To End Farm Worker Troubles, Colbert Suggests Finding Plants That Pick Themselves

A week ago, journalist Kirk Semple published an article in the New York Times about Mexican workers in New York who, in a time of widespread unemployment, have been proficient at finding and keeping jobs. According to recent census data, Mexican workers have the highest rate of employment of all the city’s immigrant groups, and are even more likely to hold a job than New York’s native-born population. That success, as Semple explores in his article, has a flip side: many Mexican workers are illegal immigrants and therefore less likely to report workplace abuses for fear of deportation.
 
Also last week, immigrant labor was in the news again when Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren of California asked comedian Stephen Colbert to address a House subcommittee hearing on the conditions faced by American farmworkers. Colbert’s “vast experience” as a farm laborer (one day spent picking vegetables) grew out of an on-air interview with Lofgren on his show The Colbert Report, and his subsequent participation in the United Farm Workers’ “Take Our Jobs” initiative, which seeks to place unemployed Americans in farming jobs. Lofgren and others said the effort has been widely unsuccessful, in part because illegal immigrants are the only ones willing to do this type of labor.
 
For his part, Colbert’s advice on how to address the labor troubles of the agricultural sector included asking Americans to “stop eating fruits and vegetables” and to find plants that “pick themselves.” As he admits:

I started my workday with preconceived notions of migrant labor. But after working with these men and women, picking beans, packing corn, for hours on end, side by side in the unforgiving sun, I have to say – and I do mean this sincerely – please don’t make me do this again. It is really, really hard. For one thing, when you’re picking beans, you have to spend all day bending over. It turns out, and I did not know this, but most soil is at ground level. If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we make the earth waist high? Come on! Where is the funding?

Colbert stated that he was happy to use his celebrity status to draw attention to the issue of migrant farm labor, and joked that he hoped his presence would bump coverage of the committee hearings “all the way up to CSPAN1.” 
 
Following his opening statement, Colbert answered questions from the subcommittee members, and in this response to Rep. Chu’s (DE-CA) question about why he was interested in this particular issue, Colbert momentarily shed his right-leaning pundit persona:

I like talking about people who don’t have any power, and it seems like some of the least powerful people in the United States are migrant workers who come in and do our work, but don’t have any rights as a result. And yet, we still ask them to come here, and at the same time, ask them to leave. And that’s an interesting contradiction to me. 

This contradiction is at the heart of a new book we are publishing next month by Ronald L. Mize and Alicia C.S. Swords entitled Consuming Mexican Labor: From the Bracero Program to NAFTA. Accessible and timely, the book argues that consumption needs in North America have significantly shaped the ebbs and flows of Mexican labor migration within the continent in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The long history of Mexican labor migration to the United States suggests that Mexicans have been actively encouraged to migrate northward when labor markets are in short supply, only to be turned back during economic downturns. While much of the book deals with the United States, its geographic take on contemporary Mexican labor is strengthened by a comparison with Mexican immigrants in Canada and patterns of migration with Mexico. Bridging the often distinct areas of research on labor markets and labor organizing with that on settlement and integration, Mize and Swords argue for a better immigration process that puts human rights at the forefront.
 
We’ll be posting more information as the publication date for Consuming Mexican Labor nears. For now, we are happy to report that Mize and Swords have some celebrities in their corner as well: author Mike Davis and actor and advocate Ashley Judd have already endorsed the book! Please check out the “Reviews” tab on the book’s webpage to read their reactions.

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