Political Memes

Some choice excerpts:

Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California's Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. "We worked three days and all of us are broke," the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.

"These [high school students] had the words and whiteness to say what they were feeling and could act out in a way that Mexican-Americans who had been living this way for decades simply didn't have the power or space for the American public to listen to them," [Stony Brook University history professor Lori A. Flores] says. "The students dropped out because the conditions were so atrocious, and the growers weren't able to mask that up."

She says the A-TEAM "reveals a very important reality: It's not about work ethic [for undocumented workers]. It's about [the fact] that this labor is not meant to be done under such bad conditions and bad wages."

And what one dude who went through the program as a 17 year old has to say about it now:

But he says the experience also taught them empathy toward immigrant workers that Carter says the rest of the country should learn, especially during these times.

"There's nothing you can say to us that [migrant laborers] are rapists or they're lazy," he says. "We know the work they do. And they do it all their lives, not just one summer for a couple of months. And they raise their families on it. Anyone ever talks bad on them, I always think, 'Keep talking, buddy, because I know what the real deal is.' "

My reading is that it failed because there was no political will to actually provide for local-born farmers any more than immigrants. And as such, it was doomed to fail from the start.