What impact did the Great Depression have on immigration in the 1930s?
The Great Depression of the 1930s hit Mexican immigrants especially hard. Along with the job crisis and food shortages that affected all U.S. workers, Mexicans and Mexican Americans had to face an additional threat: deportation.
What were some of the struggles that migrant workers faced in the 1930s?
Working conditions were often unsafe and unsanitary. Migrant workers had to follow the harvest of different crops, so they had to continue to pack up and move throughout California to find work. When the migrant workers weren’t working, they enjoyed recreational and social activities. Many sang and played instruments.
What was migration like in the 1930s?
In the 1930s, farmers from the Midwestern Dust Bowl states, especially Oklahoma and Arkansas, began to move to California; 250,000 arrived by 1940, including a third who moved into the San Joaquin Valley, which had a 1930 population of 540,000. During the 1930s, some 2.5 million people left the Plains states.
Where did migrant workers go during the Great Depression?
Many families left farm fields to move to Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay area, where they found work in shipyards and aircraft factories that were gearing up to supply the war effort. By 1950, only about 25 percent of the original Dust Bowl migrants were still working the fields.
What happened to the migrant workers in the 1930s?
The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl (a period of drought that destroyed millions of acres of farmland) forced white farmers to sell their farms and become migrant workers who traveled from farm to farm to pick fruit and other crops at starvation wages.
How much did migrant workers get paid in the 1930?
Migrant workers in California who had been making 35 cents per hour in 1928 made only 14 cents per hour in 1933. Sugar beet workers in Colorado saw their wages decrease from $27 an acre in 1930 to $12.37 an acre three years later.
What would a typical day be like for a migrant worker in the 1930s?
The typical day for a migrant worker was very difficult they moved place to place looking for jobs. The workers asked to stay at a home but it always came with a price, the price was work. The workers had to do a job and once they were finished they could stay at the place for the night.
What happened to migrant workers in the 1930s?
How are migrant workers treated today?
We’ve seen how this legacy affects care work today: low pay, no benefits, and it’s often illegal to unionize. In addition to their lack of labor protections, these workers’ social standing makes them even more susceptible to abuse at work, including wage theft and sexual harassment or assault.