VP Harris tells essential workers to stay home: The Need to Change U.S. Immigration Policy to Support Farmworkers and Others

During the last two weeks of June, Vice President Kamala Harris visited Guatemala, Mexico, and the U.S.-Mexico border. In Guatemala she stated in a press conference, “Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our borders. Don’t come.”1 On June 25, while on the border she spoke with five girls between the ages of nine and sixteen and told the press that migrants don’t want to leave their homes but come to the U.S. because they are “fleeing some type of harm.” She said, “[t]he reality of it is that we have to deal with causes, and we have to deal with the effects.”2

A few days later, one of the “effects” emerged in the death of Sebastián Fransisco Pérez, a Chuj Indigenous farmworker from the Department of Huehuetenango, Guatemala who passed away while moving irrigation equipment at a nursery in St. Paul, Oregon on June 29. In Oregon there are 26 different Indigenous languages spoken from Guatemala and Mexico, with many of these having multiple variants. Mayan languages found in Oregon include Chuj, Kanjobal, K’iche’, Mam, and Akateco.

Sebastián arrived in Oregon in early May and began to labor as a farmworker. He left his home community to support his wife who remained in Guatemala. Brought to Oregon by a coyote and helped by relatives already here, he died just short of being in Oregon for two months. The night before he passed out from heat exhaustion that eventually killed him, he was playing chess with his nephew and celebrating his 38th birthday. According to a press report, he had lived and worked in the U.S. in the past.3

Guatemala Indigenous farmworkers like Sebastián have been laboring through the pandemic, through wildfires, ice storms, and—during the past 10 days—through intense heat waves in the Pacific Northwest. During 2020 and 2021, I participated in a collaborative project partnering with ten community-based organizations to broadly assess the impact of COVID-19 on farmworkers and their families, known as the Oregon COVID-19 Farmworkers Study (COFS). The study involved a survey of 300 farmworkers and in-depth interviews with about 45 farmworkers from the survey. About 25 percent of our survey sample was of Indigenous farmworkers from Mexico and Guatemala as were the same percentage of qualitative interviews.. The survey recorded their experiences of safety on the job, labor rights, connections to home communities and family life.

In the U.S., farmworkers were classified as essential workers who put food on our tables. In the Pacific Northwest a majority are from Mexico and Guatemala. A majority of Indigenous farmworkers in our study reported losing a month or more of work and finding it difficult to pay their bills after losing work during COVID, then during wildfires, ice storms, and now working in a heat wave.

Rubén and María, Mam Indigenous parents of four from Todos Santos Cuchumatán, Huehuetenango, Guatemala lost work for more than a month during the pandemic and also during the fires.4 They both were harvesting berries. I spoke with Rubén in March of 2020. He reflected on the impact of sequential periods of no work and the ongoing stress of not knowing how to pay their bills. “I have a lot of family, six of us: me, my wife, and four children, and there are only a few hours of work. And there are other times when they say that there is no work like when the rain comes, and there are times that snow comes… About four weeks ago when the ice fell, the power went out and everything. So, we are left without a job, with nothing to pay the rent, to pay the bills, that's a lot ....” Before the pandemic, Rubén sent home money to support his elderly parents in Guatemala. When he lost work, he had to stop. Now he sends them something, but not as much as before.

As part of our conversation, I asked him what the term “essential worker” meant to him. He replied:

“Well, it means that the people who work in the fields are very important. I feel really proud to do this work because the truth is if we don’t go do this work, who is going to work in the fields…But for me, I feel like the government doesn’t support workers. You know why? Because I wanted to get legal permission to work, but no one gave it to me. I want to work here legally, but they didn’t give me, or my wife or my children. I asked a lawyer about this, and he said, no the government doesn’t want to give permission for people to work here who are undocumented. He told me to wait for the new government to come. Well, now it is here.”

Rubén is referring to the Biden-Harris government. U.S. agriculture depends on workers like Sebastián, Rubén, María, and thousands of other Guatemalans, Central Americans, and Mexicans who toil in the fields. They in turn are supporting their families in home communities in Mexico and Guatemala. Until U.S immigration policy greatly expands and provides not only a legal way for people like Rubén and María and their children to work and live in the U.S., the gaping contradiction between the dependence of the U.S. population on Indigenous and other migrant workers for food and the unwelcome reception they receive will remain unresolved. Looking even further would also reveal the tight connections between past U.S. foreign policy of intervention in Central America, wars supported by the U.S. that enacted genocide in Guatemala as well as the murders and disappearances of thousands—a legacy that is directly linked to the poverty, violence, joblessness, and corruption that drive people like Sebastián, Rubén, and María to come to the U.S. to put food on our tables.

Image Credit: Mam Indigenous farmworker during the COVID-19 pandemic. Photograph used with permission of Nestor Jiménez. Courtesy of Facebook.com.

1. BBC News. 2021. “Kamala Harris tells Guatemala migrants: ‘Do not come to U.S.’”June 8, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57387350

2. James Barragán, “In first trip to U.S.-Mexico border as vice president, Kamala Harris focuses on causes of immigration,” Texas Tribune, June 25, 2021, https://www.texastribune.org/2021/06/25/kamala-harris-texas-mexico-border-immigration/.

3. Selsky, Andrew and Nathan Howards. 2021. “Ola de calor agrava penurias de peones rurales hispanos.” San Diego Tribune, July 2, 2021. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/en-espanol/noticias/story/2021-07-02/ola-de-calor-agrava-penurias-de-peones-rurales-hispanos

4. Rubén and María are pseudonyms to protect their identities.