hypertext #2

My second hypertext essay is going to be a report of the lives which are lead by the immigrant farm workers here in the United States. Whether they are legal citizens or not, they are all living a very low wage life, and are probably working harder than almost anyone in the country, but getting paid the least for it. Now, people can argue that they deserve to be paid the least for multiple reasons. However, it doesn’t change the fact that they go through serious hardships everyday. What would you think if somebody told you that you had to go out and pick weeds everyday for the next fifty years of your life? Not only that, but you were going to be paid either minimum or under minimum wage for this work. No United States citizen would accept this, but yet they still scoff at the immigrant worker in the fields. They laugh, but in the back of their minds, they know that they could never do what they are witnessing out in the fields. Most of the field workers we see in California are illegal immigrants. A report from the LA Times states, “More than 70% of U.S. farmworkers are estimated to be illegal immigrants.”

Eric Schlosser makes the claim on p. 176 that the worst and most dangerous jobs in the meatpacking industry are usually done by illegal immigrants. Well, this is also true for field workers. The work they do is sure to injure the workers, and simply put, they have the worst jobs in the country. Nobody, and I mean nobody, would look forward to a day working in the fields for almost no money. Since hardly any American citizens are willing to do these jobs, and the jobs must get done, employers turn to immigrants to do the work. They then take advantage of these employees by firing them without some of their wages or give them less than they are legally entitled.

I think this is a huge topic to discuss, and I plan on limiting it down a bit. I also feel like it is a good topic because it has a lot of relevance to the issues going on right now, but it has also been a problem for the last century and a half here in the United States.