Socio-demographic and occupational determinants of poor self-perceived health among seasonal migrant farmworkers: A cross-sectional analysis.

ABSTRACT This paper discusses how reflective writing can be used in asynchronous online teaching to explore social topics of nondominate communities in Early Childhood Education teacher preparation programs. Through film analysis and course materials, preservice teachers explored the lives of migrant farmworker families with young children working in the U.S. labor force. Analysis of reflective writing assignments found new understanding of social issues around the lives of farmworker families with young children. Preservice teachers further discussed farmworkers from their own reference of lived experience including what fairness and equality mean for hard-working Americans. The author moreover discusses the future use of AI and its potential impact on discussing the human condition and influence on future educators finding their reflective voice.

In contrast to other economic sectors, agriculture has long been defined by its exceptionalism, which justifies specific regulations and legal exemptions, not least concerning labour laws. Drawing from rural studies, labour studies and transnational migration research, we aim to contribute to an understanding of the existing labour exceptionalism for migrant farmworkers to further the recent scholarship on migration and agriculture. This scholarship has begun to explore the concentration of migrants in seasonal farmwork, analysing migrants' decisions and employers’ choices, and the role of labour law. Our scholarship will add a focus on the media portrayal of migrant farmworkers, which, while not directly matching workers to jobs, reflects and shapes broader societal understanding and can inform political (in)action. Empirically, this paper presents a qualitative analysis of local media discourse on migrant seasonal farmworkers in Germany, which has not received very much attention in the emerging debate. These workers predominantly come from Eastern EU member states, work for the season and then return home. We further adopt a transnational perspective to reveal that the portrayal of the ideal matching of migrant workers to farmwork rests on their transnational condition of working “here” and living “there” and is silent about the externalisation of the costs of social reproduction. Against this backdrop we argue that this media portrayal reflects the discursive normalisation of the exceptional work and employment conditions of these migrant farmworkers through a positive assessment of the underlying transnational labour arbitrage. This further rationalises and legitimises labour exceptionalism for migrant farmworkers. • Media portrays Eastern European farmworkers as ‘good workers’ who are hard-working, skilled, and loyal • The portrayal offers a positive assessment of migrant farmworkers' transnational condition of working ‘here’ while living ‘there’ • The media portrayal of migrant farmworkers and their transnational condition rationalises German agriculture's labour exceptionalism

Housing is a social determinant of health, acting as both a driver and indicator of social inequity. For migrant and seasonal farmworkers, it is difficult to tease apart the interaction between the environmental and social factors related to their housing, in conjunction with extreme poverty, immigration, precarious employment, and linguistic, cultural, and educational factors. The relationship of housing with employment and the transient nature of farmworkers' occupancy add to the complexity. To assess the strengths, weaknesses, and research gaps and to identify areas requiring further investigation, we performed a critical review of the scientific and gray literature on farmworker housing and health. We propose a framework to focus research and suggest housing policy interventions to improve the health and wellbeing of this essential workforce.

A growing body of research provides evidence of extensive economic and health disparities faced by migrant farmworkers and their families, underscoring the need for livable wages, health insurance, and better working conditions. Recently, programs have provided payment to workers from corporate-supported premiums, yet no studies have explored the impacts of such programs on the health of the communities they target. In this study, we investigate whether the implementation of a workers’ rights organization program within the agriculture industry promoted health in farmworker communities by evaluating changes in infant health outcomes. Using restricted birth records data from the National Vital Statistics System from 2006 to 2018, we show that the adoption of the Fair Food Program was associated with reductions in low-weight births among foreign-born mothers from Latin America. These results underscore how strengthening labor and employment conditions for birthing parents can mitigate possible long-term or latent adverse health outcomes among U.S.-born children.

Iniqua Praxis: Social and criminal liability among caporali and agricultural entrepreneurs in the exploitation of irregular migrant farm workers

ABSTRACT This article reflects on the pedagogical tensions that emerged through a collective play creation process with migrant farm workers employed under Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s conception of emancipation, the article considers how participants engaged in a theatre-based project that explored their lived experiences of unfree labour. While the process opened space for collective self-expression and aesthetic rupture, it also exposed the ambivalence and risk entangled with acts of visibility within systems of surveillance and control. Through an analysis of post-performance dialogue, the article contends that critical pedagogy under constraint must reckon with refusal and partial subjectification as politically meaningful. Emancipatory education, in this view, may emerge not through the orchestration of overt resistance, but through the negotiation of fragile and embodied expressions that unsettle dominant scripts.

ABSTRACT Introduction The present research aims to better understand the meal preparation strategies and food security of unaccompanied Latino migrant farmworker (LMFW) youth in Georgia and Florida. This unfolded in two studies. Methods In Study 1, we explored the day-to-day meal preparation experiences and strategies of N = 20 migrant youths aged 15–20 years (50% from Mexico under the H-2A agricultural visa program working in Georgia; 50% from Guatemala, undocumented minors working in Florida). In Study 2, using a different sample, we examined the levels of food security among N = 36 unaccompanied LMFW youths aged 15–20 years and working in Florida. Results In Study 1, thematic analysis highlighted three shared themes among LMFW youth related to meal preparation strategies: (1) “I do it myself”, (2) “We try to help each other”, and (3) “Sometimes I don’t even have time to eat.” In Study 2, findings showed that 81% (29) of LMFW youths cooked alone while 19% (7) cooked in groups. Most (72%) lacked food security. Out of the 29 LMFW youths who cooked alone, 83% lacked food security compared to 29% of the 7 LMFW youths who cooked in groups. Additionally, among LMFW youths who cooked alone, those who were minors lacked food security (86%) more commonly than those who were non-minors (80%). Conclusion Together, these studies provide insight into meal preparation strategies, and food security status among unaccompanied LMFW youth, specifically that solitude in meal preparation is associated with a lack of food security among these youth in U.S. agriculture.

Migrant and seasonal farmworkers ("farmworkers") are a unique population with structural barriers to being reached in health promotion efforts. Social media platforms and communication campaigns are increasingly used in health promotion efforts with farmworkers. However, digital exclusion, sometimes referred to as the digital divide, can limit the reach of social media interventions and campaigns. It is critically important for program planners to know the potential reach of different communications channels. We conducted a secondary analysis of a time-venue convenience sample survey of farmworkers that was fielded in North Carolina (NC) in May-December 2023 at housing and clinic locations. We assessed social media use for seven platforms (Facebook, GroupMe, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, WhatsApp, YouTube), randomizing each participant with internet access to be asked about one platform. We calculated what percentage of farmworkers in NC would likely be missed via each platform based on use of the platform and inconsistent or no internet access. Several social media platforms (WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube) were widely used by farmworkers in NC. However, use and access were not universal, with even the most used platforms missing approximately 1 in 10 farmworkers who had consistent internet in their housing locations. Considering use of platforms in combination with having no or inconsistent internet access in housing, platforms missed a minimum of approximately 1 in 3 farmworkers. Campaigns and interventions should consider using multiple social media platforms and other channels to maximize reach. Future research is needed to disentangle positive and negative effects of using social media to reach farmworkers.

The recursive violence of reform: A century of failed interventions in migrant farmworker housing.

In Canada, research is governed by national ethical guidelines and standards enforced by institutional research ethics boards (REBs) to protect vulnerable populations, such as temporary migrant farmworkers. However, the rigid and inflexible application of these procedures often creates significant barriers for social science researchers striving to promote social justice for this population and may lead to antagonism between researchers and REB chairs. Institutional ethics frameworks frequently fail to account for the embeddedness of research within rural agricultural communities and the critical role these communities play in shaping ethical decision-making. When REBs overlook these relational and contextual dynamics, they impose requirements that can obstruct meaningful, on-the-ground ethical engagement. To illustrate these tensions, we focus on three challenges, namely, participant recruitment strategies, consent procedures, and protection from trauma. To avoid misunderstandings and antagonism, we call for a paradigm shift toward understanding research ethics as relations, that is, inherently embedded within complex networks of relationships, emphasizing iterative models of consent developed through ongoing negotiations between researchers, participants, and other community members. Bridging the gap between ethical research in theory and practice requires a relational paradigm that recognizes the need to mitigate hostilities and antagonism and emphasizes the importance of collaboration and dialogue – not only among academics, migrants, and community stakeholders but also between researchers and REB members.

Coffee agroecosystems represent the economic base for thousands of small growers and agricultural workers, as well as a significant proportion of many regional economies in Latin America. Every year, the production of coffee in this region attracts a great number of laborers and their families, particularly during the harvest season. Despite being essential workers in the food system, agricultural workers continue to be one of the most marginalized actors in the coffee production chain. Even with an environment of precarity, agricultural workers exercise their autonomy and food sovereignty—the process by which agricultural workers, in this case, define their food system and procure culturally appropriate foods. We examine the relationship between agrobiodiversity, knowledge, and food sovereignty in the context of plantation agriculture. Through walking interviews and participant observation with groups of farmworkers in one shade-grown coffee plantation, which is socioeconomically reflective of plantation structures in the region, we discuss how farmworkers practice their autonomy and food sovereignty through plant foraging, collective cooking, knowledge sharing, and gardening. Our results reveal extensive farmworker knowledge of and uses for associated agrobiodiversity within coffee plantations—a dimension often overlooked in agrobiodiversity studies. We place examples of practicing food sovereignty, including foraging and agrobiodiversity conservation, in conversation with challenges associated with the working conditions and precarity of migrant farmworkers: urbanization, increased migration to the United States, the increased use of herbicides, and possible effects of climate change and generational knowledge gaps on plant diversity and availability. We argue that food—deeply tied to place—and agrobiodiversity is an avenue to maintain autonomy, identity, and sovereignty amid unjust conditions of the plantation system. Finally, we suggest that complex agroecological knowledge held by migrants promotes and conserves agrobiodiversity in coffee landscapes.

Abstract The El viaje más caro (The Most Costly Journey) project, a collaborative ethnographic public health effort that employed comics as resources for mental health outreach among Latin American migrant farm workers in Vermont, has served as a model for similar efforts. This essay contextualizes two such projects that are described in subsequent contributions to this special issue.

This paper critically examines the socio-technical assistance practices and design politics involved in the eradication of migrant farmworker ghettos in Capitanata, southern Italy, with particular attention to the Pista of Borgo Mezzanone. In a context shaped by migratory regimes of control and agricultural labour exploitation, government-led interventions are sustaining projects aimed at the ‘overcoming of informal settlements’ in the area. Drawing on long-term ethnography and activist research, the paper interrogates the technocratic logic and depoliticizing frameworks underpinning such interventions and reveals how they fail to account for the social, economic and political complexity of these territories. By confronting the epistemological and operational assumptions behind the project of ‘overcoming’, we call for design politics rooted in accountability and adjacency. The case of the Pista of Borgo Mezzanone serves to question dominant spatial imaginaries, highlighting how these settlements function as spaces of precarity and exclusion, but also of belonging, shaping imagined futures.

The logic of the corporate food regime requires a system of labour based on migration. Free trade agreements have entrenched a drive for ever-expanding export agriculture and resulted in both a devastation of peasant agriculture, creating migrant workers, and an increased need for temporary labour on Canadian farms. Family farmers in Canada face labour challenges exacerbated by the current food regime and, for some, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) is seen as an answer to those challenges. However, the SAWP is based on systemic exploitation of migrant workers. This paper seeks to assess the role of migrant labour in Canadian food systems and reveal the contradictions, tensions, and possibilities of farmers acting in solidarity with migrant farmworkers by exploring the formation and political direction of the National Farmers Union’s Migrant Worker Solidarity Working Group (MWSWG).

Low-wage labour migrants often face health-damaging living and working conditions, but are frequently excluded from healthcare. The othering of migrants, bordering of healthcare and simple oversight and negligence create widening health inequalities for a society's essential workers. This review aimed to identify the forms and effectiveness of healthcare services designed to make healthcare accessible for migrant workers.We searched for literature through Medline, Embase, Global Health, Web of Science, and Global Index Medicus (from 1 January 2000 till 9 June 2023), focussing on selected work sectors (domestic work, construction, manufacturing, agriculture, mining). Primary research, reports, and grey literature from 2000 onwards containing descriptions or evaluations of healthcare services exclusively targeting low-wage migrant workers and their families were included. We excluded services focussing only on specific health conditions or disease screening. Quality appraisal was based on tools from the Joanna Briggs Institute. We narratively synthesised service characteristics and effects. This review follows the PRISMA reporting guidelines for systematic reviews and is registered with PROSPERO (CRD42023459360).Identified studies included 21 healthcare services targeting low-wage migrant workers in six countries (China, Dominican Republic, Italy, Qatar, South Africa, USA) in three sectors (agriculture, manufacturing, domestic work). Services included established medical facilities (e.g., general hospital care, semi-permanent primary healthcare (PHC) services); mobile clinics for PHC; and telehealth services. The healthcare services were provided by governmental, non-governmental, academic, and private actors. Most targeted migrant farmworkers and were primarily located in the United States. Common healthcare barriers were addressed, for example, via free care, outreach, or non-traditional hours. However, service effects on health, access and uptake, patient satisfaction, and acceptability were largely unclear, as only six studies offered some fragmentary evaluative evidence.Few healthcare services targeting migrant workers have been documented and evaluated, especially in LMICs. Although migrant workers are deemed to be mobile populations, once in the destination location, many are quite immobile when it comes to accessing healthcare. Thus, in the face of persistent exclusion of migrant workers, health systems cannot simply rely on the ability of this vital workforce to seek and use preventative or curative care, but healthcare services must be actively designed to be accessible to this mobile population in order to ensure health as a human right.

Digital health services can facilitate patients’ access to healthcare. However, access to reliable internet and utilization of digital healthcare are patterned by race, ethnicity, and class in the United States. We assessed willingness, use, and challenges accessing digital healthcare platforms among farmworkers arriving in North Carolina on temporary H-2A work visas (n = 327). We fielded a survey on digital healthcare access in English and Spanish at a central arrival hub for H-2A visa holders in 2024. We calculated descriptive statistics and assessed associations between willingness to use and uptake of digital healthcare and demographic variables. Most participants were interested in utilizing telehealth and patient portals, but few had ever used these services. Among participants who had used telehealth, 50% reported needing assistance. Older participants were less likely to utilize patient portals than younger participants. Future interventions should consider the unique context of migrant farmworkers in building digital health service models and provide digital skills training.

College students from migrant farmworker backgrounds face many personal and academic challenges. Resilience is a reliable predictor of persistence through challenges and long-term well-being. We used a quasi-single-case experimental design to examine an 8-week Predictive 6 Factor Resilience (PR6) counseling intervention aimed at increasing resilience capacity scores as measured by the PR6 scale. The group counseling intervention focused on the neuroscience-informed PR6 resilience model, which consists of six domains of resilience including vision, composure, tenacity, collaboration, reasoning, and health. Our research participants were first-year college students (N=7; age between 18 and 19; 4 males and 3 females, and all identified as Latino/a) enrolled in the College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP). Results indicated all seven participants had moderate to high resilience scores at baseline, with six of the seven participants showing an increase in median resilience scores from baseline to intervention. However, visual analysis and effect indices (PEM & Tau-U) showed inconclusive results. We discuss implications for counselors including incorporating resilience skill-building to enhance resilience capacities, the dynamic nature of resilience as a construct, and the importance of integrating culturally relevant/responsive counseling practices. Future research should include examining the PR6 resilience intervention using a single-case multiple baseline or multiple probe design to promote the ability to evaluate causal effect and replicability, in addition to transitioning the format to in-person versus virtual.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, migrant and seasonal farmworkers were deemed essential due to their central roles in US agricultural operations. However, employer-provided housing and transportation conditions increased their risks of SARS-CoV-2 exposure, and some states implemented emergency temporary standards (ETSs) at the insistence of farmworker advocates. Despite numerous studies examining the effectiveness of policy interventions (e.g., workplace closures) for mitigating SARS-CoV-2 transmission, limited research has specifically examined the effectiveness of interventions aimed at protecting farmworkers from COVID-19. We used an interrupted time series analysis to estimate how two ETSs and one executive order issued in Oregon impacted COVID-19 trends from March 1, 2020, to February 27, 2021, for the overall population and among agricultural labor groups in Oregon. Our models show that the ETS and executive order, which specifically targeted farmworker housing, transportation, and worksites, did not demonstrate any significant effects on the numbers of COVID-19 cases or associated deaths. However, the other ETS, which targeted all workplaces, was associated with statistically significant decreases in COVID-19 cases among the general population (-142.36214, p-value<0.0001), producers (-1.67128, p-value = 0.0009), hired workers (-2.39413, p-value = 0.0014), unpaid workers (-1.01572, p-value = 0.0003), and migrant workers (-0.60017, p-value = 0.0166). None of the three policy changes were found to have any statistically significant impacts on the numbers of COVID-19-associated deaths. The ETS targeting all workplaces was more effective for reducing COVID-19 transmission than the ETS or executive order specifically targeting farmworkers, indicating that the design, communication, and implementation of ETSs targeting farmworkers should be re-evaluated.

IntroductionThe article examines the conditions of life and agency of Romanian migrant farmworkers in Sicily's agricultural sector, focusing on the migration-citizenship nexus through a gendered, embodied, racialized, and intersectional lens. It aims to shed light on the paradoxes and contradictions still affecting both formal and lived forms of European citizenship regimes.MethodThis qualitative study is based on fieldwork carried out between 2022 and 2024, which included informal meetings, interviews with migrant women, employers, trade unionists, health and social workers, and participant observation in an after-school center for migrant children.ResultsThe results show that Romanian women face multiple vulnerabilities due to poor working and living conditions, physical and social isolation, gender, family situation, and legal status. Their European citizenship paradoxically subjects them to worse conditions than other migrant workers. Despite their precarious situations, these women display agency practices and counteractions in their daily lives, mainly through micro-strategies that might at first glance appear discreet and passive yet, at the same time, are the outcome of their conscious capacity to adapt to potentially unbearable circumstances. They also employ reworking strategies, such as quitting jobs, and occasionally engage in long-term acts of rupture to claim rights and challenge power structures.DiscussionThe analysis contributes to the debate on how structural determinants of oppression and exploitation relate to subjectivity and agency. It explores various forms of counteraction and survival through the concept of lived citizenship, novel ways of experiencing and enacting citizenship within and across different contexts and spaces, both physical and symbolic. While these actions are neither striking nor highly organized or effective in achieving emancipation, they serve as responses and countermeasures within a restrictive system and shed light on migrant women's reflexivity and struggle for autonomy and control over their lives that deserve greater attention.