U.S. Immigration Reform May Bar South African Farmworkers

It’s a hundred degrees and there’s a soft breeze—ideal wheat-cutting weather—as Albert Marais, a migrant farmworker, drives a 16-ton combine through fields outside Denver, hoping to beat the rain. “We cut 360 acres with this one machine yesterday; that’s a pretty good day,” he says. After the work’s done, Marais and his fellow workers will load their equipment onto trucks and make their way to other wheat fields across the Great Plains. “I like Oklahoma,” says Marais’s brother, Jannie. “It’s more like back home.”

“Back home” isn’t Mexico, where the vast majority of the U.S.’s seasonal farmworkers come from—it’s South Africa. After Mexico, the country is the biggest supplier of documented farmworkers to the U.S. Although only a little more than 1,100 South Africans worked on U.S. farms last year, they are coveted by employers because they speak English and have the skills to run high-tech machinery, learned on farms back home.