Media Covers Two Obscure Immigration Topics, with Mixed Results

 In the last few days, major newspapers have published long articles about obscure immigration streams, but with mixed results.

The full-page piece in the Times was titled "Alone in a New World with Vast Open Space, and Sheep: Latin American sheepherders, here on work visas, do the same nomadic work that European immigrants did before them. But do they have a shot at the American dream?" and reflected the content of the article, with an emphasis on the outdoor life of these workers, but with a passing note that few of them can manage to move from nonimmigrant to immigrant status.

What was missing from the article was any discussion of the U.S. government's key and dual roles in the exploitation of these workers, who are on duty 24 hours a day, but who are paid all of $1,807.

They live in tents or sometimes, if lucky, house trailers, working alone for weeks if not months on end as they move the sheep from mountain pasture to mountain pasture.

These workers are separated from their Latin American families for three years at a time, getting a three-month vacation after the passage of those years.

This is an essentially medieval industry practice that persists in the American West only because the federal government makes it possible through two policy decisions: It allows the ranchers to import some 2,000 foreign workers, who work under miserable conditions for the slimmest of wages.

https://cis.org/North/Media-Covers-Two-Obscure-Immigration-Topics-Mixed-Results