For half a century reports have been written about migratory labor but not very much has been done about it. The problems of migratory workers are many and serious. No single solution to these problems is possible, but a great deal can be done, and must be done, for these displaced persons. Most of them are American citizens; some are Mexican nationals working here on contract; others are illegal aliens, generally known as “wetbacks.”
In American industry the working people to some extent are organized; they have a voice and a vote in their government and in their jobs. They have raised their own standards of living and that of millions of fellow workers who are unorganized. They are a stable, substantial segment of American life. But in agriculture the non-migratory laborers who work in the county of their residence are for the most part unorganized. The vast majority of those who are migrants, wandering from county to county and from state to state during the harvest season, must take what they get in the matter of wages, hours of labor and conditions of work. The wetbacks, of course, are utterly defenseless in the labor market. This lack of organization among workers in agriculture is a great misfortune for them, a temptation to injustice on the part of many employers and a weak spot in the American economy.
So far as the workers are concerned, whether farm hands or migrants, it is doubtless true to say that many of them are treated with some measure of justice by farmers, ranchers and growers. But the income of agricultural labor is decidedly below that of industrial labor with due regard to differences in the cost of living. The lot of the migrant is worse than that of the farm hand with steady employment in one place. In the case of the migrant there is great uncertainty about wages, housing, hours of work, weather, health, transportation and even employment itself. In a bad year many a migratory family comes home dead broke. Even when weather and crops are favorable there may be labor surpluses in many areas and consequent unemployment for some.
Conditions in this segment of agriculture are chaotic. Workers are attracted to certain areas by radio announcements, newspaper ads, grapevine information: rumors and advice from the employment services. If an American industry got its employees in that fashion the whole country would be in chaos. It is true that labor recruiters and crew captains deliver workers to employers, but they cannot control either the weather or the crops. It is also true that this whole thing is seasonal and temporary, but there need not be so much hopeless disorder. The federal government, state governments, employers associations and labor union ought to cooperate to put order into this situation.
Congress has shamefully disregarded the needs and the rights of American citizens in the migratory label force. These workingmen and women and children are making a tremendous contribution to our economy at great personal sacrifice. One shudders to think of their sacrifices—absence from home as much as six months of the year; precarious employment, low annual wages; little or no education for the children; housing that may be fair, poor, unspeakable or just the shade of a tree; constant moving from one place to another; long hours of stoop labor even for women and children; abominable health conditions, meager food and often no sanitation; lack of priests who speak their language and lack of churches easily available.
Why should any sane man take his wife and children on such an adventure? The old Romans had a saying which went: Primum est vivere—the first thing to do is to live; if you can’t survive you are finished. The migratory laborer has to work to live. He is unskilled in the ways of industry and turns to agriculture. All the jobs in his area may be taken by Mexican nationals working on contract or by wetbacks. The American citizen has no alternative but to seek employment elsewhere. The Mexican national may be paid fifty cents an hour, with a shack to live in; the wetback will work for twenty to thirty cents an hour and live in the brush. An American family, regardless of low living standards, cannot survive on fifty cents an hour.
More than two hundred thousand Mexican nationals are brought into our country every year to work in agriculture because the farmers and growers claim that they cannot get domestic workers to harvest the crops. The work is seasonal, and the laborers must be available promptly to bring in the harvest. The Employment Service may not certify a shortage of labor unless sufficient domestic workers who are able, willing and qualified are not available at the time and place needed to perform the work. That word “willing” is the key to the situation. If a substantial number of American agricultural laborers in a given area are not willing to work for starvation wages, they create a labor shortage in that area and alien workers may then be brought in.
The Mexican national, here on contract, is supposed to be paid fifty cents an hour or the “prevailing wage,” whichever is greater. During hearings held by the President’s Commission on Migratory Labor the question was sometimes asked: “How do you discover the prevailing wage?” The method described was interesting. Some growers in a given area would get together and decide what wage they would pay. That was then the prevailing wage. Some growers claim that fifty cents an hour is too high and they don’t like laws which interfere with human liberty. There was a time when the Supreme Court of the United States held that a minimum wage law was unconstitutional because it violated liberty of contract. Some growers still believe that to pay starvation wages is a natural right.
The international contract agreed upon by our government and that of Mexico not only stipulated a minimum wage but had certain requirements regarding housing, health, unemployment and death. No such safeguards are granted to American migratory workers. The Congress of the United States, aided and abetted by certain powerful growers’ associations, has seen to it that native-born American citizens in the migratory labor force have not even a minimum of protection by social legislation. It is passing strange that a little group of wilful men can so sway the Congress of the United States.
If American citizens receive such harsh treatment, pity the poor wetback. American migrants can be exploited, defrauded and subjected to every manner of injustice but they cannot be deported; the illegal alien must keep a sharp lookout for the Immigration Service in the Department of Justice.
The growers who like foreign slave labor, even when their own fellow citizens are unemployed, can concoct a rather persuasive argument for their iniquity. After all, these illegal aliens are human beings and children of God. They are creatures of marvelous dignity and sublime destiny. They are good workers, honest, faithful and docile. Many of them are married men who seek only to support themselves and their families. Work is scarce in Mexico and wages in agriculture are pitifully low. By working twelve to fourteen hours a day in Texas at twenty cents an hour their income is much better than it would be in their homeland. They save their money and send most of it back to Mexico to support their families in decent and frugal comfort as becomes these honest working people. And, anyhow, Americans won’t do stoop labor; they aspire to something higher.
Thus the grower becomes, in a small way, a benefactor of humanity—generous, upright and benevolent. After all, this is a free country and a man may hire whom he chooses. The fact that the employee is here illegally is a mere coincidence; he is still a man with all the rights and needs inherent in his nature. He must work to live. The grower wants to help him.
Plenty of people in our country do not see the sophistry of these excuses which are offered to hide crimes of greed and injustice. Surely it is not necessary to declare that we subscribe unreservedly to the proposition that all men are created in the image of God. The illegal alien has our sympathy, our prayers and our hopes for a better future, but citizens who serve their country in peace and war, who pay taxes and build our schools and churches, have a prior right to employment when it is available.
Recently the writer spoke to a rural pastor about the small debt on his parish and asked if some of it could not be paid off every year. The pastor explained that his men were out of work because of a wetback invasion. Asked if he could not get a public official, perhaps the mayor, to remove these illegal workers, the pastor replied: “The mayor? He has fifty wetbacks on his ranch.”
Business men also suffer from these conditions. Citizens who live in rural areas cannot patronize stores and business houses when they have no income. The wetback does not dare to shop in the town; his simple needs can be supplied at the commissary on the ranch and if he is charged exorbitant prices that is too bad for him. And if the employer refuses to give him his wages at the end of his service that is also too bad but he has no recourse because he is a fugitive.
Humanly speaking, the hiring of wetbacks is smart business. If a cotton grower in California or Arizona pays five dollars per hundredweight to cotton pickers and a grower in the Rio Grande Valley pays a dollar and a half for the same work he has an obvious economic advantage. Perhaps this grower doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, that in one year as many as sixty-five thousand workers have left South Texas to labor in seasonal agriculture in other states because they couldn’t find jobs with decent wages at home. Counting women and children, this army numbered at least one hundred and fifty thousand persons. Not a few parishes in our jurisdiction are pretty well emptied out by these departures, many of which extend from April to November.
Our concern is largely with the Spanish-speaking migrants of the Southwest, but we are aware that tens of thousands of white and colored migrants from the deep South make their way North every year to harvest crops in the Eastern and Northeastern States. They too suffer the hardships and the heartaches of migratory labor in American agriculture.
Last year the Mexican Hierarchy requested the Archbishop of Guadalajara to contact the writer to learn if a program might be worked out to give more general spiritual care to Mexican migrants in the United States. It was suggested that priests from Mexico might labor among these people in the dioceses where they are employed in large numbers. American Bishops have made great sacrifices to supply Spanish-speaking priests for these migratory workers during the harvest season but many difficulties stood in the way.
The proposal that Mexican priests come to this country to work among Catholic migrants was referred to the American Hierarchy at their annual meeting and approved. Fortunately machinery was available in Texas to effectuate the plan. Eight years ago the Bishops’ Committee for the Spanish Speaking was set up, of which all the Bishops of the Southwest are members. They maintain a Regional Office for the Spanish-speak-ing supported by an annual grant from the American Board of Catholic Missions. During the past two years the office has been in Austin, Texas, and has now moved for a period of two years to Houston.
The staff of the Regional Office was delegated to head up the “Operation Migratory Labor” on this side of the border and a priest in the social action office in Mexico City was appointed our liaison officer by the Mexican Hierarchy. The American Bishops who needed Mexican missionaries were contacted to learn how many priests they would need and the period of time when their services would be required. Then the search for priests in Mexico began and continued for several months. Despite the scarcity of clergymen there, the Bishops and Religious Superiors allocated twenty-four priests to this adventure in international cooperation for the welfare of souls. They came from six dioceses in Mexico and four religious provinces.
The Regional Office received excellent cooperation from the State Department in Washington, the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Department of Justice, Mexican Consulates in the United States, the Department of Immigration, N.C.W.C., and the United States Ambassador to Mexico. The details of this operation were almost countless but the staff of the Regional Office carried on valiantly.
Arrived at their destination in a diocese of one of the Northern states, the missionaries found themselves strangers in a strange land. Their own people were out in the fields, however, and to the fields they went to minister to them. Mass was said wherever possible, confessions were heard and Holy Communion distributed. Marriages and baptisms were arranged through local pastors. The Word of God was preached to the people in their own language. The American Bishops who welcomed these missionaries to their dioceses for temporary service during the harvest season deserve special mention for their zeal and generosity. They paid transportation costs by air from Mexico City and return, board and lodging, travel expenses through the rural areas and a generous honorarium to the priests. They were happy to do this for their guests, both clergy and laity. The problems are immense. In one diocese twelve thousand Spanish-speaking migrants move in for about three months. Their spiritual and religious welfare is not easy to achieve.
The Church is doing all that she can for her migratory children but the civil authority has been negligent. Among several major recommendations of the President’s Commission on Migratory Labor this one is central: that the Congress should pass legislation establishing a Federal Committee for Migratory Labor to study the problems involved, work with state legislatures, farmers’ associations, labor unions and private organizations and make recommendations to Congress for necessary legislation to bring order imo this chaotic segment of American agriculture. The present situation, characterized by the greed of some employers, power politics, exploitation of defenseless workers, child labor, utter neglect and senseless disorder, is an international scandal.
These migratory workers are making a tremendous contribution to the nation by harvesting much of the food and fiber that we need in peace and war. States, counties and local communities should be grateful to them for their services and pay more attention to their temporal needs. Many of them are American citizens, all of them are human beings; they are a gentle, generous and lovable people.
One of our Sister-Catechists was recently talking to a family that had just returned to San Antonio from the North. For several Sundays they found themselves seventeen miles from the nearest church. Father and mother loaded the children into an old jalopy and drove over bad roads to Mass. In the evening they made the journey again to say the rosary in church with their Spanish-speaking friends. I wonder how many English-speaking folks who look down on these poor and humble people would drive a dilapidated car thirty-four miles on Sunday morning over rough roads to assist at Mass and drive another thirty-four miles in the evening to say the family rosary in a wayside chapel.
To defraud and exploit such people is indeed reprehensible.
