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.

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.

Thousands of migrant laborers in buses, trucks and trains fled northeastern India in the second day of an exodus triggered by separatists who have killed scores of workers. Militants have killed 72 people, most of them Hindi-speaking migrants, in Assam state since Friday, sparking widespread fear in a community that comes to Assam for eight months a year to work at brick kilns.

As many as half the citizens of the home state of Mexican President Felipe Calderon are believed to be working in the United States. So it was no great surprise when Calderon revealed recently that among Michoacan's migrants were some of his own kin. What's odd is that apparently no one here in Calderon's hometown, not even his family, seems to know who they are.

Food Depot is slower this summer. A hot, frazzled mother lingers in front of a tower of banana moon pies; a man in overalls pecks change for a 77-cent bag of ice. Cashiers gossip, then sigh. They miss the Latinos who loaded their checkout belts with flour tortillas, thick golden cornhusks and tamarind sodas as sweet as iced tea. Nearly 80% of Georgia's peach crop was destroyed when a severe frost spread across the Southeast in early April.

Nearly three decades of legal struggle came to a head in a Los Angeles courtroom Thursday, as a trial began in a case pitting impoverished Latino field hands against two of America's largest corporations. Dole Food Co. knowingly exposed Nicaraguan banana workers three decades ago to a pesticide made by Dow Chemical Co. that caused permanent sterility, an attorney for the men said in opening arguments in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

A worker from Honduras testified in a Los Angeles courtroom Tuesday that he and his wife tried for a decade to have children but failed to conceive after he went to work on a banana plantation where the pesticide DBCP was used. "As a man I'm worthless," Benancio Lizandro Espinoza said with the aid of a translator when asked how he felt when he found out he was sterile. Espinoza is one of a dozen banana farm workers who are suing Dole Fresh Fruit Co. and Standard Fruit Co.

Three people have been arrested in a string of robberies targeting migrant workers who congregate on local streets hoping to find work, the San Diego County Sheriff's Department said Tuesday. The three allegedly posed as employers seeking day labor and then robbed migrants.

In the 1970s, United Farm Workers founder Cesar E. Chavez fought in dusty fields and the halls of government to give agricultural laborers the right to cast secret ballots to form unions at California's farms, ranches and vineyards. Now, those who came after Chavez want to change the rules, and that has farmers and business groups up in arms.

With a nationwide farmworker shortage threatening to leave unharvested fruits and vegetables rotting in fields, the Bush administration has begun quietly rewriting federal regulations to eliminate barriers that restrict how foreign laborers can legally be brought into the country.