Generally, migrant laborers are brought to the United States by employers who employ their services for a short time or for a specific job and then send them home until they are needed again. Often cyclical in nature, therefore, such migration creates a pool of cheap labor whose workers receive no benefits or protection offered to American citizens. The cost of reproducing the labor force is also borne by the laborers themselves whose families reside, like reserves of labor in virtual bantustans, in another country In many respects, migrant labor developed as a means to get around the problems associated with the emancipation of slaves. Southern planters’ attempts to hire Chinese Americans and South Asian laborers during Reconstruction, for example, were thwarted by northern Republicans who, for a brief period at least, wanted to protect the freed people of the South. Required to employ African American laborers, Southerners instead used violence, prison labor, debt peonage and segregation to re-establish their cheap labor system. Elsewhere in the country there were fewer restraints placed on the use of migrant laborers. Chinese, Japanese, Mexican Americans and Caribbean citizens were all used. In the northeast, Italian immigration began as a cyclical, migrant labor system, with large numbers of Italians working in construction trades (often going to Argentina when production slackened in the winter) and sending money home to their families. While others have changed their status, laborers from Central America and the Caribbean are now a major part of this large pool of migrant labor in the United States.

Not surprisingly migrant labor is often associated with agriculture. On farms the intensity of the productive system varies during the year, with planting and harvesting seasons demanding the most labor. Many farmers supply cheap housing (often merely dormitories) for workers. During intensive periods, farmers will supplement their migrant labor force with a “day-haul operation,” choosing among laborers assembled at designated pick-up points. While almost all farms rely on some migrant labor, Texas has the largest population of migrant workers, mainly employed in the growing and picking of vegetables and citrus fruits. Others pick winter fruits in Florida. Many of these same farmers will move north to the Great Lakes region, Pennsylvania and Connecticut during the summer.

The nature of the labor (and conditions of migration) are such that it is difficult for migrant laborers to organize for higher pay and better working and living conditions.

Consequently most earn incomes well below the official poverty level. Early attempts by Cesar Chavez to organize California farm workers in the 1960s and 1970s, like union attempts to organize a strike among mushroom pickers in Eastern Pennsylvania during the early 1990s, met with limited success. Yet most migrant laborers remain vulnerable in the face of opposition and hostility from many in American society.

Over the past century, opposition to migrant labor has represented a strange mixture of humanitarian concern for the laborers combined with nativism (the desire to protect native-born laborers from competition with cheaper labor) and outright racism. A recent manifestation of hostility to such migrants can be found in California’s Proposition 187, which attempted to deny illegal immigrants and their families school, healthcare and other welfare. Such opposition, however, has been constrained by the farming bloc which persuades Congress to safeguard the system, and by the desire of American consumers for the cheap commodities that such labor brings.

Predicting the future for migrant labor is difficult. Farming constituencies are declining in power nationally but retain their strength at the state level. As such, particular states become more embattled in the face of a federal government that is committed to establishing trade agreements, like NAFTA, with countries in the Western hemisphere, which ultimately should reduce the discrepancy between the price of labor in the United States and elsewhere and diminish the attractiveness of such transient labor.