Amy's Blog Post Regarding Legacy of Shame

The documentary we watched last week encouraged me to think of how we can best serve the immigrants who come work here. The question really boils down to: what are we attacking, the leaves or the root of the problem? We should attack the leaves in the short term and make the best of the situation: that also makes us feel better, since our results are immediately visible (and we are, after all, a rather instant gratification society). However, to really make a difference, we need to identify and attack the roots of the problem.

Ideally, it would be nice to provide all migrant workers with basic needs met: adequate food, shelter, and water; adequate amenities such as shade and breaks. How do we accomplish this? Firstly, we should realize that such things, which would ideally be provided by the employer, are finite since the employers' resources are finite, and therefore the number of workers for a given farm needs to be capped, even during peak harvest season. Importantly, the roster of workers needs to be controlled directly by the employer; the documentary clearly showed that the existence of middlemen to accomplish this parceling of funds creates embezzlement issues. By eliminating middlemen, one can reduce the amount of salaries that need to go to these people and prevent the pocketing of the immigrants' extra money (which created the indentured servitude situation with the Guatemalans). This extra money that would have been pocketed can actually go to the employer to help him/her provide basic amenities for all the workers. Even if it's just a token sum for rent, etc., I think this relationship would provide both an obligatory feeling on the part of the employer to help provide cheap housing and also a sense of empowerment and legitimacy to the workers (rather than a feeling that they're existing on total charity or obligation).

• Employer-employee contract: employer needs to know all workers, employee needs to understand all terms of the contract and accept/decline accordingly. How do we enforce this?
  
• Employee standards: Migrants need to understand the situation at hand. People who have worked in the US for long periods of time have a better idea of what is acceptable, what sort of work conditions should and should NOT be endured, how people can fight. However, first-time immigrants may not know these standards, causing them to undercut the competition (since they're willing to settle for less). From a human rights perspective, however, this can only go on for so long! How can we educate and have them not settle for too little?
• Transparency of the entire process: If we need to educate, there has to be some time of transparency in the entire process. This boils down to legal immigration, which would prevent huge numbers of people from coming and being disappointed (and having to suffer through terrible living conditions). However, this process is extremely messy, as we all know.

The following is just a list of some other problems:

• Job competition with US citizens: We noticed that the woman in the documentary, who had worked in the fields for 40+ years, and who loved her job, was fired because of the competition from cheaper labor. Is this fair?
• Market: We are all partially to blame, as we love our cheap goods (look at the explosive success of Walmart, even though we all know they treat employees terribly! After all, do civilized people really run each other down in shopping sprees? What does civilized even mean??) So, we're more willing to buy, say cheaper imported foods--and even with tarrifs on these imports, the domestically produced goods can't be too expensive or consumers will complain. Because they can't sell too high, farmers need to produce more cheaply, which translates to lower salaries to workers, more human rights issues, etc.
• Insurance premiums: These are way too high!! It seems like most problems these days boil down to insurance companies.
  

This is by no means an exhaustive list--or even a truly accurate one--but since there are so many issues at hand I think it's important to get them down and think about each one logically so we have more of a chance of really solving the problem.