Do you want the jobs undocumented laborers are doing?
NPR did a story on a failed project to get U.S. students to do migrant labor. It failed. Miserably. Because they couldn’t do the job.
As the great-grandson and grandson of migrant workers who labored in Hawaii’s sugarcane fields, I know something about hard work and sacrifice. My family came to this country not to take anything from anyone, but to do the jobs that needed doing.
So when I hear politicians and pundits claim that undocumented workers are stealing jobs from Americans, I think about a story from 1965 that proves just how wrong that narrative really is.
Read: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/31/634442195/when-the-u-s-government-tried-to-replace-migrant-farmworkers-with-high-schoolers
That year, the U.S. government tried an experiment.
They had just ended the Bracero Program, which had brought Mexican workers to American farms since World War II. Farmers were panicking, saying their crops would rot without Mexican laborers.
So the Department of Labor came up with what seemed like a brilliant solution: recruit 20,000 American high school athletes to replace the migrant workers.
They called it A-TEAM or “Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower.”
The government bought radio ads and magazine spreads with slogans like “Farm Work Builds Men!”
They got baseball legends and football stars to endorse it. They specifically wanted jocks: strong, healthy American boys who could surely handle farm work better than those foreign workers, right?
The response seemed promising at first. About 18,000 teenagers signed up. Only about 3,300 of them actually showed up to work.
And of those who did show up, most quit within weeks.
Randy Carter was seventeen at the time and worked picking cantaloupes in the California desert. He remembers that first morning vividly.
Work started before dawn to avoid the worst heat.
“The wind is in your hair, and you don’t think it’s bad,” he said. “Then you go out in the field, and the first ray of sun comes over the horizon. Everyone looked at each other, and said, ‘What did we do?’ The thermometer went up like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. By 9 a.m., it was 110 degrees.”
The work was backbreaking. The teenagers had to bend over all day in blazing heat, picking cantaloupes whose rough skin tore through gloves in just four hours.
They lived in old Army barracks with no air conditioning, where nighttime temperatures stayed in the 90s.
They ate bologna sandwiches that literally cooked in the heat.
In the Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas, and Wyoming quit after just two weeks.
Students staged strikes.
The whole program collapsed and was never tried again.
This wasn’t because American teenagers are weak or lazy. It was because farm work is incredibly difficult, and the conditions and pay make it nearly impossible for anyone with other options to stick with it.
But here’s what really gets me.
While these American students were complaining and quitting after days or weeks, Mexican workers had been doing this same work for decades, supporting entire families on these wages.
As someone whose own family knows what it means to work in fields for survival, I understand what those Mexican workers understood. Sometimes you do whatever work is available because your family depends on it.
My great-grandfather and grandfather didn’t have the luxury of quitting when the work got hard. Neither do today’s migrant workers.
The A-TEAM experiment proves something important that gets lost in all the political shouting. Americans, by and large, don’t want these jobs.
We’re not talking about office work or factory jobs with good pay and benefits. We’re talking about grueling physical labor in extreme conditions for low wages.
When given the chance to take these jobs from migrant workers, American teenagers, even strong, athletic ones specifically recruited for the task, couldn’t or wouldn’t do it.
This reality hasn’t changed in the nearly sixty years since A-TEAM failed.
Today’s service economy offers Americans far better opportunities than picking crops or cleaning hotel rooms or washing dishes in restaurant kitchens.
The unemployment rate for American citizens is low not because migrant workers are taking their jobs, but because there are better jobs available to people who have the education, language skills, and legal status to access them.
The truth is that migrant workers, including undocumented ones, fill a crucial role in our economy.
They do the essential work that keeps our food system running and our service industries functioning.
Without them, we’d face the same crisis farmers warned about in 1965: crops rotting in fields, hotels that can’t maintain their rooms, restaurants that can’t stay clean.
Randy Carter, now in his seventies, learned something from his summer as an A-TEAM member that every American should understand.
“There’s nothing you can say to us that [migrant laborers] are rapists or they’re lazy,” he says. “We know the work they do. And they do it all their lives, not just one summer for a couple of months. And they raise their families on it.”
Coming from a family that did this work, I know Carter is absolutely right. My ancestors weren’t taking jobs from anyone. They were doing jobs that desperately needed doing, jobs that others wouldn’t or couldn’t do. The same is true today.
When we appreciate the real contribution of migrant workers instead of scapegoating them, we can have honest conversations about immigration policy.
Any discussion that starts with the false premise that these workers are stealing jobs from Americans who want them is built on a foundation of ignorance about what this work actually involves.
The A-TEAM experiment of 1965 wasn’t just a policy failure. It was a reality check that we still haven’t fully absorbed.
It showed us that some jobs require not just physical ability, but the kind of determination that comes from necessity, the kind my family knew and that migrant workers today still know.
Until we acknowledge that truth, we’ll keep missing the point about who really builds America and who really keeps our economy running.