Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 19, 1980
voL,.cxxx .... NO. 44,741 c!~~~khtO 1080The New Y o r k h
Thousands of Aliens Held
In Virtual Slavery in U.S. -
By JOHN M. CREWDSON
Spd.lto'IhcNtrYorkT~
--
IMMOKALEE, Fla. -Uncounted thousands
of Spanish-spealung aliens who flee
da this country each
-
year to escape the
erushing poverty of their homelands are
being virtually enslaved, bought and sold
en sopbti-ted ~11d-d labor ek
They the
country in consignments by selfde
an c l guarded by day, beaten or threatened
with harm or even death if they try
to escape, their children held hostage to
insure their continued servitude. Some
ma ffnd themselves locked up by night
times the workers held in bondage are little
more than . children . . themselvps. .
Of the 25,000 or so agricultural workers
scribed labor contractors who deliver who come to Florida at the peak of the
them to farmers and growers for bun- winter harvest season, Mr. Williams estidreds
of dollars a head.
mates, perhaps 2,000 are "trapped in
how many find themselv=
bound to
ca‘m~;~&~;g,
4 aesp
who take advantage cially when they find the working condiof
their illegal status, their na'ivete and
their cultural alienation is not known.
t i ons not to their libg, and that brings in
the nastier elements of violence."
But dozens of Immigration and Natu- When the harvest ends, the worker, if
ralization Service officials, migrant aid he is lucky, is set free, often with only a
lawyers, prosecutors, social workers, few dollars to show for weeks of labor. If
union organizers and others who he is not so lucky he is sold by the farmer
-k closely with migrant laborers said to mother farmer for several hundred
&hterwews that they believed the prac- dollars, and the process hems again.
. . . .
tice. while not common, was probably a Peonage Moves With Migrants
gmwing one involving thousands of mig
rants Peonage, though it exists on farms and
from the
of ranches of the Southwest, is relatively unto
the
Virginia* common there because of the proximity
the of Texas to to the Mexican border. California, Ari
the orange groves of Florida.
zona and Texas are flooded with lllega
alien workers, and "there just isn't that
Rising Tide of Immigration much excess demand for labor here,"
"You're not talking about something said Lupe Sanchez of the Arizona Farrnisolated,"
said William Burk, an assist- workers Union.
a Border Pam1 chief in ~~1 Ria, Tex. Rather, it is in the c i t and ~ winter
~umbmo MO-0, a senior official of the vegetable belts of Florida and the mato
immignflm agrrtd. a
fields of Idaho and on the tobacco farms
of Virginia and North Carolina that farmsignificant
mount of that going he are at a premium, so much go
said. that the coyotes who smuggle them north
. * . * . * or east can easily command fees of a
worker.
Existence is hard enou for the inegal
aliens who toil ir~ the fie1 e
. a -
from sunup t~ Federal officials say one ot the largest
sundown, picking lemons in Arizona, let- smuggling opefations is run by two Flortuce
in California or melons in south ids men who operate a tomato farm.
Texas for a few dollan a day, cooking They are under investigation by the +imover
W fires, sleep@ in the fields at migration service and the Justice Deni%t
and watching, always, for the went, and a Federal grand jury-is
r-afomd agents of La Mima, the
nit& States Border Patrol.
But for those who unwittingly stumble
into the underworld of the slave traders,
life can be infinitely worse. Shackled with
inflated debts they can never repay, they
f
hearin evidence in the CW.
Unti recently, tne vast majority of
f-worken in the south and Southeast
were black. ~ uthe t makeup of the farm
labor force is changing rapidly all along
the Eastern Seaboard.
143
33
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