What was the life expectancy of a migrant farm worker?

What was the life expectancy of a migrant farm worker?

49 years
Learning points. The average life expectancy of migrant workers is 49 years, compared to 77.2 years for most Americans. Immigrant workers have a higher disease burden than other populations.

What happened to the migrant workers in the 1930s?

The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl (a period of drought that destroyed millions of acres of farmland) forced white farmers to sell their farms and become migrant workers who traveled from farm to farm to pick fruit and other crops at starvation wages.

What was migration like in the 1930s?

In the 1930s, farmers from the Midwestern Dust Bowl states, especially Oklahoma and Arkansas, began to move to California; 250,000 arrived by 1940, including a third who moved into the San Joaquin Valley, which had a 1930 population of 540,000. During the 1930s, some 2.5 million people left the Plains states.

Where did migrant workers come from in the 1930’s?

The migrants represented in Voices from the Dust Bowl came primarily from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. Most were of Anglo-American descent with family and cultural roots in the poor rural South.

Are migrant farm workers legal?

The Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (AWPA/MSPA)is the principal federal employment law for farmworkers. While the law does not grant farmworkers the right to join labor unions or access to collective bargaining, it does contain some important protections.

What percentage of farm workers are immigrants?

Immigrant farmworkers make up an estimated 73% of agriculture workers in the United States today.

How many migrant workers were there in the 1930s?

The exact number of Dust Bowl refugees remains a matter of controversy, but by some estimates, as many as 400,000 migrants headed west to California during the 1930s, according to Christy Gavin and Garth Milam, writing in California State University, Bakersfield’s Dust Bowl Migration Archives.

How was life for migrant workers in the 1930s?

Daily Life Many migrants set up camp along the irrigation ditches of the farms they were working, which led to overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions. They lived in tents and out of the backs of cars and trucks. The working hours were long, and many children worked in the fields with their parents.

Why did farmers migrate to California in the 1930s?

Migration Out of the Plains during the Depression. During the Dust Bowl years, the weather destroyed nearly all the crops farmers tried to grow on the Great Plains. Many once-proud farmers packed up their families and moved to California hoping to find work as day laborers on huge farms.

What was it like for migrant farmers in the 1930s?

Many migrants set up camp along the irrigation ditches of the farms they were working, which led to overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions. They lived in tents and out of the backs of cars and trucks. The working hours were long, and many children worked in the fields with their parents.

What crops did migrant workers pick in the 1930s?

An urgent need developed for seasonal labor during the harvest period for cotton, tobacco, cucumbers, potatoes, sweet potatoes, string beans, tomatoes, apples, peaches, and other crops.

What was life like for migrant farm workers in the 1930s?

Working conditions were often unsafe and unsanitary. Migrant workers had to follow the harvest of different crops, so they had to continue to pack up and move throughout California to find work. When the migrant workers weren’t working, they enjoyed recreational and social activities. Many sang and played instruments.

What they found was back-breaking work, low pay and discrimination. The Mexican and Mexican-American migrant farm workers already in California faced displacement and harsh working conditions. During the 1930s, more than 2.5 million people migrated to California.

Why did people migrate to California in the 1930s?

In a journey chronicled in John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” millions of migrant workers in the 1930s flocked to California in search of a better life. Fleeing the Midwest Dust Bowl, they hoped for a paradise where there was good weather and plentiful crops.

What was the experience of migrant workers in California?

Those who did cross over into California found that the available labor pool was vastly disproportionate to the number of job openings that could be filled. Migrants who found employment soon learned that this surfeit of workers caused a significant reduction in the going wage rate.

What was the immigration policy during the Great Depression?

Some state legislatures made it a crime to bring poor migrants into the state and allowed local officials to deport migrants to neighboring states. In the winter of 1935-1936, California, Florida, and Colorado established “border blockades” to block poor migrants from their states and reduce competition with local residents for jobs.