'We need 'em worse than they need us': how Haitian workers feed the US

Laborers from the Caribbean nation pick berries and process Thanksgiving turkeys across rural America

Ayanna J Legros
Thu 3 Oct 2024 12.00 EDT


On a foggy morning in June 2021, I left my Durham, North Carolina, home to travel two and a half hours to rural Whiteville, North Carolina, population 5,000-ish. I headed there to meet some of the town’s newest, albeit temporary, residents: 200 Haitian migrants employed as blueberry pickers.

These farm workers put food on our tables – and on family tables back in Haiti. But they’re a less visible work force in our food supply chain, toiling largely out of sight on farms in places like Columbus county, with its miles of fields. They are doubly invisible among US guest workers, who overwhelmingly hail from Mexico.

But Haitian migrants also come to the US and locations across the hemisphere to work in food production or other service industries. Their numbers have increased after the devastating 2010 earthquake, and many have been able to use temporary protected status (TPS) to stay and work in the US due to conditions that make it hard to return home.

Others brave unsafe border crossings into the Dominican Republic’s sugarcane fields for abusively low wages. Some board rickety boats to voyage into Turks and Caicos’s shark-filled waters to serve tourists in luxury resorts. Many endure human trafficking into Maryland to pick tomatoes or risk getting whipped by border patrol agents as they walk across the arid US-Mexico border. And as anthropologists Vincent Joos and Laura Wagner once pointed out, there’s a good chance your Thanksgiving turkey was processed by Haitian workers in North Carolina.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/03/haitian-farm-workers-north-carolina