Putting a Stop to Slave Labor

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Sometimes backpackers like me showed up for a few days to hike the trails and fish in the streams, but Max didn't speak English and the campers generally didn't speak Spanish. It was a life of isolation that only a hermit (or a delusional college boy with literary aspirations and a backpack) would choose, and Max was a gregarious 30-year-old without any romantic notions of the sheepherder's lonely vocation. He didn't enjoy the life much. He had a wife and three daughters back in Guanajuato. He was doing it for the money.

Max said he was making about $4,500 a year. Even if you adjust for inflation, that's not much of a job, but it was the best a farm kid from Mexico could find without a green card. And without someone like Max, the rancher who owned those sheep might have been out of business. A legal worker would have cost the rancher at least twice what he was paying Max, assuming he could find a competent person willing to move into the mountains alone for six months. That sort of increased overhead would have rendered him vulnerable to competitors at home -- unwilling and unmotivated to pay a fair wage -- or to wool and meat exporters in Australia and Chile.

If we shut down illegal immigration, a program to legalize our 'guest workers' would be a matter of necessity to save American agriculture. At that point, the citizenry would have had to acknowledge how we were treating people like Max. But because nothing was done then -- and because it doesn't look like anything meaningful is going to happen in the foreseeable future -- illegal immigration endures as a testament to our hypocrisy.

We, the citizens of the United States, are lying to ourselves about our labor force. We are lying persistently, and it's hurting everyone involved. The lies rob legitimate workers of needed jobs, they rob industrious immigrants of fair opportunities, and they rob America of its essential morality.

Bryan Welch lives on a small farm outside Lawrence, Kansas. He is the publisher and editorial director of Ogden Publications Inc., owners of Utne Reader, Mother Earth News, and other magazines and websites.

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