Deportation threats send shivers through farmworkers
More than two million people working on farms in the country arrived more than 15 years ago but 42 percent of them still lack the documents that would allow them to work legally
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More than two million people working on farms in the country arrived more than 15 years ago but 42 percent of them still lack the documents that would allow them to work legally
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FRESNO, United States (AFP) — With planting season well under way in California, the leading US food-producing state, fear is taking root among thousands of migrants who labor to feed a country that now seems ready to deport them.
“We have to stay hidden,” Lourdes Cardenas, a 62-year-old Mexican living in the city of Fresno, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“You are unsure if you will encounter the immigration authorities. We can’t be free anywhere, not in schools, not in churches, not in supermarkets,” said Cardenas, who has lived in the US for 22 years.
President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has left people like her “depressed, sad, anxious” and fearful of being deported, she said.
Cardenas is one of more than two million people working on farms in the country.
Most were born outside the US, speak Spanish and, on average, arrived more than 15 years ago.
Still, 42 percent of them lack the documents that would allow them to work legally, according to the government’s own figures.
In January, surprise raids by immigration officials in Bakersfield, an agricultural city about 400 kilometers from the Mexican border, sent chills through workers in California’s breadbasket Central Valley.
They were a stark reminder that the country some of them have called home for decades elected a man who wants them gone.
“We were not afraid of the pandemic,” said Cardenas, who did not stop working during the worst months of Covid-19. “But right now this is getting bad for us.”
While they might be staying away from church, or altering their shopping habits, the one thing these migrant workers cannot do is stay away from work.
That is why for the United Farm Workers, the largest farm workers’ union in the US, the threatened mass deportations will not translate into more jobs for Americans.
Instead, they say, it will further drive down the cost of those migrant workers, making employers less likely to pay them the much higher salaries that American workers demand.
“You have thousands of people who are so afraid of being deported that they’re willing to work for way less,” union spokesperson Antonio de Loera told AFP.
“They’re not going to report wage theft. So if anything, it’s undercutting the value of American workers.”
“This status quo serves the interest of many employers in the agricultural industry. For them, this is the sweet spot,” De Loera said.
“They have their workers but their workers are so afraid that they won’t organize, they won’t ask for higher wages, they won’t even report violations of labor law or unsafe working conditions.”
There is, he said, a fairly simple solution: grant the workers legal status.
