DATELINE:
Bittersweet Harvest.
REPORTERS: Aaron Thomas and Catherine Scott
JOSE MANUEL GONZALES (Translation): We’ll start working again now on this strip here.
In the tobacco fields of North Carolina, Jose Manuel Gonzales is beginning another day of back-breaking work.
JOSE MANUEL GONZALES (Translation): It’s hard work starting from 5 a.m. From 4 we are on our feet. We work through and finish up by 5.30 p.m. but we don’t get back here until around 7 or 8 at night.
Jose's here trying to put his three kids back in Mexico through school.
JOSE MANUEL GONZALES (Translation): So that my kids don’t have to work as hard as their dad and can lead a better life. My youngest is five years old, so I won’t be taking a break from this until he has a future.
Jose and over a million other migrant workers are the lifeblood of America's giant $400 billion agriculture industry, but the hard labour and low pay means few Americans want the work, so it's mostly done by Latinos - Mexican migrants like Jose Manuel.
Nadia Moreno knows all about migrant workers her family has toiled in the sun for decades.
NADIA MORENO: I come from a third-generation farm working family. The first time I went to the fields was with my grandpa on a Saturday, when I was seven or eight, because Saturday is when the inspectors don't show up.
What she saw inspired her to take action. She's heading to a training camp where young activists will learn how to protect the rights of farm workers like her parents.
NADIA MORENO: Seeing them struggle and everything made me want to do something better and to continue going to school until someday to be able to help them and give back to them because they give so much to us.
CATHY CROWE: Growing up in the south you hear about slavery a lot.
Cathy Crowe is also heading to the program.
CATHY CROWE: You hear about those conditions and they say we're done with the plantation system.
The plantations are etched deep in America's psyche - part legend, part grim reality. Generations have come and gone here but the hard labour continues.
CATHY CROWE: I went to those fields and then as we were driving people pointed out that they're still an old plantation and now we have farm workers that are living in those exact same plantations, the same structure, with the same quality of life. It was just really shocking.
Cathy soon got fired up about the workers' conditions, which most Americans aren't even aware of.
CATHY CROWE: People talk about food justice, but when people talk about food justice, they mean they want my food local and organic. They think about how was that pig treated, how was the pig slaughtered but they never say how was that worker treated.
WOMAN: You're not employees of SAF, you're not employees of your organisation. By law you are considered volunteers or trainees.
Cathy and Nadia are joining college students from around the country. They've given up their Summer Holidays to volunteer with a group called Student Action with Farm workers.
WOMAN (Translation): Sometimes they share their food and invite us to eat with them.
For the next two months they'll be striving to improve the conditions, health and rights of farm workers.
MARY LEE HALL, MANAGING ATTORNEY LEGAL AID OF NORTH CAROLINA: I think most of us will be doing outreach where the workers live because they have the right to control that.
Today they're learning about the laws that govern migrant farm workers.
MARY LEE HALL: That's illegal, no protective gear for pesticides.
MAN: Is there like a maximum number of hours they can work per day?
MARY LEE HALL: No.
The issue that most upsets farm workers is being underpaid by unscrupulous bosses.
WOMAN (Translation): We can talk here, we have some information.
To prepare the students are role-playing how to approach farm workers who are having problems.
MAN (Translation): Okay, we are going to give you our number, if have any questions or something.
And also practising how they will react if they're confronted by an angry farmer.
FARMER: Hey, who are you guys?
MAN: We're from the health clinic.
FARMER: The health clinic? My workers don't need anything from you. They're fine, they're healthy, they work every day.
MAN: Sounds good, we'll leave.
For Nadia the exercise brings back childhood memories of her own encounters with outreach workers.
NADIA MORENO: Nobody would talk to them like we would, just avoid talking to them, because you don't know if they they've come with legal services or they're here to check your documentation or anything. So as a farm worker we close in on that so if they ask you something you'll be like, ahh... But never really talk to them.
For Cathy that distrust is going to be even harder to overcome.
CATHY CROWE: Spanish isn't my first language. I'm not a farm worker. My parents didn't do farm work. It's hard to get people trust me when I come for them to know I'm not an immigration officer, I'm not a police officer, I'm really just here to help them.
DONALD TRUMP, REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: When Mexico sends its people, they are not sending their best.
The immigration debate is reaching fever pitch in America after the billionaire Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign.
DONALD TRUMP: They're sending people who have lots of problems and they are bringing those problems to us. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists.
Trump's racist speech only adds to decades of stigma which has taken its toll on many of these students.
GERARDO SILGUERO: Growing up as a migrant worker, it's kind of something you didn't want to share with anybody. You sort of kept that away from people because you did want to be that modern American kid. You don't want to be that outcast.
MELINDA WIGGENS, STUDENT ACTION WITH FARMWORKERS: A lot of those students haven't shared their stories out of their circles right. Many of them grew up in farm worker communities, they grew up around Latinos. They haven't had to say to an outside group or a diverse group, here's my story.
Growing up near America's southern border, Nadia's family lived in constant fear of immigration checks.
NADIA MORENO: So I really didn't know that I was undocumented until I was in High School. I live in Hatch which is 30 minutes away from Cruces, but there is a checkpoint in between. We would never go out to the movies or for ice-cream with our friends because you would have to go to Las Cruces to get there. So we never asked my mum why it was we would never go.
Nadia has lived most of her life in the USA, but as an undocumented migrant she has no official status and can't access financial aid or subsidies like her fellow school mates. Jose Cisneros is also undocumented and found himself in the same boat.
JOSE CISNEROS: I got really frustrated when I was looking into colleges and I realised that I was not eligible for in-state tuition for the majority of scholarships and grants and even though I was a number one student in my class, I was not eligible for any of this.
Nadia was already unpacked in her dorm room when she found out her scholarship was denied. So her parents pulled out the family's savings to pay for the first semester's tuition up front.
NADIA MORENO: They're what make me want to move forward. They're what makes me proud. Like my dad has a sixth grade education and so does my mum, that's all they were able to do. But he sits on that tractor for 12 hours and my mum comes back from the fields and when they come back I'm like, wow, my parents have the best occupation because regardless they've been able to give me of everything.
Nadia and Jose are lucky. Eventually they received one of the few scholarships undocumented students can access. Now Jose wants to change the system to give others a chance.
JOSE CISNEROS: There are thousands of other students, more than a million in the US, who want to go to college and are undocumented and can't fully obtain what they want.
NADIA MORENO: I think it's on the way to our placement.
As the week's training wraps up, the students start to mentally prepare for their farm visits, for some that means thinking about their parents who've sacrificed so much for them.
GERARDO SILGUERO: I'm not really worried of where I'm going to go, or who I'm going to confront or who's going to confront me. I can handle that by myself. I'm more worried about, I guess about letting them down or not being enough, not...
REPORTER: Not doing enough to repay the debt you feel you owe them?
GERARDO SILGUERO: Yeah, an enormous debt. I feel like I think that's what worries me the most.
I return to North Carolina a month later on Independence Day. While people are celebrating all the ideals of the American dream, for the nation's farm workers it's just a day without work or pay stuck far from the celebrations.
CATHY CROWE: We're about to do outreach at a pretty big camp. There should be about 28 workers.
Cathy is interning for a local clinic doing health education. Sometimes half the battle, though, is just finding the workers' unmarked camps.
CATHY CROWE: We always draw little pictures on their folders to say, OK, you're going to see a yellow sign and you're going to turn right onto this long gravel driveway and you may go half a mile down and then you'll find their trailer.
We eventually find tonight's camp. Cathy and her colleagues set up for dinner before getting down to business.
CATHY CROWE: Usually when we first go out there they're very shy. Most of them it seems like they don't want us to come in. They're like, why are you here, what's going on? I'm tired, I want to go to bed, I want to eat. Then we start joking with them and talking with them and they are like okay your people who want to reach out.
CATHY CROWE (Translation): That’s a bit more fun than going through the topics page by page. It’s called Jeopardy! Typically how many glasses of water should you drink per hour?
CATHY CROWE: I'm usually thinking do they understand me first – do they understand the Spanish that I am saying, a lot of times I'll just repeat myself until I'm, like, OK I got it.
WOMAN (Translation): For how much? 300? The question is true or false. Alcohol is a good way to combat depression.
MAN (Translation): True?
The game might seem trivial, but it keeps the men engaged.
CATHY CROWE: They really got into it. They were like, "Choose that one, choose that one. They got really competitive with each other.
Among the farmworkers I spot Jose Manuel, he seems to be enjoying himself tonight, but the laughter can't hide his loneliness.
JOSE MANUEL GONZALES (Translation): The hardest part is being away from my family and feeling isolated. We just work here in the fields, then we go home. One day a week we buy our food for our lunch with our co-workers. So we don’t see our kids, just the same work with our co-workers. it's hard feeling isolated here.
CATHY CROWE: I think breaking that isolation for them is really nice. A lot of times they open up to you during the health assessment.
CATHY CROWE (Translation): How many people in your family are dependent on you?
CATHY CROWE: You ask how many people in your family and they tell you all their kids names and if their kids are in high school or college and what they are doing, you can tell they just want to get to know you and tell you about their lives.
200km away Nadia has been having similar experiences. Today she's bringing toiletries donated by a local church to a farm workers' camp.
BETO (Translation): I’m thinking about my kids, I’m going inside.
One of the men, Beto, shows me the room he shares with his cousin. The farm owners are required to provide accommodation for these men, but poor housing is a common complaint. Beto's camp is as about as good as it gets but many farm workers aren'ts so fortunate. I wasn't allowed to access camps with very poor conditions for fear of antagonising the farm owners and making the situation even worse for the exploited workers, but Nadia has been taking photos at some of the camp sites that have upset her.
BETO (Translation): When we get back, they let us know if there’ll be work or not.
NADIA MORENO: There's one camp that has two toilets for 25 or 23 workers, and it is just separated by a curtain and the boys were saying that they have five showers and only two work. And so they live four or five to one room. There's no air conditioning. It's sickening to see that this qualifies for 30 people to live here.
Whatever the living conditions the work itself can be a health hazard. Jose Manuel and his men are back in the fields picking tobacco leaves at the risk of getting what's called 'green tobacco sickness"'.
STEPHANIE TRIANTAFILLOU, PIEDMONT HEALTH CENTRE: What the green tobacco sickness is, is actual dermal absorption of nicotine from the tobacco plant. Usually green tobacco sickness will present itself as nausea, vomiting, dizziness and often a rash on the skin.
Jose Manuel has suffered this condition before, which is why he's wearing rubber overalls, while others have garbage bags tied around them as their only protection, but that brings its own dangers in the North Carolina summer. It's only 10am and already the humidity and heat are soaring.
STEPHANIE TRIANTAFILLOU: Every summer we know of workers who die of heat stroke and if they don't die of heat stroke they experience heat stress.
CAL BERRYHILL, FARM OWNER: Our contact is for £600,000.
Cal Berryhill is Jose Manuel's boss. He's adamant that none of the farm owners he knows would drive their workers to heat stroke.
CAL BERRYHILL: I don't see any of that going on here. Here, it maybe I'm not aware of it. We realise these guys are human and they they're like me when it gets hot. It's tough work. But I don't know of anyone around here that would be called a slave driver.
Cal insists migrant workers are absolutely vital for agriculture, but their working conditions remain far worse than other industries.
MELINDA WIGGENS: Why are farmworkers treated differently under these labour laws? Why can children work in the fields as young as ten? Why if you work on a small farm are you not covered by workers' comp why don't they get overtime protection, basic labour laws that we all take for granted.
Importing Mexican workers started as an emergency measure during World War II and already the conditions they faced were extremely harsh.
MELINDA WIGGENS: Those laws were passed in the 30s and farmworkers were either exempt altogether or treated differently, primarily because at that time overwhelming majority of farmworkers were black, African Americans. It was all about racism, it was about nothing else.
Jose has already come a long way from his family's humble origins and today he's working to change the laws requiring undocumented students to pay more for university than other locals.
JOSE CISNEROS: I knew so many other students at my school that wanted to go to college, that wanted to do something, be nurses, be teachers, be lawyers. And they just couldn't. So I feel that it's part of my duty as an undocumented student who made it to college to do something positive.
As it turns out, Jose's internship is at North Carolina's General Assembly, where he's lobbying for a new bill.
JOSE CISNEROS: Basically the bill would grant undocumented students in this state and state tuition, if they've lived here for more than three years. Would you be willing to support something like this?
Jose is trying to get politicians like Representative Howard Hunter to support this bill.
HOWARD HUNTER, POLITICIAN: I will be supporting something like this.
JOSE CISNEROS: Thank you so much, we really appreciate your support.
HOWARD HUNTER: No problem.
But others are proving much harder for Jose to persuade.
JOSE CISNEROS: Even though they do tell us these things in private, they don't publicly come out and support it. It's just interesting to see how that dynamic works with what they are scared of when it comes to re-election.
But Jose is not giving up. He's finding ways to pressure a key Senator and he's hopeful that a federal solution won't be too far away.
JOSE CISNEROS: I have the feeling and the hope that immigration reform will happen within the next Presidency.
Back out in the farmland, it's finally Sunday. The farmworkers' one day off.
NADIA MORENO: Today we have church service for the farmworkers. There's people playing soccer in the back, there's a soccer tournament back there. They will sit here and eat and talk and enjoy mass for the Sunday.
The atmosphere here lifts everyone's spirits.
SON (Translation): we have seen each other a few times.
NADIA MORENO: That’s great.
SON (Translation): Yes, it’s nice to have company.
NADIA MORENO: It is.
Nadia gets talking to a young worker who is feeling a lot less isolated because he's recently been joined here by his father.
FATHER (Translation): It gives me so much happiness being here with him.
SON (Translation): It’s funny, he is the weirdo one in the team.
NADIA MORENO: The new guy?
SON (Translation): Yes, the new guy. I was always craving company and it’s even better that it’s my dad.
The confidence he gets from his dad is something Nadia can relate to.
NADIA MORENO: My parents are like my rock. They're both farmworkers and through them I see everybody else out in the fields and so that's kind of what pushes me to finish and to not just give up halfway and to continue going to school.
REPORTER: I can hear in your voice you sound a little proud. Are you proud?
NADIA MORENO: Yeah. My mum would always tell us - "Life isn't easy". So it was like a little thing that everybody in the field would say. That kind of stuck with me. She says, "There's always roadblocks, but if you really want to do something, if you really want to fight for something, then you can find new ways to do it".
It's been a life-changing two months for Nadia and now she's found her calling.
NADIA MORENO: I really think I've found what I want to do with social work. I've found my place.
This experience has been profound for all the students. Defying the Trump stereotypes, they're striving to make America better and finding a new self-confidence along the way.
GERARDO SILGUERO: Before I used to think being a farmworker was the worst thing in the world, something you don't really share with people, you know, you try to avoid talking about that stuff because I don't know, maybe you think it's embarrassing or you think it's not fantastic work, you know. But now I feel real proud about it. I've been getting such an urgency - yes, my parents did this, I was there with them, I saw them, I witnessed it. And it's like, there's nothing negative about that, it’s such an important job. Farmworkers literally feed the world. Without us there would be no - have you ever had an apple? You're welcome, you know.
Reporter
AARON THOMAS
Story producer
CATHERINE SCOTT
Camera and story editor
AARON THOMAS
Translations
EMILY BARTON
FLORENCIA MELGAR
Publicity
NATALIE DUBOIS
Editors
MICAH MCGOWN
DAVID POTTS
RYAN WALSH
Title music
VICKI HANSEN
27th October 2015