Labor, Migrant

Historical Overview

The history of migrant labor relates to the four major migrant streams that have shuffled workers to where the crops need tending. Over the past 20 years, scholars have identified migrant streams that are increasingly Mexican immigrant, and due to political pressures to fortify the U.S.-Mexico border, the short-term sojourners are increasingly settling in rural agricultural destinations.

As the agricultural industry concentrated and expanded in the early 20th century to meet rising U.S. consumer demand, large numbers of temporary laborers were recruited to meet the short-term, labor-intensive harvest schedules of highly perishable crops. Berkeley economist Paul S. Taylor detailed the crops associated with the various migrant streams of the 1930s (see Figure 1). Remarkably, the four migrant streams did not alter significantly until the late 1980s. The East Coast migrant stream originated in Florida and the Caribbean and originally brought former African American sharecroppers north to pick apples, cranberries, and strawberries. Later, African Americans were replaced by Caribbean migrants from Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Haiti, and other islands who were first recruited to pick sugar cane in Florida and then moved up the eastern seaboard to pick the New England fall harvest. The Appalachian/Ozark migrant stream was more regionally focused and more crop specific, so wheat, cotton, and fruit pickers each followed their own distinct routes. During the Great Depression, the number of Appalachian and white sharecroppers swelled, but their presence in the migrant stream predated the 1930s. The Midwest migrant stream originated in South Texas and Mexico and most often followed the railroad lines. San Antonio, Texas, became the home base for many sojourners along this Midwest migrant stream. The Pacific Coast migrant stream originated in the Imperial Valley of California and Mexico. Mexican migrants have picked Washington apples, Oregon hops, and Idaho potatoes for well over a century.

Recent Migrant Streams

Over the past 20 years, the increasing reliance on Mexican labor has resulted in a redrawing of the migrant stream map (see Figure 2) and the development of new Mexican migrant streams to all agricultural regions of the United States. Workers in the established migrant streams travel from Mexico, through the border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, to the Pacific Coast, Mountain States, Upper Midwest, and Atlantic Coast. A number of agricultural communities in California and south Texas also send migrant workers along these same routes, but it is primarily migrants directly from Mexico who now occupy all migrant streams.

A renewed grower utilization of the U.S. government's H-2A temporary visa program accelerated and institutionalized this process. The H-2Aprogram originated in 1952 to meet the labor demands of Florida sugar and tobacco growers along the East Coast migrant stream. It allowed immigrant workers to obtain temporary visas to enter the country for a limited period to harvest predesignated crops. The latest available data show that agricultural firms in all 50 states employ H-2A labor and that there were 45,000 visas issued in 2003, up from 42,000 in 2002. Tobacco is the largest single crop that employs H-2A workers (35 percent of total). Scholars and labor activists readily agree that Mexican workers are the main visa recipients. Today, the fields that feed the nation, and increasingly the world, are almost exclusively harvested by workers of Mexican origin, even as the number of workers employed in agriculture continues to decline.

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