Immigrants in the Food Industry Part 2
I did research for a book on the work on the anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston who did extensive field work among agricultural workers in the 1930s and 1940s. Growing and picking fruit was and continues to be an important industry for many U. S states where thousands of family farms sales are in the billions of dollars. Workers who hand pick crops have always determined the long term viability of the agricultural industry. Historically farmers of recruited workers including indentured servants from Europe, enslaved Indigenous people from the Americas, enslaved Africans in early American history, and in the late 19th and early 20th century European immigrants. This is because farmers have not been able to get locals to take the jobs or stay on the job even during periods of high unemployment . As a result they have turned to others many of them today from Latin America immigrants many of them undocumented workers to pick their crops.