by David Bacon
New America Media

SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, Calif – October in California’s farm worker towns, the unemployment rate starts to rise as the harvests end. In Coachella, not far from the wealth of Palm Springs, one of every eight workers has no job. In Delano, where the United Farm Workers was born in the grape strike 50 years ago, it’s one of every four, as it is in other small towns of the southern San Joaquin Valley. On the coast in Santa Maria and Lompoc the rate is 13.8 and 15.5 percent respectively. In the Imperial Valley, next to the Mexican border, the unemployment rate is over 26 percent in Brawley and Calexico.
This is a reality invisible to the state’s urban dwellers. Los Angeles has a high unemployment rate for a city, but it is still less than rural towns at 8.7 percent, or one of every twelve workers. And in San Francisco and Berkeley the percent unemployed is 4.3 and 5.9 — less than a quarter of the rate in Delano.
Then the winter really hits. By February one of every three workers in Delano and Arvin is unemployed. In Salinas it goes from October’s one in ten to February’s one in five. Coachella is one in every six. And in Brawley, Calexico, Lompoc and Santa Maria unemployment just never goes down.
Winter is the hard time, when the money made in the summer and fall has to keep the rent paid and kids fed while nothing is coming in. With immigration papers workers can get a little unemployment insurance benefit, but with no papers workers can’t collect it — in fact, any benefit that requires a Social Security number is out of reach. Everyone in this season can use a little work, but for undocumented people especially, even a few days of work make a lot of difference.
Much of the work in the winter is cleanup. With the onset of the drought in California one farmer in a watermelon field near Merced began using drip irrigation to cut down on his water consumption. In the winter, therefore, the plastic tubes that carry water to the plants have to be collected so that leftover fruit and vines can be plowed under, and the field made ready for planting again in the spring. The tubes are only good for one season. After they’re collected a recycler is paid to dispose of them.
Drip irrigation is an important technique for organic growers because it waters only the plants growing fruit, helping to keep out weeds without using herbicides. This kind of irrigation also decreases the vulnerability of the watermelon plants to diseases that can occur with the older system of overhead sprinklers.
Organic or not, few growers and contractors here supply any protective equipment for field cleaners. Workers purchase their own cotton gloves to keep their hands from getting scratched and infected, but the thin cloth doesn’t keep out water. The field is full of mud, and workers buy big black garbage bags, tearing holes for their head and arms. That’s some protection, but water still seeps in quickly through sleeves and pants. No one knows what chemicals might have been used here, or what’s in the water that soaks their clothes after a few hours.
Most of the workers in this field come from Sinaloa. Twenty years ago they might have gone home during the off-season, where the cost of living in their hometowns of Guasave or Los Mochis is a lot lower. They might have spent the holidays with their families, and returned when the work starts up again in the spring. Not any more, though. Going home is too expensive for workers at minimum wage, regardless of their immigration status. And those with no papers are held virtual prisoner in the U.S. by the combination of economics and immigration policy.
Taking inflation into account, wages have been falling in California fields for two decades. Today a bus ticket home, or gas for the car, costs at least a week and a half of full time work at the minimum wage of $9 an hour. For those who don’t have papers, going home is virtually impossible. Just the cost of a coyote to take a returning worker through the desert and across the border is at least $2000. At $9/hour that’s more than a solid month of full time work.
And many people don’t make it. The cemetery in Holtville in the Imperial Valley holds the remains of hundreds who die on the border journey every year, many of whom are found in the desert with no identification, and buried with no name.
So in the west San Joaquin Valley town of Gustine, the trailer parks are full in the winter. The town is evenly divided between residents descended from the Portuguese immigrants who arrived two or three generations ago, and more recent arrivals, mostly from Moyahua in Zacatecas, even further from California than Sinaloa.
Some people get jobs pruning grapevines and cleaning almond orchards, two of the few relatively dependable sources of winter work. But unemployment hits hard here too. The town was once a center of the dairy industry, supplying milk and cheese to nearby cities. The dairy industry has grown elsewhere in the San Joaquin Valley, but Gustine’s cheese plants closed one after another over the last two decades. Its original cheese factory, the New Era Creamery, was built in 1907 when the railroad line was extended down the valley’s west side. New Era closed in 2005, just short of a century in operation. Last year what remained of the structure burned down, leaving residents with even fewer alternatives to labor in the fields.
In the winter, even that labor is hard to find.

by Dan Gordon
UC Newsroom

The United States is a nation of immigrants drawn from all parts of the world by the promise of freedom and a good life. But a substantial body of evidence suggests that for the newly arrived, life in the United States can be hazardous to their well-being.
When they get here, immigrants are on average healthier than their native-born American counterparts. But the longer they stay, the worse they fare on measures such as heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and mental health.
Faculty at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health are working on identifying factors contributing to the declining health status of immigrant groups that’s occurring over time and through the generations.
Part of it has to do with an unfamiliarity with U.S. society and its complicated health care system. Many immigrants lack health insurance. But Marjorie Kagawa-Singer, a professor at the Fielding School who focuses on the delivery of care that appropriately considers a patient’s culture, notes that it’s more than just cost.
“If someone is new to this country, doesn’t speak the language and has to learn to navigate our system, it’s like plopping us in the middle of Siberia and expecting us to figure out what we need,” she said.
For example, many immigrants across the educational and cultural spectrum hold beliefs about disease and how the body works that diverge from the biomedical model practiced in the U.S., Kagawa-Singer added, and many health care practitioners are uneducated on those differences.
“When you have problems in both health literacy among patients and cultural competence among practitioners, you get this ‘perfect storm’ of people who will not be able to utilize the health care system even when it’s offered,” said Kagawa-Singer.
The Latino paradox
Despite social and economic disadvantages, newly arrived Latino immigrants are, by many measures, healthier than other groups. That’s been called the Latino Paradox. But the evidence also shows that the longer these immigrants are in the United States, and through successive generations, the paradox disappears: Risks of chronic conditions such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease increase.
“The suggestion is that they’re adopting unhealthy American lifestyles,” said Alex Ortega, a Fielding School professor whose work focuses on the physical, medical and mental health needs of Latino children and their families. Ortega is also principal investigator of the UCLA Center for Population Health and Health Disparities, a $10 million, five-year effort funded by the National Institutes of Health to study and reduce cardiovascular disease risk in East Los Angeles.
Less attention has been paid to a similar phenomenon. Ortega has found that among Latino children, the longer they have lived in the United States and the more generations their family has been here, the higher the risk for poor mental health. Among the possible explanations: “As people immigrate and become acculturated, in some cases they lose family and social ties. And without those support systems, they lack the safety net to help protect them from the effects of poor mental health,” said Ortega. Similar findings have been reported for other immigrant groups.
The health impacts of discrimination
While assimilation may be a significant factor in immigrants’ worsening health, other factors, such as culture, genetics and socioeconomic status, play an important role. “But they don’t fully explain the health disparities we see,” noted Gilbert Gee, a professor at the Fielding School and member of the UCLA Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Equity. In fact, Gee believes that some of what is attributed to assimilation may actually be the result of the way immigrants are looked upon in their new home.
“Another aspect of being here a long time is that you experience more discrimination,” said Gee, who seeks to measure the impact of that discrimination on mental and physical health. He points out that immigrants go from feeling at home in their country of origin to being viewed as a racial minority.
“Suddenly you’re not Sri Lankan but simply Asian,” Gee said. “It can be stressful enough to come to a new society and learn a new language, but it’s doubly stressful when you’re also dealing with these negative stereotypes.”
In a study of Asian American immigrants, Gee’s group found that clinical depression was more likely to be predicted by experiences of discrimination than by acculturation. Gee suggests that more recent efforts to pass English-only laws have created a hostile climate for immigrant groups, potentially to the detriment of their health.
For Gee, this underscores the notion that civil rights policies are also health policies. “When we’re changing the way we define immigrants, that is likely to have a health impact,” he said.
This story was adapted from a longer version that appears in the Fall 2014 issue of the Fielding School of Public Health Magazine.