Here’s a little quiz. In North Carolina, which of the following is not required at migrant labor camps: air conditioning, washing machines, or flush toilets. Answer just below.
I’ve been a volunteer outreach worker, trekking from time to time to farmworker labor camps, for a little more than a decade. In North Carolina there is a small constellation of organizations, mostly nonprofits, who visit camps all the time to deliver food, clothing, medical services, or just vital information in Spanish. Over the years I’ve come to know some of these agencies well.
I’ve also come to know more and more about the sad places in which we house our farmworkers in this state. I’ve been to dozens. Hardly one is a place I would ever choose to spend a night in. Recently I reviewed my notes to see I’ve been to 48 camps. This made me wonder: How many camps are there altogether in this state? And where, precisely, is each of them located? I decided to find out.
About that quiz. It’s a trick question. This state, where summer temperatures routinely top 90 degrees, requires no air conditioning at migrant labor camps. Nor washing machines—despite the presumably obvious fact that farm work tends to dirty one’s clothes. Nor flush toilets. Outhouses, or privies, are perfectly fine. Even two-seaters.
Much of this state’s giant agricultural industry is all about crops (our meat production is a whole nother story). Tobacco remains our top crop, followed by sweet potatoes, then grain, then a slew of other items you see in the produce aisle at your grocery store.
North Carolina has always depended on a steady supply of low-cost labor to work our fields, people who will work for the lowest possible compensation and endure the harshest living and working conditions. For about 250 years, enslaved men, women, and children did this work. Then sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Then, migrants moving from state to state with the seasons. Nowadays, around 25 thousand Mexican men with an H-2A visa in their pockets work the fields of North Carolina, leaving their families for the better part of every year, then going back to where they came from. There is no path to citizenship for these workers. We love the work they do. The workers themselves? Not so much.
Since 1986 the US has permitted growers to sponsor a foreign worker’s temporary, non-immigrant visa. Among many requirements of the program, the employer must provide no-cost housing to these workers. Hence there are labor camps all over the state. Nationally, by the way, the H-2A program has taken off like a rocket in recent years. We’ll soon have half a million H-2A farmworkers in the United States each year. But that too is a whole nother story.
I saw my first camp with outhouses in 2013. I was on outreach with the venerable Father Tony of the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry, researching an article I was writing. What I remember most from this camp are the people who did not seem to belong there. One was a baby, less than a year old, strapped to the back of a woman who may have been the camp cook.
The other was a barefoot boy, four or five years old. Watching him run around, I called out a hello, stopping him just long enough that I could snap his photo. Behind him were three ancient outhouses, each with a handmade sign. Two said “MAN” and the third “WOMAN.” It inspired my nickname for the place: Camp Outhouse.
Over the years as an outreach volunteer I had compiled from various sources, and my own experience, a list of camp locations. My personal database, I knew, was incomplete. In my recent quest for a fuller picture, I downloaded from the US Department of Labor every certified H-2A job order a North Carolina employer had submitted for the 2022 growing season, each of which specifies where workers are to be housed. I found 611 such orders, some from dozens of growers filing jointly as part of the North Carolina Growers Association. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, there was little uniformity among the orders, with different employers using different fields for the same information, addresses formatted every which way, and so on. I got to work.
When visiting camps I almost never go inside one. These are homes, I reason, and I respect their occupants’ privacy. At one camp, however, chatting with Juan Carabaña, another legendary North Carolina outreach worker, the men brought up the topic of mattresses. They wanted us to see the colchones here and invited us inside. Juan and I then traipsed through every room of the camp, shocked by more than just the mattresses.
The first thing I noticed was darkness. Each room was lit by a single low-wattage bulb in the middle of its ceiling. Next was a cloying smell, the result of men living in close quarters among hundreds of pieces of clothing, food items and other such stuff, in rooms with almost no ventilation. Despite being a pleasant 70 degrees or so outside, inside it was at least ten degrees hotter, especially in the kitchen. Here, beside an old sink was a row of stoves, each of which should have gone to a landfill twenty years earlier. Or thirty. Flypaper hung from nearly every ceiling in the camp. The darkness of the kitchen may have been a blessing. It made the dangling ribbons of dead insects less noticeable. The bathroom had four toilets, but two had no seats or tank tops and looked like they hadn’t been swabbed in years. And then there were those colchones.
Of the 18 mattresses the men uncovered for us, exactly one of them was in decent shape, with no apparent tears, no stuffing escaping, and no metal springs sticking out. Each of the others had some or all of those problems. Some were so bad the men had topped them with collapsed cardboard boxes to keep the ends of metal springs from piercing their skin while they slept.
My job order data analysis took longer than expected. But after more than 100 hours of file conversion, Python scripting, data cleanup and geocoding, I had converted my pile of PDFs into a single personal Google map of 1,620 H-2A housing sites. Zooming in and reading the summary data I included for each site, I can see they range in size from a single mobile home for one worker to a giant complex of structures with beds for 400 workers. Farm labor camps, I can now say, and indeed see, are located in 86 of North Carolina’s 100 counties, clustered mostly around Sampson County on the eastern side of the state.
Outreach workers often give nicknames to camps. These are typically based on some nearby landmark or distinguishing feature, such as the privies at my Camp Outhouse. With so many camps to keep track of, these can be helpful. I was both curious and disturbed, however, when I first heard someone refer to “the POW Camp.” Upon visiting the camp myself, my curiosity about the nickname was satisfied before the outreach van had even rolled to a stop. Surrounding the complex is a tall, chain link fence topped by three strands of industrial barbed wire. Home to 50 or so men, the aging wooden barracks here are held off the ground by stacks of cinder blocks—one can picture a camp guard shining a flashlight underneath to check for signs of prisoners digging escape tunnels. The POW Camp also features outhouses. These, fortunately, are placed outside the barbed-wire fence to keep some distance between their stewing odors and the sleeping men.
Not every farm labor camp in North Carolina features barbed wire, or outhouses, or mattresses with steel wires poking a sleeper’s back. But each one could. Like many states, we do have health and safety standards for our migrant labor camps, and a staff of state workers charged with seeing them upheld. What we lack are dignity standards. There is no law here, for example, against surrounding a camp with a barbed wire fence, reminding workers each time they enter they are more like beasts of burden in a corral than people who deserve a decent place to live.
Much as I’ve wanted to, driving home after visiting one of these hovels, I cannot entirely blame our growers for the way things are. Some individual growers should be ashamed of themselves. Certainly. But crop growers generally are under intense pressure to keep their costs down, due in large part to foreign competition and a federally mandated minimum wage for H-2A workers. Here, that wage is now $15.81 per hour. Our growers’ competitors in other countries can, and do, pay a small fraction of that wage to their workers doing the very same work. It’s little wonder so many growers here spend so little money maintaining their worker housing.
Blaming growers for the poor quality of North Carolina’s farmworker housing is way too easy. Responsibility for this situation lies with the elected officials who write our laws. And with those of us who elect them.
It would take me nine years to get back to Camp Outhouse. While I had taken photos back in 2013, I failed to note where exactly Father Tony had driven us that night. He retired in 2017. Juan Carabaña looked at my photos of the camp but did not recognize it. I simply could not find the place. Then, after hours of scanning satellite views of potential locations one day, I spotted the one feature of this camp most visible from the sky: those three little outhouses.
On one of the hottest days of 2022, Juan took me and a small crew of outreach workers to Camp Outhouse. More than 90 men, mostly bare-chested, lined up to receive food and other items from the back of our van. I learned from the workers there was no longer an onsite cook here, and no children. Only workers and only men.
The outhouses were still there, now supplemented by a row of portable toilets, the kind you see at construction sites and music festivals. When Juan asked the men what they thought of these, their faces lit up. They liked them, they told us, because someone came to clean them out every few weeks. To them, this was something to appreciate, indeed, to boast about. Their outhouses had been upgraded to portajohns.
Photos by Michael Durbin
Michael Durbin 
This is America?
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Great piece, Michael. I’ll see Leticia this morning, and I’ll make sure she sees it. Dave
Michael, You have provided us fortunate readers with a hard-to-shake-off portrayal of these people’s horrific situation. Your eye for graphic details, your photographs, and your tireless research for hard data–all these make an impact. Running through all of this is your empathy for the workers and, yes, for the growers. Now it’s up to our legislators and to us who vote for better ones. Thank you.
Although the requirements for migrant housing are very minimum most farmers in NC provide more than what is required. There are more good housing sites than bad housing sites. Your view does not do justice to all the farmers in NC who do a good job providing free housing to migrant workers.