The Working Poor

by David K. Shipler

  The United Farm Workers of America, the union founded by Cesar Chavez, has complained that California does not vigorously enforce its own laws. Where farmers fail to post warnings that fields have been sprayed, for example, and ignore the mandatory waiting periods before resuming hand harvesting, minuscule fines of $200 or $300 are levied. Only when overt illness results can the fines reach $2,000, the union reports.5 The victims are invisible, after all.

  The children of migrants can also be invisible in schools, which they may attend only for a few months before moving on. The United States has a keen interest in educating these youngsters, for most of them will remain in the country and grow up to become working citizens. Severe disruptions in their schooling do not contribute to the society’s well-being. Yet only a few small programs, funded mostly by the U.S. Department of Education, seek to address the problem by providing kids with laptops for learning on the web, for example, or by sending traveling mentors and instructors who keep the studies going as families follow the growing seasons from south to north to south again. Teenagers have been able to graduate from high school through these efforts, which exist in Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oregon, and elsewhere. But the number of students enrolled is too small to release the vast majority from the educational deficits that confine them to a predetermined path.

  Blacks used to work these North Carolina fields, first as slaves, then as free citizens who were imprisoned by the unyielding laws of economics. “They were treated pretty tough,” said Jimmy Burch, who saw some of his fellow farmers drive the workers ruthlessly. “They worked all week, and all they got was the wine and their meals, or marijuana and their meals, whatever the thrill of the week was,” he recalled. “You say, ‘Well, this guy’s taking advantage of them.’ And he is. And on the flip side of the deal is, where else is he gonna go? Where’s he gonna go? What’s he gonna do? I mean, he ain’t got no marketable skills. He’s got a roof over his head. Might not be a nice roof, but it’s a roof. He’s warm at night, he gets fed every day. To me, it would be a shitty existence, but for some of these people, I guess it’s all right. I guess. Kind of sad to say that. I guess it’s better than being homeless in New York or Washington, waiting for somebody to hand you fifty cents or a dollar.”

  Today, after massive black migration from farms to cities and from South to North, most field hands are Mexican and Central American, the bulk of them here illegally; less than 2 percent arrive through a limited visa program known as H2A, whose red tape is formidable. If they complain about employers, they risk not being hired and issued the visa the following year. The remaining 98 percent come without visas, and if the laws against employing them were enforced efficiently, agriculture in North Carolina and certain other parts of the country would shut down, farmers believe; machines cannot replace hands in harvesting crops that are easily damaged. Jimmy argues that since the United States grants visas liberally to foreigners who write videogame software, it should do the same for foreigners who harvest food.

  Being undocumented is precarious. Fearing deportation, you will think twice about contesting your wages or working conditions. You will be ineligible for government benefits except free school breakfast and lunch programs, emergency Medicaid, immunizations, and treatment for communicable diseases. And you’ll suffer from less obvious inconveniences, such as the lack of a bank account, which will cost you in fees when you transfer money. In other words, American government and business gain financially from your inability to legalize your presence in the country.

  Some 6.1 million Mexicans are thought to be living as undocumented immigrants in the United States, the Pew Hispanic Center estimates, and about 52 percent of the country’s 1.6 million farmworkers are here without permission, the Government Accountability Office figures.6 They send more than $9 billion a year to Mexico to help their families with food, clothing, medicine, and housing; the flood of cash exceeds the government budgets of some Mexican localities. Most workers seem to focus on the immediacy of however many dollars they can earn today, not on some elusive career ladder. A young man named Abel was a case in point. He knew how to repair farm machinery, but he didn’t advertise his skills and preferred to stay in the fields. If he became a mechanic, he imagined, “They’ll be paying me the same as everyone else and I’ll have to work harder, do more difficult work.”

  Abel and many others have a single purpose—not to gain a foothold in the United States, not to enter the mainstream, but simply to make enough money to sustain their impoverished families back home. The common ground of America looks too remote from the twilight margins where they reside.

  Earning minimum wage in the cotton fields, Abel and his two cousins worked from seven to seven in the planting season, and from seven in the morning until midnight seven days a week during the harvest from October to December—a peak of labor intensity that saw nine brothers and cousins cram into a tiny grimy trailer sitting among the fields of cotton and tobacco. On this farm, the grower followed the law and paid them overtime of $7.50 for each hour over forty a week, and he didn’t charge them for gas, electricity, or rent for their dingy quarters. That was a better deal than they could get during their winters picking oranges in Florida, where the grower charged them each $40 to $50 a week for housing. At the busiest times, they sent about half their earnings to Mexico as a lifeline to keep their parents out of destitution; in slower months, they sent practically everything home, holding out about $30 a week each for food and $200 a month for payments on the old cars that all three of them managed to buy. The jalopies were not a luxury; they got the men to painting and construction jobs in periods between farm chores. Nevertheless, all that labor yielded only modest results: In three years, the cousin who had been here the longest, Rolando, had saved only $2,000 of the $5,000 he needed to build a house in Mexico. “If you would give me the 3,000,” he said to me with a laugh, “I would go back right now.”

  The price they paid was figured in loneliness, separation, and isolation from anything resembling community. No substitute could be found among the rough and transitory flows of migrants from south to north to south again. Abel put it succinctly: “We’re single, and we’re looking for girlfriends.”

  As the men send dollars home, 10 to 25 percent of the money is siphoned off by Western Union, banks, and pharmacies in both the United States and Mexico through unfavorable exchange rates and exorbitant fees for wire transfers. People without bank accounts get hit with the highest charges: Their average remittance of $300 dwindles by $80 to $90 as it travels electronically to Mexico, according to the Texas Credit Union League.7

  To open an account, a bank usually requires a Social Security number. To get a valid number, an immigrant must be in the country legally, so an undocumented immigrant cannot get a valid Social Security number. No problem, said Abel, and he pulled out a Social Security card. He and his two cousins were sitting at a scarred round table in their trailer. All three were here without permission from the U.S. government, doing jobs essential to the U.S. economy. And all three had bank accounts. Social Security cards are not very elaborate, and to my untrained eye this one looked real. So did Abel’s more complex, laminated green card bearing the seal of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Together they cost $100—a package deal—and Abel said he could have paid more if he had wanted higher quality. “We present it for work, that’s all,” he explained. “After that we don’t really carry it.”

  Producing such documents is part of a charade: The workers know that the farmers generally know that the cards are phony, and the farmers know that the workers know they know, but the little card shuffle seems to exempt the employers from the fines under federal law. Those doing the hiring have dutifully checked the documents, after all. The immigration agency is usually content to deport the workers without going after the employers as well. A noted exception came in the form of a federal grand jury indictment of Tyson’s Foods and six employees on charges of arranging to have illegal immigrants
smuggled into the country and provided with false documents. The case was thin, however, and despite testimony by several employees who pleaded guilty, a federal jury acquitted the company and the three managers who were brought to trial.8

  The only authentic piece of identification illegal immigrants can obtain is a driver’s license, and that has become more difficult since the terrorist attacks of September n, 2001. A license is not a necessity for the newest arrivals who don’t have cars and don’t drive farm equipment, but it’s essential for those who want to step off the migrant train and stay in one place for a while, or move up a rung on the job ladder from field hand to tractor driver. Certain states require a Social Security number, and one that’s false can get the applicant arrested on the spot for fraud. Among the tighter rules since September 11 is Pennsylvania’s practice of stamping “non-citizen” on immigrants’ licenses, which are now timed to expire when their visas do.9 This provokes some to drive without licenses and encourages ethnic profiling by the police, who park outside trailer camps and stop drivers who look Hispanic. The Justice Department has asked police to enforce immigration laws, which have targeted people from Muslim countries especially.

  The crackdown also generates some migration within the migration— a trip from Ohio, Tennessee, or South Carolina, where the rules are strict, to North Carolina, for example, where lawsuits against the state used to guarantee that anyone without a number was allowed to fill in the blanks with zeros. Even here, though, you needed two forms of I.D., and that could be a hassle. A voter’s identification card from Mexico counted as one, and a Mexican birth certificate was acceptable. Otherwise, a title to a car would suffice, along with the voter’s I.D., but that required a certificate of insurance, which in turn required identification, and on into a labyrinth. After September 11 and the rising fear of immigrants, North Carolina imposed new requirements: proof of state residency and either a valid Social Security number or Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, available with some difficulty from the IRS. Then Congress stepped in, barring states from issuing licenses to illegal immigrants after 2008.

  Father Paul Brant put fifteen hundred miles a week on his aging van crisscrossing the countryside of eastern North Carolina on behalf of these folks: saying masses; doing counseling; arranging medical care; and helping people get driver’s licenses by pleading, urging, demanding that the motor vehicle administration adhere to its own regulations. He was a Jesuit priest who got his start helping the poor in the Bronx—a tall bear of a man with a flushed, puffy face and a constant smile in his blue eyes. He wore a pleasant squint of jolly compassion behind narrow-rimmed glasses, the thinnest wisp of a gray beard, and a T-shirt that said, “Festival Latino Wilmington ’98.” His fluent Spanish tumbled along in a very American accent.

  He had just had a go-round with the bureaucrats on behalf of Patty and Gloria, whose lack of English required them to take the tests in Spanish, as North Carolina law allowed. Two years before, an examiner in the Kenansville office flatly refused to use Spanish for the test on road signs, even though he had cards with translations sitting on his desk. Now, a more amenable woman, whom Father Paul had helped get the job, was on duty. But he decided to phone ahead anyway, just to be sure. He never identified himself when he called, because he wanted to know how the agency responded to everyone, not just to an activist priest. He found out. Not recognizing his voice, the examiner told him that while applicants could take the written test in Spanish, the signs test had to wait for an interpreter, available only on Fridays. Puzzled, Father Paul called the state capital in Raleigh to see if the rules had changed. They had not. A supervisor contacted the hapless examiner to ask why she had refused to give a test. Her nose was out of joint when the priest walked into her office with

  Patty and Gloria. Would he please call her supervisor and get her off the hook? she asked. “I will,” he said to me, “but what she told me when I was there was different from her knee-jerk response before she knew who it was.”

  The other bureaucracy that bothered Father Paul was the Roman Catholic Church: the officious parish priest, the inflexible diocese, the hierarchy that seemed indifferent to the special needs of the transient Hispanic faithful. The church, for its part, seemed barely to tolerate Father Paul, an itinerant priest without a parish, as he journeyed along the edges of society, rocking the boat.

  “What I like most is people empowerment,” he declared. “I like to get organizations up and running to help address an unmet need, and a lot of that’s needed in the Catholic Church ’cause there are lots of unmet needs. But I’m always in trouble with my superiors as a result—not my Jesuit superiors, but the other ones. They don’t like waves. They don’t like change. It’s really amazing, the bureaucracy—no matter where it is, it’s the same. It resists any kind of innovation, any kind of change.”

  Migrants who want to marry, for example, run into a six-month waiting period imposed by the diocese to make them stop and think. It sounds sensible, but six months is a whole growing season, and the bride, the groom, or their family members will probably be long gone by the end of it. Most of the marriages that don’t last have been arranged at age fifteen or sixteen, Father Paul argued, and he believed that devout Hispanic adults usually go solemnly enough into matrimony not to need the forced period of reflection. “When a Hispanic couple comes to you and says they want to get married in the church, you’re pretty sure they’re ready to make a lifetime commitment,” he insisted. “But these pastors who don’t work with Hispanics much are saying, ‘Well, number one, I don’t speak Spanish; number two, there’s a regulation. No.’ ” He gave an exasperated laugh. “Most of the priests around here who don’t work with Hispanics are very much by the book, and they won’t make any exceptions for anything. And they don’t ask questions; they just say no. So that’s driven a lot of people away.”

  Those failed child marriages can present a problem, given the church’s opposition to divorce. A second marriage cannot be performed in a Catholic church unless the first is annulled, and that must be done by the diocese in which each individual resides—not so easy when the wife, for example, is back in Mexico or Honduras. “Our diocese did not have any provision for handling annulments for couples unless both of the partners were living in this diocese,” Father Paul said, “and it requires a special appeal to Rome in order to change jurisdictions, and have this diocese take charge of annulments that properly belong to another diocese. So for two years I presented it to the people in charge of our tribunal: that it was an unjust situation because even if they could do the communication with the diocese in Latin America, most of the dioceses do not have a tribunal. They can’t afford to put three priests or two priests in an office to handle marriage cases. So they don’t have anything. Basically, then, it becomes impossible for the couple to be freed from a previous marriage bond and be able to marry again. So now they’ve given me permission to do that. They say, ‘Be sure to tell them it’s gonna take an extra year because we have to go to Rome and ask for a change of jurisdiction and then we have to start the process after we’ve gotten that.’ ”

  Most of his time was occupied by secular issues, though, and they ran the gamut of farmworkers’ difficulties. One was the lack of community, intimacy, and trust, especially among young men traveling without families. “The kinds of problems that are exacerbated would be the ones that could be settled if the patriarchs were around—the abuelos, the grandparents,” he noted. “I’ll ask them after they’ve shared something profound with me, ‘Do you have any other … accountability partner, somebody they’d feel comfortable saying the same things to? Do you have anybody of confidence that you can talk to?’ And they’ll say no.”

  So Father Paul tried to fill the void, both by offering good advice and by handing out narrow cards the size of a bookmark, produced on the computer in his cluttered yellow house. Migrants could carry the card, which bore an iconic image of the Virgin Mary and a prayer in Spanish appealing for help in abstaining
from alcohol and drugs. Alcoholism was rampant, Father Paul observed. Cocaine and marijuana arrived with young workers, many of whom were addicts before they came, he said; some kicked the habit once they were here, though it was harder to make that happen in the absence of family and community. Health problems became severe, not only because of drugs, alcohol, and the denial of medical insurance, but also because farm work had a high incidence of accidents.

  Father Paul was a fixer, an arranger, a middleman, a negotiator, a finder of dentists who would permit payments on an installment plan, doctors who would reduce their charges for uninsured workers, sometimes to zero. And he was a financial counselor, transcending cultures to explain patiently to these folks that here in the United States it was better to pay a little on a bill periodically than to wait and pay nothing until you had it all. He taught them something about the country they served.

  The migrants, so essential to America, journey along its edge, touching its wealth as tangents barely touch a circle, never penetrating, never looking out from inside. And so they do not see themselves the way they are seen, and they do not apply to themselves the measurements that America applies to their suffering.

  When a migrant stops moving, however, he starts to enter America. He looks around. He settles in. Perhaps he opens a little store to sit incongruously on a North Carolina crossroads to stock jalapeños and other foods familiar to his countrymen. Perhaps, like Agustin Baltazar, he just keeps working year-round on the same farm, and he begins to wonder how to see himself.

  Agustin was straddling the line, inside and outside. He and his wife and three children lived in a small white frame house, decorated with flashing lights and a lovely Christmas tree, owned by his boss, a chicken farmer who charged no rent. A handsome guy of thirty-three, Agustin had to spend every penny he earned. Nothing was ever left over. Yet he was not sure where to place himself in the hierarchy of classes.