University of Minnesota Moment: Migrant Workers

Transcription

[Announcer]: I'm Rick Moore with the University of Minnesota Moment. It's widely known that migrant workers in the workforce number somewhere between 2 and 3 million nationwide. In Minnesota, migrant workers make up a workforce of about 50,000 each summer. Lisa Sass Zaragoza, a U of M outreach worker in the department of Chicano Studies, says that Minnesota farmers have had a long relationship with migrant workers.

[Sass Zaragoza]: Migrant farm workers first began coming to Minnesota in about 19, in the late teens, 1917 is when the recruitment starting in earnest. And that was predominately to work in the sugar beet industry in the Red River Valley. The United States Government, combining with land grant institutions put a fair amount of resources and energy into the sugar beet industry, and certainly Minnesota was one of a handful of states.

[Moore]: Zaragoza says that the number of workers, for the most part, will start declining, but there will always be a need.

[Sass Zaragoza]: Probably from about the 1950's, 1960's, people have been saying, "we're not going to have any migrant farm workers anymore so therefore we don't need to build housing, we don't need to be really putting any, anything into infrastructure." Which I think has not served either the state of Minnesota or migrant farm workers, or farmers, for that matter. But so I think in some ways the numbers will, it's quite possible the numbers will decrease, but I think there will always be some sort of a need, whether it's because of the weather and the instability of not knowing what's going on and also the seasonal nature of the work.

[Moore]: For the University of Minnesota Moment, I'm Rick Moore.