This New York Times article focuses on Mississippi, but it’s close to home. It’s about a lawsuit in which Black farmworkers say they have been displaced by higher-paid foreign labor.
Black families with deep connections to the Delta have historically been the ones to perform fieldwork. That began to change about a decade ago, when the first of dozens of young, white workers flew in from South Africa on special guest worker visas. Mr. Strong and his co-workers trained the men, who by last year were being lured across the globe with wages of more than $11 an hour, compared with the $7.25 an hour that Mr. Strong and other Black local workers were paid.
Growers brought in more South Africans with each passing year, and they are now employed at more than 100 farms across the Delta. Mr. Strong, 50, and several other longtime workers said they were told their services were no longer needed.
Use of the agricultural guest worker program has been rising, the article notes, from about 55,000 visas in 2011 to more than 213,000 in 2020. No figures on Arkansas in this article.
The lawsuit says foreign workers have been paid more illegally and Black workers have been subjected to demeaning treatment. The suit also says it was a violation of civil rights law to hire only white workers from South Africa, a country with a history of racial injustice.