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We close our special week of As We Are rebroadcasts with a conversation about life as a migrant worker - past and present.
You'll meet Moises, a young man here with no documentation, who collects moss and mushrooms for a living. He passed the GED in Spanish after help from a community college program. You'll also meet Conception Hernandez, a mother of five. She came to the US after her husband, who had worked for years illegally, got amnesty and decided to stay.
Our other guests grew up working the fields but have now left them behind. Mario Magana was caught several times trying to walk across the US-Mexico border in the 1980s. He now teaches in Oregon State University's extension service. For part of her childhood, Carmen Pachuca lived truly a migrant life. Her family would stay in one place as long as a crop was ripe for the picking, then move on. For a while, they lived in a migrant camp near Woodburn, a place Carmen remembers as lively and warm, despite crude living conditions. She left agricultural work and became a healthcare aide -- but both she and Mario still clearly remember the fields.
Have you picked crops? Are there migrant workers in your community? You can read comments from the initial broadcast here and add your own, or post below.
We'll be back live on Monday!
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I was in the Portland food service business for 15 years. Immigrant workers were the backbone of every house I worked in. Those who were managers, cooks, and dishwashers all worked more than one job. There were never any no-shows for a shift staffed by a migrant worker. While the locals are able to focus on lifestyle the migrant worker must focus on living. To know what hard work is spend a day doing the labor of migrant worker.
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For 4 years, I worked as an ESL teacher in Hood River, OR where there was about a 40% migrant farmworker population. Presently, I'm a Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador where 1/4 of the population has migrated to the United States. I'm so glad this topic is being discussed...this morning, as I was on a 45 minute hike to the nearest pueblo in order to catch a bus back to my site, I was chatting about this exact topic with another Peace Corps volunteer friend! We discussed the "disconnect" that many Americans have with this topic because they do not know any migrant workers and their difficult journey to arrive in the United States. "They" are just like "us"...they want their children to receive an excellent education, to live in a safe place, to be able to put food on the table, to WORK and support their families. Though many people do not want "illegal" workers, everyone wants their inexpensive produce or meat butchered, homes built and clothing sewn.
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I work for Oregon Corrections and have a choice to "hire" inmate workers to perform various landscape maintenance jobs in our prison. I have had various races in my crew, trying not to choose one over the other. I have found, as a rule, Hispanics have the best work ethic. Never complaining about the weather or how hard the work was. My disapointment is most of these are incarcerated because of drug crimes (mfg. & delivery), sex crimes, (having sex with under age females) or crimes of person- robbery etc.
As a rule, one on one these are hardworking people, making no problems, doing thier time, knowing that they have a "hot and a cot" until they are deported.
Why can't they come here, even illegaly, do the straight and narrow,and have a productive crime free life? -
While I understand some of your listeners concerns about privacy they should NOT get in the way of implementing new ideas with new technologies. I have worked in the very highest levels of the federal government and trust me we have NO interest in your personal business nor do we have the capability to shift through the mountains of data that would result. Your concerns will not be with government but with private entities such as insurance companies.
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