The romantic image of a child on an American farm is of a barefoot lad in overalls meandering down a dusty lane with a cane fishing pole in hand. Today's reality is a sweaty, stooped, skinny teen-age boy from Mexico, cut off from his family and working the fields for subpar wages under the watchful eye of a farm labor contractor. We preach about child labor in other countries but we're not looking at the scandalous developments here over the last 10 years. We need to turn the lens on ourselves.
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It's an outdoor sweatshop. The declining economic status of the poor and the privatization of education in Mexico means that rural children there who can't afford tuition or bus transportation to school may hire out as farm workers in the U.S., Majka said. Most enter the country illegally, often with the help of farm labor contractors who pull together crews to work the fields. Estimates of the extent of the problem vary. The Human Rights Watch cites figures that range from 300,000 to 800,000 farmworkers under age 18 in the United States.