"Q: How do you consider the terms “farmworker” and “migrants” and how they are used, including by the media?
There are several different ways that migrant farmworkers are categorized that play into their work and their lives and their bodies not being valued as much. One example is how legal professionals or the media talk about “skilled” and “unskilled” labor. Strawberry pickers are classified as unskilled labor, but my experience picking next to them is that they are very skilled and they are very fast, whereas I was very unskilled in that situation. Our society appears to value certain types of people and certain types of labor more, and it does not appear to value the labor that goes into our food.
Another example of how the terms “migrant”, “migrant worker”, or “immigrant worker” are used unequally is that these are not used to talk about wealthy tech workers here in San Francisco who come from all over the world to work at Google, Twitter, and DropBox.
But when we say “migrant worker” we tend to refer to people doing manually labor on farms, and when we say “farmworker” it seems that should mean anyone who works on the farm — the owner, the mechanic, the engineer, the person who went to business school, and the people picking. But “farmworker” always has the connotation of manual laborer and usually people from Latin America doing that work. So the categories of “unskilled labor,” “migrant worker” and “farmworker” all get conflated and this helps reinforce the idea that these people are not as valuable, that their labor is not as valuable, that their health is not as valuable."