For most consumers, the story of food begins at the shelf of a grocery store. Although there are labels for ‘organic,’ ‘non-GMO,’ and ‘fat free,’ and few labels that tell us whose work and labor made our food available. There is a disconnect for consumers—not with where their food comes from or how it’s grown—but who made it happen, and the greater political, economic and socio-cultural drivers important to labor and the farming system.

This is an enormous oversight. The U.S. farming sector employs over 3 million seasonal and migrant farmworkers, 72% being foreign born–68% from Mexico and 3% from other South American countries.

Migrant farm workers face many obstacles in the U.S. farming system. Proper working documents are difficult to come by, meaning the industrial farming system has nowhere near the manpower it needs. This leads to individuals traversing borders under illegal and dangerous circumstances, opening the floodgates for mass exploitation and human rights violations. Farms are not accountable for providing livable wages and safe living/working conditions. Still, migrant farm workers covet these positions because the pay is much higher, earning anywhere from 3 to 10 times what they might make in their hometowns.

A rising tide of nationalism and deep structural racism in the US have made the challenges workers face much more urgent. The shift in the political climate has led to the touting of policies that ‘crack down’ on Southern and Central American migrants entering and working in the country without formal documentation. With the current administration’s border enforcement, the number of migrants apprehended by Border Patrol at the U.S.-Mexico border are at all-time highs. Ironically, the jobs migrants are getting entail hard manual labor that citizens don’t even want.

These issues take more than just labels to solve. We need to ask the deeper questions of what is really driving how these large and industrial farms work, what has led these migrant laborers to become so politically symbolic, and what can we do about it? These are all questions I will explore in my beat by diving into the economic, political and socio-cultural intersections of immigration/migration and food and farming systems in the U.S.

Sources: http://www.ncfh.org/uploads/3/8/6/8/38685499/fs-migrant_demographics.pdf