When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers

Farmers often proclaim that immigrant workers for field work that no U.S. citizens will do.  Gustavo Arellano on NPR reminds us of an effort by the U.S. government to prove that this claim was wrong. 

In 1965, Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz wanted to recruit 20,000 high schoolers to replace the hundreds of thousands of Mexican agricultural workers who had worked in the United States through the “Bracero Program,” a guest worker program in place from WWII to 1964.  The program ended in 1964   “But farmers complained — in words that echo today’s headlines — that Mexican laborers did the jobs that Americans didn’t want to do, and that the end of the Bracero Program meant that crops would rot in the fields.”

Secretary of Labor Wirtz cited the farm labor shortage and a lack of summer jobs for high schoolers as the reason for a new program of employing male high school students in the fields.  Specifically, Wirtz wanted high school athletes.  the new program was  called A-TEAM — Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower.

Read the story about how the program fizzled.  As Gustavo Arellano writes,  the “experiment quickly disappeared into the proverbial dustbin of history. In fact, when Stony Brook University history professor Lori A. Flores did research for what became her award-winning 2016 book, Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement, she discovered the controversy for the first time. Until then, the only time she had heard of any A-TEAM, she now says with a laugh,`was the TV show.'”

KJ