Illegal Immigration

Fields of Tears: The Undocumented Immigrant’s Search for the Stolen Jobs No One Wants

Every crop exacts a certain degree of torture. In the grape fields of the San Joaquin

Valley, small groups of undocumented migrant workers spend their days weaving in and under

vines and crawling alongside metal tractors to avoid the inevitable whack of their metal flanges.

A leather-faced laborer pulls up his tattered trouser leg to reveal his scarred shins as proof.

Standing up to alleviate their hunched backs exposes them to pesticide-covered vines, and boosts

the correlation of birth defects and cancer in the families of migrant farmworkers. Squatting,

kneeling, and contorting their bodies perpetuates physical agony (“Fields of Tears” 2010). In

order to feed our country, an estimated 2 million farm workers handpick the vast majority of our

fruit and vegetable crops. Of these 2 million workers, approximately 78% of them are

undocumented immigrants who work tirelessly, and oftentimes in deplorable conditions, to meet

the unrelenting demands of our multi-billion dollar agricultural industry (“Findings from the

National Agricultural” 2005). These migrant workers fill a critical labor gap in our economy, and

provide an endless supply of food on our shelves and in our refrigerators at affordable prices.

Given the working conditions migrant workers must endure and the labor benefits they provide

to the United States, it is inexcusable that our broken immigration system marginalizes the very

people who keep our nation’s food in steady supply.

At a time of high unemployment, many Americans believe that undocumented

immigrants rob our country of job opportunities, when, in fact, they often occupy menial work

that Americans deem unworthy. Agricultural work is one of the most dangerous and

inadequately compensated jobs in the United States. For their strenuous physical labor, farm

workers squeak by on an annual average income of $10,000 to $12,499 individually and...