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posted by martyb on Friday August 24 2018, @04:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.

NPR has an August 23rd, 2018 story about the original "A-TEAM" (Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower), a 1965 project to replace migrant workers with high school kids on summer break.

The year was 1965. On Cinco de Mayo, newspapers across the country reported that Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz wanted to recruit 20,000 high schoolers to replace the hundreds of thousands of Mexican agricultural workers who had labored in the United States under the so-called Bracero Program. Started in World War II, the program was an agreement between the American and Mexican governments that brought Mexican men to pick harvests across the U.S. It ended in 1964, after years of accusations by civil rights activists like Cesar Chavez that migrants suffered wage theft and terrible working and living conditions.

But farmers complained — in words that echo today's headlines — that Mexican laborers did the jobs that Americans didn't want to do, and that the end of [the program] meant that crops would rot in the fields.

[...] the national press was immediately skeptical. "Dealing with crops which grow close to the ground requires a good deal stronger motive" than money or the prospects of a good workout, argued a Detroit Free Press editorial. "Like, for instance, gnawing hunger."

[One group] got paid minimum wage — $1.40 an hour back then — plus 5 cents for every crate filled with about 30 to 36 [melons.] [Students] worked six days a week, with Sundays off, and they were not allowed to return home during their stint. The farmers sheltered them in... "defunct housing" [according to one student].

Problems arose immediately... In California's Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers... quit after just two weeks on the job... Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.

[Stony Brook University history professor Lori A. Flores] says the A-TEAM "reveals a very important reality: It's not about work ethic [for undocumented workers]. It's about [the fact] that this labor is not meant to be done under such bad conditions and bad wages."

The kids gave up their summer vacations, worked in 110 degree heat six days a week, slept with no air conditioning, and ate subsistence rations, for nearly no benefit; it's no wonder the program was not a rousing success.

In tangentially-related news, the U.S. Libertarian Party published a press release the day before entitled "Immigrants Benefit the United States" that makes the blanket assertion "Immigrants, almost across the board, are a net value to the United States."


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday August 24 2018, @04:07PM (2 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday August 24 2018, @04:07PM (#725872)

    Since 1990, the US has:
    - Forced Haiti to change its government, twice (in 1995, and 2004)
    - Fought in the now-sorta-finished civil war in Columbia
    - Backed Mexico's government against the Zapatista Rebellion against NAFTA in 1994
    - Backed and quite possibly were directly involved in the 2004 coup attempt against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela
    - Backed an attempted coup against Rafael Correa in Ecuador in 2010
    - Been part of organizing the ouster of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil before her term was up

    And that's just some of the stuff we know about. More recently, the US government has been deafeningly silent about hundreds of people being rounded up and disappeared in Nicaragua over the last few months.

    --
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @04:59PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @04:59PM (#725907)

    Let me clarify then and say, "The worst is over."

    ;-)

    I don't agree with some of your examples because those were where the US extended aid to a govt in putting down a guerrilla war.
    I don't think too many Colombians for example had a soft spot for the FARC in the past 20 yrs.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @05:38AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 25 2018, @05:38AM (#726151)

      Those same Colombians might not appreciate the US adding fuel - or carcinogenic herbicides - to the mix.