Bitter Harvest: LIFE With America’s Migrant Workers, 1959
America has transformed its economic landscape (and has seen
that landscape transformed by outside forces) so thoroughly in
the past half-century that, to a large degree, today’s workplace
is a different universe than that of, say, the 1950s. The
explosion in service jobs, the collapse of so much of the
country’s industrial sector, outsourcing, the digital
revolution, “permalancing,” telecommuting — these and countless
other developments can make the relative stability of the United
States’ post-war economic hegemony seem like something of a
Golden Age. Some sectors of the economy, however, have hardly
changed in the past five or six decades — or the past few
centuries, for that matter — and perhaps the best example of
employment that looks much the same today as it did 50 years ago
is the harvesting of crops with migrant labor. The fraught
debate about illegal immigration and jobs being “stolen” from
working Americans by undocumented aliens is enormou