It’s easy to blame farm management for exploitative working conditions, patients’ poor health choices for their chronic pain, and migrant workers’ greed and impatience for their decision to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border. However, when author and physician-anthropologist Seth Holmes actually studies these issues, he realizes that global economic pressures—not individual choices—are actually responsible for them. Because most public conversations about agriculture, medicine, and immigration view individual decisions in a vacuum, without considering these structural factors, public policy consistently tries to change individual behavior rather than global economic conditions. This is usually ineffective. Instead, Holmes shows that, in order to institute more humane and effective public policy, government officials, scholars, and activists must understand the economic pressures that globalization places on individuals and communities.
Global economic forces—not poor individual choices—have caused the interconnected problems that Holmes studies in agriculture, public health, and immigration. Most importantly, the Triqui migrant workers whom Holmes studies don’t go to the U.S. because they want to strike it rich: rather, they literally have no other option. They used to farm corn, but when the North American Free Trade Deal (NAFTA) went into effect, their crop suddenly became uncompetitive with cheap, industrially produced, government subsidized corn from the U.S. Unable to keep farming or find work in Oaxaca, many Triqui people can’t afford to feed themselves or send their children to school. As a result, they have no viable economic option except migrating elsewhere for work. While conventional immigration narratives suggest that people like the Triquis are responsible for the consequences of crossing the border because they’ve freely chosen to do so, Holmes shows that their decisions are not truly free. Rather, because of the globalizing agriculture industry, they have no choice but to migrate.
The effects of globalization are also clear at the other end of the spectrum, in the decisions of the managers and healthcare workers who mistreat the Triqui migrants once they arrive in the U.S. The Tanaka Brothers Farm exploits its workers, forcing them to live in tiny metal shacks and suffer chronic health problems, but its owners are actually charitable, well-intentioned, and generous people. The Tanakas don’t improve these conditions or pay their workers more because they can’t afford to: facing competition from farms overseas, they constantly need to cut corners if they want to avoid bankruptcy. In other words, the Tanaka brothers don’t neglect their workers out of greed and cruelty. Rather, they have no choice because of global market forces in agriculture—the same economic pressures that forced their Triqui workers to leave Oaxaca in the first place. Similar pressures also explain why doctors and nurses provide substandard medical care to migrants. In the for-profit U.S. healthcare system, practitioners have no incentive to treat poor, uninsured immigrants like the Triqui farm workers. When they try to serve such communities out of goodwill, practitioners lack the resources they need to provide effective treatment (like medicine, language interpreters, and administrative support staff). Like the farm owners who can’t afford to treat their workers better because of economic pressures in the globalizing agriculture industry, healthcare workers can’t afford to adequately treat migrant workers’ illnesses because of economic pressures in the profit-seeking healthcare industry. The globalization that causes these problems isn’t an abstract, invisible, or unstoppable market force: rather, it’s a deliberate policy decision that governments have the power and obligation to overturn. Holmes isn’t trying to say that migrant workers’ suffering is inevitable because it’s the result of global forces—rather, he’s saying that it’s impossible to alleviate this suffering simply by changing individual decisions, as systematic policy change is what’s necessary.
To effectively address exploitation and human suffering in agriculture, medicine, and immigration, public policy must target broad economic change, rather than just trying to influence individuals’ decisions. First, limiting undocumented immigration and healing migrants’ suffering at the border requires changing economic conditions in those migrants’ home countries. While many Americans assume that giving more resources, weapons, and political power to the border patrol will dissuade migrants from crossing the border, this assumption is based on a misunderstanding. For most undocumented migrants, crossing the border will nearly always be worth it, as they face worse violence and abject poverty at home. But through policy change, the U.S. government could dissuade people like the Triquis from migrating illegally. By modifying its agricultural export policies, the government could make it possible for them to stay in Mexico, and by giving them protected status as temporary guest workers, the government would make it possible for them to cross the border legally and safely. But improving migrants’ lives and regulating immigration requires this kind of policy change, which targets structural conditions rather than individual decisions. Similarly, whereas the Tanaka brothers can take incremental steps to improve working conditions, they can’t meaningfully improve their workers’ lives unless the government implements new policies to protect workers and farms like theirs. Finally, to solve the problems with migrant healthcare, Holmes argues that it’s necessary but insufficient for individual doctors to unlearn their prejudices and listen better to their immigrant patients. Rather, the U.S. needs to overhaul its healthcare system and address the systemic lack of funding where it’s needed most—in the poorest and sickest communities. Again, Holmes underscores that the solution is public policy, not individual decision-making.
By emphasizing how the global economy impacts individual lives, Holmes hopes to recenter conversations about immigration, healthcare, and agriculture on the structural forces that shape people’s personal decisions. As a result of these forces, the people who actually perpetuate violence and inequality on the ground—like Rob and John Tanaka, who exploit their workers, or the coyotes and Border Patrol agents who duel at the border—have little choice in the matter. As long as the public continues to view these individual decisions in a vacuum, isolated from the global economic context that causes them, the real policy changes needed to aid widespread suffering will never come about.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Global Pressures and Individual Choices ThemeTracker
Global Pressures and Individual Choices Quotes in Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies
My Triqui companions often explain their everyday lives in terms of sufrimiento (suffering). But one of the sites of sufrimiento most frequently described by Triqui migrants is crossing the border from Mexico into the United States. Many times throughout my fieldwork, my migrant companions told me stories of their harrowing experiences. One of my friends was kidnapped for ransom with her four-year-old boy. […] One young man I know described burns on his skin and in his lungs after being pushed by his coyote into a chemical tank on a train. Another man explained that he was raped by a Border Patrol agent in exchange for his freedom. All my migrant companions have multiple stories of suffering, fear, danger, and violence at the border.
Early in my fieldwork, I realized that an ethnography of suffering and migration would be incomplete without witnessing firsthand such an important site of suffering for Latin American migrants.
Traditional migration studies assumes a dichotomy between voluntary, economic, and migrant on the one hand and forced, political, and refugee on the other. The logic behind this dichotomy states that refugees are afforded political and social rights in the host country because they were forced to migrate for political reasons. Conversely, migrants are not allowed these rights because they are understood to voluntarily choose to migrate for economic reasons. The "push" and "pull" factor school of migration studies tends to assume that labor migration is entirely chosen, voluntary, and economic.
However, my Triqui companions experience their labor migration as anything but voluntary. Rather, they have told me repeatedly that they are forced to migrate in order for themselves and their families to survive. At one point during our trek across the border desert, Macario told me, "There is no other option left for us."
Over the course of my fieldwork, many of my friends and family who visited me in the labor camp quickly blamed the farm management for the poor living and working conditions of berry pickers.
[…]
The stark reality and precarious future of the farm serve as reminders that the situation is more complex. The corporatization of U.S. agriculture and the growth of international free markets squeeze growers such that they cannot easily imagine increasing the pay of the pickers or improving the labor camps without bankrupting the farm. In other words, many of the most powerful inputs into the suffering of farmworkers are structural, not willed by individual agents. In this case, structural violence is enacted by market rule and later channeled by international and domestic racism, classism, sexism, and anti-immigrant prejudice. However, structural violence is not just a simple, unidirectional phenomenon; rather macro social and economic structures produce vulnerability at every level of the farm hierarchy.
During my fieldwork, I picked once or twice a week and experienced gastritis, headaches, and knee, back, and hip pain for days afterward. I wrote in a field note after picking, "It honestly felt like pure torture." Triqui pickers work seven days a week, rain or shine, without a day off until the last strawberry is processed. Occupying the bottom of the ethnic-labor hierarchy, Triqui pickers bear an unequal share of health problems, from idiopathic back and knee pains to slipped vertebral disks, from type 2 diabetes to premature births and developmental malformations.
The suffering of Triqui migrant laborers is an embodiment of multiple forms of violence. The political violence of land wars has pushed them to live in inhospitable climates without easy access to water for crops. The structural violence of global neoliberal capitalism forces them to leave home and family members, suffer through a long and deadly desert border crossing, and search for a means to survive in a new land. The structural violence of labor hierarchies in the United States organized around ethnicity and citizenship positions them at the bottom, with the most dangerous and backbreaking occupations and the worst accommodations. Due to their location at the bottom of the pecking order, the undocumented Triqui migrant workers endure disproportionate injury and sickness.
Years later, Abelino still tells me that he has knee pain and that "doctors don't know anything" (los medicos no saben nada).
After considering in some detail the course of Abelino's interactions with health care institutions, this common statement makes more sense. Several assumptions were made along the way, from the absence of stomach problems to his first return to work being "light duty," from his ability to read English to his being paid as an hourly worker, from his incorrect picking as the cause of his injury to his faking of the pain, from the importance of "Objective" biotechnical tests to the disqualification of his words and experiences.
Pierre Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence has proven especially helpful for my understanding of the ways in which the order of inequalities described thus far has become unquestioned and unchallenged, even by those most oppressed. Symbolic violence is the naturalization, including internalization, of social asymmetries. Bourdieu explains that we experience the world through doxa (mental schemata) and habitus (historically accreted bodily comportments) that are issued forth from that very social world and, therefore, make the social order—including its hierarchies—appear natural. Thus we misrecognize oppression as natural because it fits our mental and bodily schemata through which we perceive it. […] Symbolic violence acts within the process of perception, hidden from the conscious mind.
If we social scientists are to research, theorize, and confront socially structured suffering, we must join with others in a broad effort to denaturalize social inequalities, uncovering linkages between symbolic violence and suffering. In this way, the lenses of perception as well as the social inequalities they reinforce can be recognized, challenged, and transformed. This book endeavors to denaturalize ethnic and citizenship inequalities in agricultural labor, health disparities in the clinic, and biologized and racialized inequities in society at large.
