Driven by harsh conditions in their homelands, laborers travel far, only to see new hardships here

BY RONNIE GREENE

IMMOKALEE - At dawn, the migrant workers huddle around the red-and-blue buses that deliver them to Florida's rich farm fields. One by one, they pile into the rickety carriers, their fingers dirty with Florida soil, their faces weathered from sun-soaked labor.

This is farm country, Immokalee, Florida. Just 100 short miles from South Florida's urban shuffle, Immokalee feels a century away. The streets are dusty, the traffic slow -- farmhands trudging or riding bikes, cars a luxury beyond the reach of most.

By day, they pluck the tomatoes and oranges that are the lifeblood of Florida's agriculture economy. By night, they return to their modest camps, where they turn on fans to shoo the heat and tally the earnings they will send back home.

In Immokalee, you will find the face of Florida's farmworkers. While some pockets of the Sunshine State include American men recruited from homeless camps to harvest crops, Immokalee's workforce, mirroring the farmworker profile across the nation, is largely Mexican-born.

The men, women and some children laboring here paid steep fees for the privilege. Many walked through the desert to touch U.S. soil in Arizona, then paid $1,000 or more to be smuggled to Florida on the back floor of furtive vans.

And, like farmworkers nationwide, they struggle. Certainly, the long hours under the sun provide more pay than most ever earned back home.

But this prosperity is relative. Most farmworkers nationwide earn less than poverty pay. And in Florida, some have been criminally abused. Immokalee and the farm towns beyond it have been home to three of the five farmworker slavery prosecutions brought against Florida farm contractors and smugglers since 1996.

In 2000, the U.S. Department of Labor issued A Demographic and Employment Profile of U.S. Farmworkers, which was based on interviews with 4,199 farmworkers in 85 counties from 1996 to 1998.

The study found that:

• 61 percent of U.S. farmworkers had income below the poverty level.

• The median income was less than $7,500 a year.

• 14 percent of farmworkers owned or were buying a home in 1997-98. Three years earlier, the ratio had been one in three.

• 77 percent of U.S. farmworkers were Mexican-born.

• More than half of America's farmworkers -- 52 of every 100 -- were unauthorized workers.

In Immokalee, these numbers have faces.