Migrant Labor

The "Made in Italy" label conjures images of little old men and women in aprons and spectacles, stooped over wooden tables, cutting leather and sewing by hand in workshops that dot the hills of Tuscany. It certainly doesn't make you picture Chinese immigrants toiling long hours in ramshackle, poorly illuminated sheds, and then sleeping in small rooms behind thin plywood right there in the factories.

Hoboes Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps and the Harvesting of the West Mark Wyman Hill and Wang: 336 pp., $28 Given the legislation recently passed in Arizona, designed to send all those pesky undocumented workers back south of the border, it's ironic to read in Mark Wyman's valuable history of migrant labor "Hoboes" that, as early as 1912, Arizona cotton growers were actively recruiting Mexican workers. When anti-immigrant sentiment flared during the economic slump following World War I, Southwestern landowners argued that it would mean "ruin and bankruptcy" if Congress denied them the right to import foreign labor.

In response to "Migrant Labor: City Issue Now" (Column One, Nov. 17): When are the residents of North San Diego County going to wake up and realize that they are the ones who should take care of their migrant worker problem? After all, they are the ones who are addicted to cheap Mexican labor and it was their city councils that favored construction of high-income housing while ignoring the housing needs of the poor. Instead of passing the buck to the federal government, they should roll up their sleeves and take care of the problems they helped create.

The rice has been harvested, the chaff burned. It's time for planting winter wheat, seed sunk deep into new furrow, as white birds with razor beaks land on fields to feast. Ali Mohammed has endured another season without his son. It is the rhythm of the Nile Delta: Crops change, children are forced away. There are few jobs here and they don't pay much. Young men, like fathers and grandfathers before them, leave this fertile land. Mohammed's son Ali took a 40-hour bus ride across the desert to paint buildings in Libya.

A wealth of job opportunities is luring tens of thousands of South and Southeast Asians to Japan, forcing this once isolated nation to cope with the problem of migrant labor. More than half the foreigners working at companies investigated by the Labor Ministry between Oct. 16 and Nov. 16 were found to be working illegally, a recent report showed.

For 68 Buena Park fourth-graders, the expression "field trip" took on new meaning Wednesday. The students at Raymond Temple Elementary School, who have been studying Cesar Chavez and the history of migrant farm labor in California, got a taste of what it's like to be a farm worker, if only for an hour, as they gleaned string beans from an Irvine field.

Come sunup, migrants work the vast fields of citrus, flowers and vegetables in the fertile Florida heartland. Come sundown, they are not welcome in this small town. Within four days and without dissent, the town council passed an emergency ordinance that bans group housing for migrant labor inside the town's one-square-mile limits. The intent of the ordinance is to control density and preserve "family-type living" in the town of 1,000--not to banish itinerant workers, said Mayor Dixie Scott.

There may be no city in California where Proposition 187 is met with more trepidation than this rural town carved out of the fruit orchards and vineyards of the San Joaquin Valley. Scratch the surface and nearly everyone at one time, including the mayor, in this Latino community of 10,000 people is the product of an illegal trek across the border.

Nearby homeowners complained about a thriving immigrant squatter encampment on a Carlsbad hillside, so San Diego County officials took action. Inspectors declared the site a health hazard, forcing shanties to be bulldozed and migrant families evicted. Lawmakers in Costa Mesa, seeking to reduce the proliferation of immigrant day laborers on city streets, tried to cut financial support to charities that provided food, clothing and other aid to undocumented workers.

Like so many dreams that come and go here, this one began with the harvest under a brutal sky. It was a late afternoon in August, 103 degrees outside, and the boys from the McFarland High cross-country team had been at it since 5 in the morning. They had spent the day in long sleeves and bandannas working without words alongside their parents deep in the fields. They were spread across farms for miles around, but the toil did not vary. They stooped and crawled.

A Moscow court convicted seven teenage skinheads of killing 20 migrant workers, Interfax news agency reported. The court also said the gang had tried to kill 12 other migrants between August 2006 and October 2007. From January through October of this year, racist attacks killed 113 migrants and wounded 340, the nongovernmental Moscow Human Rights Bureau said.

Federal authorities said Thursday they had dismantled a smuggling ring that brought hundreds of undocumented immigrants each month into Southern California, using private homes as "drop houses" and a 99-cent store as a staging ground. Authorities estimate the ringleaders may have grossed $6 million to $18 million annually transporting about 5,000 undocumented immigrants after they illegally crossed the border into Arizona.

The "Made in Italy" label conjures images of little old men and women in aprons and spectacles, stooped over wooden tables, cutting leather and sewing by hand in workshops that dot the hills of Tuscany. It certainly doesn't make you picture Chinese immigrants toiling long hours in ramshackle, poorly illuminated sheds, and then sleeping in small rooms behind thin plywood right there in the factories.

Huang Qingnan had just reached a tiny fast-food stand in a run-down neighborhood here when all of a sudden, two men dressed in dark clothing appeared out of nowhere. They unsheathed watermelon-cutting knives concealed in newspapers and began slashing Huang's legs and back with the 16-inch blades. The 34-year-old labor activist shrieked in pain. Witnesses said he turned and lunged toward one attacker, then collapsed. "Catch them, catch them!"

Marine police retrieved the bodies of 22 migrant workers from Myanmar found floating off the west coast of Thailand, police said today. Acting on information from fishermen, a police search party found the corpses in the Andaman Sea near Ranong province Saturday. "We do not know why or when the boat or boats sank, but we believe that they must have been overloaded and sank in that area about two days ago," police Lt. Col. Yongyuth Preechachart said in Ranong.

A Los Angeles jury ordered Dole Food Co. on Thursday to pay five Nicaraguan banana plantation workers $2.5 million as punishment for concealing the dangers of a pesticide that rendered them unable to have children. The verdict, which awarded far less in punitive damages than some observers expected, was hailed as a victory by attorneys on both sides. It follows a Nov. 5 jury award of $3.2 million in compensatory damages. The five-month trial marked the first time a U.S.

With the observance of Cesar Chavez Day on March 31, this is a good time to remember the contributions of migrant farm workers in making California one of the nation's agricultural leaders and for bringing to market the fruits and vegetables we eat. Despite technological advances, today's farm workers continue to struggle under difficult circumstances not unlike those depicted in the Great Depression novel "The Grapes of Wrath."

The operators of 191 migrant labor camps in California have been cited for providing contaminated drinking water to farm workers or violating federal law by not properly testing water quality, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Monday. More than 8,500 migrant workers who live in the camps could be subject to a wide range of diseases from tainted water, including typhoid, cholera, infectious hepatitis and dysentery, the agency said.

Dole Foods of Westlake Village should be liable for civil punishment for concealing health dangers posed to workers by a pesticide used on its Nicaraguan banana plantations 30 years ago, jurors in a Los Angeles courtroom decided Wednesday. The decision clears the way for punitive damages in addition to the $3.2 million that jurors awarded the workers earlier this week to compensate them for their injuries.

A Los Angeles jury on Monday awarded $3.2 million to six Nicaraguan farmworkers who had sued Dole Food Co. Inc., arguing they had been rendered sterile some three decades ago by the international corporate giant's application of a banned pesticide on the plantations where they worked. Jurors return today to consider whether Dole, and codefendant Dow Chemical Co., should be punished with more monetary damages.