UNEARTHED: AMERICA'S FARM WORKERS AND THE H-2A VISA

Late last spring, I knocked on the door of a ramshackle house beside a county highway, uneasy and unsure of what the night held in store. The house, which looked so dilapidated that I’d driven past it four or five times despite the protests of Google Maps, actually held the offices of the North Carolina Farm Workers Project (NCFWP), a group I’d come into contact with via several colleagues, a couple of phone calls, and a stream of emails.

On this night, the door opened to reveal several new faces filing papers and bustling about, readying for a night of the mobile clinic. Half an hour later, I got back into my car and caravanned behind these new acquaintances, past street lights and cell service, down dirt roads, to a cement block structure in the middle of what felt like nowhere. In the light of day the whole scene would likely have appeared much more bucolic, but at this hour, I felt tired, a little unsettled, and ready to go home to my family after a long day of work.

In the ensuing months, however, I learned more than I’d ever cared to know about a population of men who keep the farms of North Carolina clicking and the system that brings them here. My students too (I’m a professor in a physical therapy program) seemed to experience, with each new cohort and each new evening, exactly the same mix of thoughts and feelings I did that first night: moving from exhaustion, to a bit of fear, to passing the night in “the zone” of too much work in too little time, to finally heading home (more exhausted) but newly humbled and awakened.

The farms of North Carolina—the big ones, that is—operate thanks to a subculture of which I knew nothing: a complicated web of farmers, migrant workers, and national government. It was Alina (not her real name), a volunteer for NCFWP, who enlightened me. The men milling around us in dusty boots and faded jeans each night had, in some cases, been returning to the same farms year after year (sometimes generation after generation) after being granted what are dubbed H-2A visas.

“H-2-what?” was my first question.

Alina explained that the H-2A visa allowed workers to come to the U.S. temporarily and legally to assist on farms. Farmers applied for the visas for the workers and, often times, agents in Mexico (from where most of the men came) would coordinate staffing. The primary justification for the H-2A visa was that the farmer had to show that local workers could not be found to reliably do the same work for the wage. This brief explanation shattered a few preconceived notions I didn’t know I had: First, I had assumed that the workers were illegal. One hears so much rhetoric (on both sides of the political fence) about how difficult it is to get legal entry into the U.S. and that, thus, we have a tremendous influx of illegal aliens. Instead, thousands of immigrants were coming here through a system established by the U.S. government. Perhaps even more eye-opening, was the justification for bringing these men here. (Side note: not every person from every country qualifies for a H2-A visa; for a comprehensive list, look here. Bottom line: It's harder to get here from some countries than from others.) There is a trope among many armchair politicians that “immigrants are stealing our jobs,” but here, with my feet planted on the dry dirt of a tobacco farm, I saw a strong (and numerous) example to the contrary. Rather, U.S. farmers had to look outside the country to find reliable, affordable help.

“But surely the wages are really low?” I asked Alina.

“Not too bad,” she replied. “Some of them can make $10-15 dollars an hour. Maybe more if they’ve got special skills. That can go a long way in Mexico.”

Or here. As of January 1, 2016, minimum wage in North Carolina is currently $7.25 an hour.

For more on the mobile farm worker clinic and H-2A visas, check out my next post in this series: UNEARTHED: AMERICA'S FARM WORKERS.