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When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers
NPR [npr.org] has an Aug 23rd, 2018 story about the original "A-TEAM", a 1965 project to replace migrant workers with high school kids on summer break.
...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 [an] agreement between the American and Mexican governments that brought Mexican men to pick harvests across the U.S. [which] ended in 1964, after years of accusations [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.
[Historian Lori 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 [lp.org]" that makes the blanket assertion "Immigrants, almost across the board, are a net value to the United States."
