Who are the farmworkers in the United States?
According to the US Department of Labor’s 2000 National Agricultural Workers Survey, 77% 4 of the farmworkers surveyed identified as “US born white”; 2% identified as “Latin American born”; 2% as “other US born”; 1% as “US born African Americans”; 1% as “Asian born”; and 1% as “US foreign born”. Please note that the Survey and numbers do not include H2-A guestworkers, who are predominantly Mexican.5 The USDA Economic Research Service, taking their data from the 2000 Current Population Survey (CPS), reports that 46% of hired farmworkers identified as Hispanic.6 In 2002 ERIC Digest issued the following statement on the discrepancies in the statistics cited: “CPS has no specific data about migrant farmworkers; and some statistical discrepancies were inevitable if directly comparing CPS with NAWS. Nevertheless, farmworkers’ basic characteristics were similar as portrayed in these two sources.
