Wondering Why There Is So Little Migrant Labor Here

[ThomWV]

Not even saying anything about legal or illegal, hell, who could tell and what difference does it matter anyway but it is notable how little migrant labor you see here in central and northern West Virginia. There are none, and I mean none at all, in this area (county) where I live. So I was wondering why? Then it came to me - there is no job West Virginians won't do. If it pays we have someone who will step up and do it. I don't know what that says for or against our state, but it just seems to me to be the main reason so few of our new residents have found a nitch here, the competition is already too great for the poorest jobs.

[madokie]

1. Possibly the employers are more in tune with what a job is worth and are willing to pay it

Who knows but it may just be you guys don't have a bunch of money hungry business owners in them parts.

[Xipe Totec]

2. The migrant workers I know of

traveled north with the harvest seasons, mostly in the great plains. They still do, but now there are fewer since the advent of the combines. National Geographic did an issue on these migrant workers about 15-20 years ago, but I can't find the exact article now.

These are some quotes from a different source; Oregon State University:


Here, where the North American wheat belt extends from West Texas to the Canadian prairies, as many as a quarter of a million migrant and seasonal workers traversed the plains, harvesting and threshing wheat, until the advent of the combine in the second half of the 1920s. But there are also other significant subregions of the West where farmers developed extensive and intensive agriculture. Eastern Washington's Palouse and the fruit-growing areas of the Yakima and Wenatchee Valleys were some of the earliest western agricultural zones to require tens of thousands of seasonal workers every harvest and packing season during the early decades of the twentieth century. And as early as the 1870s, the farms of California's central river valleys required seasonal laborers. California's agribusiness would eventually become the largest user of migrant farm labor in the American West

(snip)

During the first few decades of the twentieth century, the vast majority of migrant and seasonal laborers working in western agriculture were white, native-born men. Among these predominantly unmarried workers, traveling by rail from job to job and living in "jungles," harvest Wobblies developed a distinctive culture of work and of life on the road, which I have termed their "worklife culture." They shared much of this culture with other migrant and seasonal agricultural laborers of the day. Yet the Wobblies embodied a unique camaraderie in the jungles, worksites, union halls, skid rows, jails, and freight cars of the American West. Their common experiences forged a socilcultural bond that was further strengthened by aggressive opposition to employers, law enforcement officers, and "hi-jacks," the robbers and confidence men who preyed on migrant harvest workers. Harvest Wobblies expressed themselves through an impressive outpouring of writing, impassioned speeches, union organizing, humor, and song. Sustained through several decades by a common sense of identity and purpose, they created a worklife culture that appealed to Great Plains migrant and seasonal workers, bringing tens of thousands of them into their union.

http://oregonstate.edu/dept/press/g-h/HarvestWobIntro.html

[Gman]

3. West Virginia is not known as being a growing area with many professional

job opportunities such as, for example, Texas or California. Also, for the most part, people in West Virginia don't leave WV for higher paying jobs. Of course, many do. But an even greater many do not. That leaves the lower paying jobs for them such as the hotel maid jobs, or the restaurant dishwasher jobs, etc. Nothing wrong with that at all. It just means there is not a lack of people that will take those jobs which is the niche undocumented workers fill. Basicly what you're saying.

There's not a lot of construction happening in West Virginia like there is in other more urban areas that are really booming so there is not a lack of skilled construction workers therefore no place for undocumented workers to find work in construction.

And, there is not a lot of farmland like there is in the Midwest, Texas or California which needs the undocumented workers to get the crops out of the fields and to market before the crops go bad.

I'm familiar with Eastern West Virginia. I was there in July. All the way from Pittsburgh, it didn't seem like much had changed from the last time I was there 5 years ago. However, I did notice significantly more Hispanics. I don't know, nor do I care if they were US citizens or not. It doesn't matter. It's just that to me it was noticeable because I"m from South Texas where there is a large Hispanic population and I had been to WV previously a few times where there obviously was not a large Hispanic population. But that did seem to be changing.

[ThomWV]

4. There are fewer people in this state right now than there were in 1980

Which sort of kills your theory that people from here don't leave. There are rich people here too, in case you didn't know, so there are people paying guys for cutting lawns, and digging ditches, and hauling trash, and cleaning out every nasty thing you can think. The difference is that here its locals doing it, not folks who just arrived from somewhere else.

Oh, and yes, its true, this state finall gained a bit of population between 1990 and 2000, but it still hasn't got back to where it was when we moved here in 1980. Oh, and when I moved here the unemployment rate in this state was just over 17%.

[Dems4HowardDean]

6. One reason the people may be leavng is WV is the pay.

West Virginia pay is the third lowest in the nation. May be why the immigrants skip WV for jobs.....

link to pay for each state: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104652.html

[KoKo]

5. Come to NC! It's ALL IMMIGRANT LABOR...sorry to shout but the last

five years it seems that with the Hog and Poultry "Death Factories" and the Boom in Construction in our major cities that the HUVAC and New Construction and everything else that supports home building and business office construction, plus Apartment Buildings like mushrooms sprouting up. I wonder how our laid off textile and furniture manufacturing employees can compete. We don't see them here...because of the cheap, imported labor. :shrug: