity's place in the universe. You need a society in which intellectual pursuit can take you to the frontiers of discovery, and in which news of your discoveries can be routinely disseminated.

As I would learn later on, developed countries will always welcome the Einsteins of this world -- those individuals whose talents are already recognized and deemed to have value. This welcome doesn't usually extend to the poor and uneducated people seeking to enter the country. But the truth, supported by the facts of history and the richness of immigrant contribution to America's distinction in the world, is that the most entrepreneurial, innovative, motivated citizen is the one who has been given an opportunity and wants to repay the debt.

Unwilling to give in to that possibility, I keep going, holding on fiercely to the belief that I can make it. Taunts of “you can’t” and “who do you think you are?” have never stopped me before, so why should they now?

En route to California I had a few drinks with an American executive for Falstaff Brewing Company who said he'd been a hobo from '37 to '39. He talked about a friend of his who had lost his legs beneath a freight train and died. He told me he knew something about farm labor contractors. "Killers," he called them. And said it again, "Killers.

The new migrants from the dust bowl are here to stay. They are the vest American stock, intelligent, resourceful; and, if given a chance, socially responsible. To attempt to force them into a peonage of starvation and intimidated despair will be unsuccessful. They can be citizens of the highest type, or they can be an army driven by suffering to take what they need. On their future treatment will depend the course they will be force to take.

Although most Americans do not realise it, their nations agricultural system has relied heavily on migrant labourers and slaves from Africa, Asia and south of the border for the last four centuries. The country’s agricultural sector has functioned to varying degrees on bondage and servitude from the beginning, which is no different fro agricultural sectors elsewhere in the world. From feudal times to the present day, the arrangements that characterise agricultural work have been remarkably resistant to change, including in the United States. Laws are passed, awareness is raised, workers protest, and lives are lost - but trafficking for slavery and bondage in America’s agricultural sector remains far more prevalent today than almost anyone cares to admit.

We ought to recognize the darkness of the culture of death when it shows up in our own voices. I am startled when I hear those who claim the name of Christ, and who loudly profess to be pro-life, speaking of immigrants with disdain as “those people” who are “draining our health care and welfare resources.” Can we not see the same dehumanizing strategies at work in the abortion-rights activism that speaks of the “product of conception” and the angry nativism that calls the child of an immigrant mother an “anchor baby”? At root, this is a failure to see who we are. We are united to a Christ who was himself a sojourner, fleeing political oppression (Matt. 2:13–23), and our ancestors in Israel were themselves a migrant people (Exod. 1:1–14; 1 Chron. 16:19; Acts. 7:6). Moreover, our God sees the plight of the fatherless and the blood of the innocent, but he also tells us that because he loves the sojourner and cares for him so should we, “for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:18–19). We might disagree on the basis of prudence about what specific policies should be in place to balance border security with compassion for the immigrants among us, but a pro-life people have no option to respond with loathing or disgust at persons made in the image of God. We might or might not be natural-born Americans, but we are, all of us, immigrants to the kingdom of God (Eph. 2:12–14). Whatever our disagreements on immigration as policy, we must not disagree on whether immigrants are persons. No matter how important the United States of America is, there will come a day when the United States will no longer exist. But the sons and daughters of God will be revealed. Some of them are undocumented farm-workers and elementary-school janitors now. They will be kings and queens then. They are our brothers and sisters forever. We need to stand up against bigotry and harassment and exploitation, even when such could be politically profitable to those who stand with us on other issues. The image of God cannot be bartered away, at the abortion clinic counter or anywhere else.

Sometimes I struggled to say something meaningful only to learn that silence is just as powerful as words.

Moreover, these changes occurred when most American households actually found their real incomes stagnant or declining. Median household income for the last four decades is shown in the chart above. But this graph, disturbing as it is, conceals a far worse reality. The top 10 percent did much better than everyone else; if you remove them, the numbers change dramatically. Economic analysis has found that “only the top 10 percent of the income distribution had real compensation growth equal to or above . . . productivity growth.”14 In fact, most gains went to the top 1 percent, while people in the bottom 90 percent either had declining household incomes or were able to increase their family incomes only by working longer hours. The productivity of workers continued to grow, particularly with the Internet revolution that began in the mid-1990s. But the benefits of productivity growth went almost entirely into the incomes of the top 1 percent and into corporate profits, both of which have grown to record highs as a fraction of GNP. In 2010 and 2011 corporate profits accounted for over 14 percent of total GNP, a historical record. In contrast, the share of US GNP paid as wages and salaries is at a historical low and has not kept pace with inflation since 2006.15 As I was working on this manuscript in late 2011, the US Census Bureau published the income statistics for 2010, when the US recovery officially began. The national poverty rate rose to 15.1 percent, its highest level in nearly twenty years; median household income declined by 2.3 percent. This decline, however, was very unequally distributed. The top tenth experienced a 1 percent decline; the bottom tenth, already desperately poor, saw its income decline 12 percent. America’s median household income peaked in 1999; by 2010 it had declined 7 percent. Average hourly income, which corrects for the number of hours worked, has barely changed in the last thirty years. Ranked by income equality, the US is now ninety-fifth in the world, just behind Nigeria, Iran, Cameroon, and the Ivory Coast. The UK has mimicked the US; even countries with low levels of inequality—including Denmark and Sweden—have seen an increasing gap since the crisis. This is not a distinguished record. And it’s not a statistical fluke. There is now a true, increasingly permanent underclass living in near-subsistence conditions in many wealthy states. There are now tens of millions of people in the US alone whose condition is little better than many people in much poorer nations. If you add up lifetime urban ghetto residents, illegal immigrants, migrant farm-workers, those whose criminal convictions sharply limit their ability to find work, those actually in prison, those with chronic drug-abuse problems, crippled veterans of America’s recently botched wars, children in foster care, the homeless, the long-term unemployed, and other severely disadvantaged groups, you get to tens of millions of people trapped in very harsh, very unfair conditions, in what is supposedly the wealthiest, fairest society on earth. At any given time, there are over two million people in US prisons; over ten million Americans have felony records and have served prison time for non-traffic offences. Many millions more now must work very long hours, and very hard, at minimum-wage jobs in agriculture, retailing, cleaning, and other low-wage service industries. Several million have been unemployed for years, exhausting their savings and morale. Twenty or thirty years ago, many of these people would have had—and some did have—high-wage jobs in manufacturing or construction. No more. But in addition to growing inequalities in income and wealth, America exhibits

mutagenic, and neurotoxic. If it is grown on an impersonal factory farm, the tomato will be lifeless and have no charm. If it is picked by an underpaid migrant worker who’s given no benefits and few worker’s rights, then the tomato is hypocritical and lacks integrity. If it is chopped by machine along with thousands of other tomatoes, delivered to a fast-food joint, and slapped together with a bun and meat from a cow who suffered even worse traumas, then our tomato is now suicidal, or even murderous, because it has lost its soul and has no reason to live. I think you get the picture.

The Chinese government’s distinct attitude to worker protections also extends to its treatment of hundreds of millions of migrants moving from the countryside to the cities. Thanks to China’s hukou system, these workers are effectively illegal immigrants in their own country. Originally meant to keep workers on farms in the Maoist era, the hukou system limits the rights of Chinese to move and settle anywhere in China outside of where they were born.

The decades between the Civil War and World War I were also an epoch of rapid population growth and urbanization. Between 1870 and 1900 national population nearly doubled from 40 million to 76 million, while the population of cities tripled from 10 million to 30 million. … Year after year an endless stream of hopeful emigrants from American farms and European villages poured into the anonymous teeming cities of tenements and skyscrapers. These migrants were living now not merely in a new community, but in a setting so unfamiliar and disjointed that many doubted it deserved the term community at all. Most of the new urban dwellers were also living in a new country. In the thirty years between 1870 and 1900, nearly 12 million persons immigrated to the United States, more than had come to our shores in the previous two and a half centuries. In the following fourteen years nearly another 13 million would arrive. In 1870 one-third of all industrial workers in America were foreign born. By 1900 more than half were. In 1890, immigrant adults actually outnumbered native adults in eighteen of the twenty cities with a population over 100,000. … To those who lived through this epoch, what was most striking was simply the overwhelmingly accelerated pace of change itself. We often speak easily about the rapid pace of change in our own time. However, nothing in the experience of the average American at the end of the twentieth century matches the wrenching transformation experienced at the beginning of the century by an immigrant raised as a peasant in a Polish village little changed from the sixteenth century who within a few years was helping to construct the avant-garde skyscrapers of Louis Sullivan in the city of ‘big shoulders’ besides Lake Michigan. Even for native-born Americans, the pace of change in the last decades of the nineteenth century was extraordinary. A Bostonian Henry Adams later wrote of his own boyhood, ‘The American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900.

The decades between the Civil War and World War I were also an epoch of rapid population growth and urbanization. Between 1870 and 1900 national population nearly doubled from 40 million to 76 million, while the population of cities tripled from 10 million to 30 million. … Year after year an endless stream of hopeful emigrants from American farms and European villages poured into the anonymous teeming cities of tenements and skyscrapers. These migrants were living now not merely in a new community, but in a setting so unfamiliar and disjointed that many doubted it deserved the term community at all. Most of the new urban dwellers were also living in a new country. In the thirty years between 1870 and 1900, nearly 12 million persons immigrated to the United States, more than had come to our shores in the previous two and a half centuries. In the following fourteen years nearly another 13 million would arrive. In 1870 one-third of all industrial workers in America were foreign born. By 1900 more than half were. In 1890, immigrant adults actually outnumbered native adults in eighteen of the twenty cities with a population over 100,000. … To those who lived through this epoch, what was most striking was simply the overwhelmingly accelerated pace of change itself. We often speak easily about the rapid pace of change in our own time. However, nothing in the experience of the average American at the end of the twentieth century matches the wrenching transformation experienced at the beginning of the century by an immigrant raised as a peasant in a Polish village little changed from the sixteenth century who within a few years was helping to construct the avant-garde skyscrapers of Louis Sullivan in the city of ‘big shoulders’ besides Lake Michigan. Even for native-born Americans, the pace of change in the last decades of the nineteenth century was extraordinary. A Bostonian Henry Adams later wrote of his own boyhood, ‘The American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900.