< Previous page
Next page >

Other large farms maintain housing for migrant workers. Dale Bone, one of the state's largest farmers until he retired this year, said he considered housing a required part of hiring transient Mexican labor. During 30 years growing tobacco, sweet potatoes and cucumbers, he built enough dormitories, houses and apartments to hold 1,100 workers.

Bone said his housing kept workers coming back.

"If you didn't have housing, you weren't going to have no labor," Bone said, "because there wasn't no place to get any housing."

Long, Ag-Mart's president, said running housing would be too burdensome for his company. He said the company would have to check that workers haven't, for example, thrown trash in the yards or pulled mattresses off frames, putting the housing in violation of state standards.

He said many workers prefer to live without that kind of intrusion from their employer.

"Would you like to live so, every morning, I came to your house and said, 'Let me see what the inside of your house looks like'?" Long said.

He also said some workers have chosen to stay in North Carolina year-round, so they wouldn't need migrant housing.

Many of the company's workers live in the only housing available in this rural swath of Eastern North Carolina -- aging trailers and abandoned buildings scattered alongside rural roads.

On a recent visit to Pender County, The News & Observer found four unregistered camps of Mexican migrants who said they worked for Ag-Mart. Some of the camps were groups of trailers, while others were just one house that held several workers. Under state law, even a single trailer must be registered with the state if it houses migrant farmworkers.

At each location, stained mattresses resting on bare floors filled nearly all the living space. Twelve people lived in a cinder-block home about the size of a double-wide trailer, and two single-wide trailers housed eight people each.

Kitchen appliances were caked with dirt. Window screens often flapped in the breeze, and the sweltering homes buzzed with flies and other insects.

The men in one trailer, at the end of a dirt road just north of Currie, said they travel between Ag-Mart's farms in North Carolina and Florida -- living in housing that labor contractors arrange.

They said the cluster of trailers is home to Ag-Mart workers every growing season, although labor officials found no registrations for homes at that address since 2004.

The law's standards

State law requires 50 square feet of sleeping space for every occupant. Luginbuhl said that means no more than four or five people can live in one single-wide.

At this home, the men said seven adults and one child lived in the trailer. The living room held two mattresses. A stroller and baby walker were piled on the couch. Dirt streaked the walls. A man heated tortillas in a kitchen teeming with flies.

Several miles west, near the town of Atkinson, five adults and three children shared a single-wide trailer.

One woman said she illegally crossed the border six years ago, when she was 18. She left behind her parents, corn farmers from Hidalgo, and a daughter who was then just a year old. She hasn't seen the child since.

Now 24, she has two more children, ages 1 and 3, and said she earns $20 to $100 a day picking tomatoes. The money pays for a tiny room at the end of the trailer, which she shares with her husband and children. Another family lives in a small room at the other end, and a single man has his bed in the living room.

The trailer is lighted by bare bulbs hooked to extension cords. Some windows are made from boards. Screens are torn free. Thin carpet partially covers plywood floors, and ceiling tiles are stained from leaks.

< Previous page
Next page >