Thread: Farmworker Migration Empties Farm Towns (Just Great)

www.washingtonpost.com

By MIKE SCHNEIDER
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 2, 2005; 3:42 AM

IMMOKALEE, Fla. -- Now that Florida's winter fruit and vegetable season has ended, Maximo Sales plans to search for work as a tomato picker in North Carolina.

He'll join as many as 100,000 other farmworkers, known as "follow-the-crop migrants," who trek each year from south Florida to Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland and New Jersey to pick fruits and vegetables.

Jose Martinez, 46, owner of "El Oasis" talks to a reporter May 15, 2005, in Immokalee, Fla. Activity in Immokalee and other Florida farming communities is slowing down to a crawl as thousands of migrant farmworkers head north to North Carolina, Georgia and Maryland to pick tomatoes, peppers and blueberries. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz) (Alan Diaz - AP)

"When the work is over, I head up there. When it's done, I'll head on back," said Sales, 22, of Guatemala, as he sat in the shade of a rundown trailer that he rents for $135 a week.

The annual migration is part of the nature of transient agricultural work, buts its effects are widely felt in the small farming communities the workers leave behind.

Towns such as Immokalee depend on the farmworkers to shop at their grocery stores and eat in their restaurants.

"It gets really quiet and slow around here," said Yolanda Vasquez, manager of La Fiesta grocery store, where farmworkers congregate each morning during the winter vegetable season to be taken to the fields.

During a typical winter day, several hundred customers pass through the doors of the grocery store, generating $30,000 in revenue. In the summer, revenue drops to as little as $6,000, said Vasquez, who cuts back the hours of her 20 staffers in the slow season.

Collier County doesn't keep figures on the economic impact of the farmworkers' absence in Immokalee, a town of 20,000 people, but Francisca Garcia estimates that business drops anywhere from half to 80 percent along the downtown street where she owns La Michoacana restaurant.

"It's difficult because people aren't here to spend money," said Garcia, who cuts her food purchases by half in the summer.

Tomato companies in Immokalee also have fields and packing houses in North Carolina or Pennsylvania and many of the workers will stay with the same employer when they travel north in work crews led by labor contractors.

But in a shift from past years, many workers, like Sales, will travel by themselves, said Rob Williams, director of the Migrant Farmworkers Justice Project for Florida Legal Services in Tallahassee.

"It's much more likely that workers find their own arrangements today," he said. "The contractor may not want to take the risk of transporting illegal aliens."

Sure....why hitch a ride. They have a driver's license from some state, don't they? Free Birds. Nomads. Earning some nice money seems to me. Unchecked, undocumented.

Americans used to do this work. I know some.

I think I just ate my last tomato I didn't grow myself.

Great!
Except they need to head SOUTH, not north.

But in a shift from past years, many workers, like Sales, will travel by themselves, said Rob Williams, director of the Migrant Farmworkers Justice Project for Florida Legal Services in Tallahassee.

"It's much more likely that workers find their own arrangements today," he said. "The contractor may not want to take the risk of transporting illegal aliens."

Ain't that touching? I'll bet Mr. Williams just drips with do-goodism and socialist sentiments. Do you think maybe if they thought about it for a while they could come up with a longer name than "The Migrant Farmworkers Justice Project for Florida Legal Serivces?" The MFJPFLS. Let's call them "The Muffies" for short.