Investigate Midwest (https://investigatemidwest.org/tag/migrants/)
At times, the H-2A visa program that brings non-citizen farmworkers to the U.S. has been used to facilitate human trafficking, experts and activisits said. But the number of people trafficked through the program appears to have increased.
The average age of farmworkers born outside the U.S. steadily increased from 2008 to 2019, while the average age of U.S.-born workers has stayed about the same over the same period.
Foreign-born farmworkers are on average 5 years older than their U.S.-born counterparts.
An analysis by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Environmental Research Service attributes the trend to a decline in younger immigrants entering the U.S. workforce.
The age of the average immigrant farm worker was nearly 42 in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available. Three quarters of hired farm workers were foreign-born as of 2016, and about one quarter are women, according to the USDA.
During an incident in Kennett, Missouri, in summer 2018, H-2A workers labored through high temperatures while denied breakfast and with little access to water. Their legal status was supposed to protect them.
DURAND, Wis. — Twenty-six-year-old Rosa Jiménez and her husband, Manuel, 36, used to do the grocery shopping together. They would take the kids and make a day of it. But, lately, Manuel goes alone. Read on in this new report from Wisconsin Public Radio.
The bed bug infestation at the Pine Creek migrant labor camp in Holland, Michigan, had become so bad by June that Tomas and Leonor Pizana turned their bedroom lights on before going to sleep.
Gabriel and Sara Ruiz, husband and wife, were neighbors who fell in love and moved from Michoacán, Mexico, to California in the early 1990s to work on farms with hopes of realizing the American Dream. They brought with them their two children, Gabriel Jr. and Maria.
Mexico isn’t home anymore for Agustín Chavarria — Lexington, Missouri, is.
Newlyweds Alvaro Porras Loza and Maricruz Martinez Hernandez moved in early June from the Kansas City area to work the farm fields of New Haven, a town that hugs the banks of the Missouri River and stationed about an hour west of St. Louis.
While Latinos make up less than 4 percent of Missouri’s population, the number of Latino residents in the state grew nearly 80 percent between 2000 and 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
An investigation by In These Times and The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting reveals how today's migrant farmworkers are still living in deplorable housing reminiscent of "Harvest of Shame."