Migrant Workers

Gov. Jeb Bush signed legislation Friday that strengthened protections for as many as 300,000 migrant farm workers harvesting crops in Florida. The law provides the workers, many of them Mexicans, with better protections against pesticides and increases the penalties against contractors who violate farm labor laws. It also revives a dormant commission to monitor farmworkers law.

Juliana Martinez Dionicio has no language. She is deaf and mute. Her family speaks only Trique, an obscure Indian language that is foreign even to other Mexicans. She communicates with her family in gestures no one else understands. Illiterate and silent, Juliana lives in isolation made even more profound by her circumstances -- traveling with her sister and father in an anonymous stream of undocumented immigrant farmworkers who tend fields across the West.

Angry and desperate, they spilled out of the International Shoe and Hat City construction site hoping to be heard. They shook their fists. They seethed over the beatings they say they have suffered at the hands of the developer's guards. Mostly, the 250 or so migrant workers banded together in shared misery, brought from China's far-flung provinces by economic necessity.

Even on good days, life is a trying affair for the migrant workers who crowd a settlement of dingy, sun-cooked mobile homes next to the plant where they cut up chickens. These are not good days. First, the fatal shooting in June of one of the trailer-park residents -- a Mexican man who worked at the poultry-processing plant -- jangled nerves around the migrant community. Then about 150 of the workers were fired by Peco Foods Inc.

Thick wads of cash bulge from the work-coarsened hands of men recently arrived in this small outpost near Maine's North Woods. The money represents much of these migrant brush cutters' insubstantial wealth, and now they ponder how much to spend and how much to send home to relatives in Mexico and Honduras. Some stock up on staples like tortillas, chorizo and cheese. Others pore over CDs and cassettes of Latin music.

A program aimed at bringing 30 Mexican doctors to care for migrant farm workers in the state's most underserved rural pockets has stalled because proponents have not found a medical school in California willing to oversee it. The Licensed Physicians and Dentists from Mexico Pilot Program was hammered out last year in legislation carried by Assemblyman Marco Firebaugh (D-Los Angeles). By allowing Mexican professionals who are not licensed in the U.S.

Concerns over the security of matricula consular documents merely reinforce the fact that our nation is less secure when we have migrant workers in this country with no status and no acceptable form of identification ("ID Cards Called Risky," June 27). The initiative of presidents Vicente Fox and George W. Bush to create some program of worker legalization should not have been suspended post-9/11 but, indeed, accelerated. Migrant workers suffer increased exploitation and dig themselves more deeply underground, while nonetheless being counted on to provide essential labor in critical economic sectors.

China abolished a 20-year-old vagrancy law that human rights groups said had let police imprison people at will, leading to hundreds of detainees' deaths. Elimination of the law was the latest small but significant political change by Premier Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao since they took power in March. The decision followed the highly publicized death in custody of a graphic designer detained in March.

At a time when farmers throughout China's vast countryside traditionally reap the year's first harvest of wheat and begin planting corn, many migrants to urban areas are returning home out of fear, and some are bearing the seeds of a potentially devastating rural epidemic of SARS. Beijing and other cities that are now the hotbeds of severe acute respiratory syndrome have tried to prevent migrants from fleeing by promising free health care for SARS patients who can't afford it.

In front-page reports in Wednesday's newspapers, officials insisted that there was no truth to the rumor that the capital would be sealed to prevent the spread of the SARS virus. Those reassurances failed to prevent a wave of panic buying of food and basic goods, nor did they ease the worries of out-of-town students and migrant laborers who scrambled to get out of the city.