Black Labor Too Uppity for the Fields: Guest Workers Needed

Obama’s immigration vision is clearly aligned with agribusiness.”

In the South, undocumented farm labor has almost totally replaced Blacks in the fields. The owners claim that African Americans don’t want the jobs, and are incapable of doing the work. Yet, as reported in the May 6New York Times, Blacks in Vidalia and Moultrie, Georgia, have gone to court, charging farm owners with discouraging them from applying for jobs in the fields and, once hired, paying them less than Latino workers and then firing them because of their “race and national origin.”

More bluntly put, African Americans refuse to be treated as slaves or fugitives in a foreign land. We’ve starred in that movie, already. One man who was fired after a week in the fields told the Times, “We are not going to run all the time. We are not Mexicans.”

The farm owners, like their historical brethren, seek the closest approximation to slave labor that society will allow. Undocumented, seasonal workers who are racially and ethnically identifiable – and, theoretically, removable, at white society’s convenience – fit the bill.

The slave master always claimed that his Black captives were too lazy and shiftless to work, necessitating the application of whip and lash and knife and fire as moral implements. Old Master hasn’t changed a bit. He has replaced the Blacks, who had “no rights that any white man is bound to respect,” with right-less undocumented workers. He claims to love his Mexicans and Central Americans, just as he told his northern visitors that he loved and cared for his slaves, back in the day – until they were spoiled by emancipatory aspirations.

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