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Migrants filling a void
By Nick Gevock - The Montana Standard - 09/17/06
DILLON — With the crisp air of a September morning, Aurelio Leal’s thoughts turn to his home in Mexico as he moves irrigation pipe on a ranch north of here.

In a few weeks Leal, a migrant worker who comes every year for a summer job on the Sitz Ranch, will head home for the winter. He said he misses his family all summer, but by September it gets especially tough after being away from his wife and three children since April.

“It’s kind of hard,” the reserved 51-year-old said, speaking through a translator.

But for Leal, like other Mexicans who come to work on farms and ranches around southwest Montana, the motivation to spend half the year away from family is strong. They say the pay is too good to pass up and working in the United States offers a chance to get ahead in Mexico.

“I’m able to send home $1,000 a month,” Leal said on a recent afternoon.

Leal is one of several hundred migrant Mexican workers who arrive every spring in southwest Montana for the summer to work in agriculture. They come through a U.S. Department of Labor program designed to provide farms and ranches with help. Most of the Dillon workers’ homes are in rural states in Mexico, like Nayarit on the west coast.

Farmers and ranchers are responsible for finding workers, and then have the necessary paperwork handled by the Snake River Farmers, Inc., an agricultural association based in Rupert, Idaho. This year Snake River Farmers has helped with the Labor Department’s “H2A” paperwork for 215 Mexicans who came to Montana, said Beth Parkinson of the group.

“The majority of them are in the Dillon area,” she said.

And the benefit of having Mexican workers goes both ways. Ranchers in southwest Montana say they couldn’t get by without the help of Mexican workers.

In fact, many who have hired Mexicans are their biggest advocates, saying they appreciate the jobs, are dependable and will do the hard labor that most Americans simply won’t.

Occasionally a Mexican hired by a rancher doesn’t work out, but the majority come here to work and do an excellent job, rancher Jim Sitz, who has hired several Mexicans on his family ranch, said recently.

“In the United States today, you can’t find many people who want to do agriculture work. When I was a kid, most high-schoolers worked on ranches. You go into a high school today and almost none of them do.

“The Mexicans are a necessity in the United States.”