Sweet Tyranny: Migrant Labor, Industrial Agriculture, and Imperial Politics

5. Immigrant Labor and the Guest Worker Program

5 Immigrant Labor and the Guest Worker Program Soon after the United States formally entered World War I, the Michigan Sugar Company came up with a plan to convince eastern European migrant families to stay in the countryside year-round. It would erect “modest but comfortable houses” near the factories and sell them to “any of the beet workers who wish to take advantage of the offer on the deferred payment plan.” To drum up support among farmers and townspeople, the sugar company claimed that building homes for migrant families would not only solve their looming labor shortage, it would also be a means to “Americanize” the migrant population. “It is patriotic in that it will tend to teach these people American ideals and make them stable citizens. It has its social side, making for better morals among them together with giving them home responsibility, and then there is the economic side through which they will be imbued with the habit of thrift. Having a home to work for they will be less apt to squander their money uselessly, as so often many of them do.”1 Despite the company’s initial enthusiasm about building houses for eastern Europeans—and thereby transforming them from migrants into neighbors and citizens—it soon abandoned its home-building plans and instead began recruiting thousands of Mexicans to work in the fields. In 1918, Michigan Sugar Company officials announced in one small-town newspaper that, “unable to get a sufficient number of Russians [we] were compelled to resort to the dark skin fellows.”2 The following year, the company attempted to assuage fears about a possible labor shortage by letting local farmers know that “[a]nother bunch of Mexicans were brought to the vicinity this week.”3 By 1920, the company continued its strategy by recruiting at least five thousand Mexicans to toil in the fields. Both the plan to build houses and, even more significant, the decision to recruit Mexican workers, provides a window onto the numerous ways World War I disrupted labor relations in rural Michigan.4 Simply put, the war threatened the migrant family labor system that Michigan’s sugar beet companies had worked so hard to create over the past two decades. For the war, which had inaugurated a period of all-time high sugar prices, also created thousands of jobs in nearby industrial centers like Detroit, Saginaw, and Flint, thereby making it possible for many eastern Europeans, who had long combined urban/industrial work with migrant labor, to stay in the cities yearround . Just as important, the eastern Europeans who chose to remain in the fields were growing ever more militant, demanding higher wages and better living conditions. Therefore, less than a year after United States Department of Labor (USDL) Secretary William B. Wilson responded to the demands of southwestern growers by announcing that his department would waive the contract labor law, head tax, and literacy requirement for Mexicans coming to work in agriculture, Michigan’s sugar beet industrialists and farmers began to hire Mexican workers as well. They did so, however, not with the intention of turning the newly arriving Mexicans into neighbors, much less citizens. The announcement that Mexicans would toil in the fields was not followed by plans to build them houses, and thereby transform them socially, politically , or economically. Rather, the sugar companies hoped that Mexicans would tend to the crop as needed and then return south of the border when no longer wanted. Although the strategy of recruiting Mexicans may have seemed like the ideal solution to their labor problems, industrialists and growers would soon find that relying on a government program, which was basically a racialized labor program, would come with political costs. Perhaps most important of all, it would ensure that their “labor problem” would no longer be a private affair but rather a matter of national and even international interest. For its part, the federal government found itself acting as a labor padrone, a position that would prove much easier to assume than to abandon. “The State as Padrone”5 The “labor shortage” that threatened rural Michigan during World War I was part of a national crisis as farmers from coast to coast scoured the nation in immigrant labor and the guest worker program · 123 search of workers. In the South, white planters complained that the war had disrupted land, labor, and race relations as thousands of African Americans...