Lessons Show Plight of Immigrants Who Feed Us

Alma wanted to put milk in her children’s bottles. In her native Mexico, she could only afford to fill them with coffee. Like many recent immigrants to the United States, Alma came here to spare her children such grinding poverty. “I’d like to live [in the United States] for my kids,” she says, “for them to study and not live the life I lived in Mexico, because it was very hard.”

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Once here in the States, though, Alma could only find employment as a farmworker in Florida. She still lives in poverty as one of the country’s estimated 10.8 million undocumented immigrants. These laborers do the backbreaking work that puts billions of dollars of food on our plates.

Early this year, the Southern Poverty Law Center interviewed 150 immigrant women—including Alma—who left Latin American nations in search of a better life in the United States. Instead, most of them landed in physically crippling, low-paying jobs that make our lives easier but have rendered them voiceless and invisible.

Their stories, and the circumstances in which they live and work, are profiled in the report, Injustice on Our Plates [2]. The report has been released today, 50 years after CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow shocked the nation with Harvest of Shame—his own report on migrant workers.

At the same time, Teaching Tolerance will provide the first of seven theme-based lessons on the issues raised in the report. Designed for students in grades 7-12, the lessons will help meet curriculum standards for language arts, economics, history, government and geography.

Through selected readings and activities, students will explore issues surrounding our nation’s dependence on immigrant labor and the realities of life at the bottom of the economic ladder. The first lesson, Recognizing the Undocumented [3], asks students to separate facts from myths and identify political talking points. Students will also come to understand the power of personal stories and analyze events during half-century since Murrow’s groundbreaking documentary.

Six more lessons, coming in January, will focus on the economics of risk and the motivation for migration on the part of both workers and employers. They will also explore how current immigration policies affect families, the health risks of food industry work and the way food arrives at our tables. The unit ends by examining potential solutions—both local and national—to the problems.

Williamson is associate editor of Teaching Tolerance.