I am one of ten kids of Bill and Lorraine Durbin. My dad’s father died before I was born, but my mom’s dad, the remarkable James Kalish, was a regular presence in my life as a kid.
In the 1960s, he and his wife Bernice lived in East St. Louis, Illinois, and we lived in nearby Fairview Heights. They came to our house all the time, or we went to theirs, and there is one thing that struck me about Grandpa Kalish more than anything else: He was always happy, always impressed with whatever his grandkids were up to, and always so positive—about everything.
As a child, I knew nothing about the childhood of our Grandpa Kalish, nor his family history, nor what his life had been like before I met him. Only now, decades later, do I know enough about his early years to realize how incredible it is that he was so happy in his later years.
For the past few months I’ve been looking into my family history, posting here as I went. Now it’s all in a new section of this website.
I’ve been curious about this story for more than fifty years. In 1973, when I was ten, I asked my parents if we had a family tree. “No,” came the answer, “but let’s make one.” Sitting at our kitchen table in Fairview Heights, Illinois, Mom and Dad jotted down the name of every ancestor and relative they could think of. They tossed out names to each other, pausing occasionally, then suddenly blurting out a name that meant nothing to me. In his perfect cursive handwriting, Dad wrote down names that went back two or three generations, with lines connecting them, until they could think of no more. That tree went back about 80 years. Today we can go back more than three centuries.
When I moved to North Carolina from Chicago in 2005, I had no idea that so much of our nation’s food was still harvested by hand. Now, twenty years later, that hasn’t really changed. Much of the produce in any grocery store–the peppers and melons and berries and whatnot–is still picked by human hands.
What has changed is the number of so-called guestworkers those hands belong to. These are the citizens of other countries who leave their families for the better part of every year to work in US crop fields, authorized by an H-2A temporary seasonal visa. In the early 2000s, the number of H-2A workers across the US hovered around 50 or 60 thousand. Now it’s almost half a million. Most are from Mexico. Most are dads.
To the Mexican farmworker, the appeal of going north each year is obvious. Here, they can earn in one hour what might take two days back home. But they must live apart from their families for the better part of each year–typically 6-9 months, often longer–and live in a labor camp that may or may not comply with even the barest of housing standards.
For many years, no state brought in more H-2A workers than North Carolina. The nation’s very largest H-2A employer is here, as is one of the nation’s only farmworker unions. It’s an ideal place to peer into what works well in the H-2A program and what does not. In North Carolina one can also get a glimpse of true family farming operations, struggling to make ends meet, who depend on H-2A labor. There are scores of those. For the past few years I’ve been diving deep into this little known world, trying to understand it. I’ve done my best to convey what I learned in my bookFinding America’s Farmworkers: Reaching Out in North Carolina.
With the second Trump administration now getting underway, nobody knows what’s in store for the army of guestworkers who depend on the H-2A program to feed their families–nor for the growers who depend on it to feed theirs. There were no day one executive orders aimed directly at the H-2A. Changes are expected, especially for US farmworkers outside the H-2A program, struggling moms and dads lacking work authorization, now at risk of being swept up in mass deportations.
In recent years, the population of agricultural guestworkers in the US has exploded. It’s not inconceivable that growth has just begun. If we are to continue growing food in this country, somebody must harvest all those peppers, melons, and berries. We may also see expansion of the guestworker program in other industries.
Before that happens, I hope we will consider what things are like today for all the homesick dads who work in our fields.
An H-2A farmworker looks out from his labor camp barracks in Sampson County, North Carolina, 2019. Photo by Michael Durbin
