Estimates of how many Mexicans die every year attempting to cross into the US for work vary; Border Patrol counts of annual deaths range from 400-500. On the other hand, Baylor University scientists have singlehandedly identified the remains of “some 1,000 cadavers of border-crossers [for] families in Mexico and elsewhere” since 2002, and currently have a backlog of hundreds of bodies they have been unable to identify. [link] Extra-governmental estimates of deaths are sometimes significantly higher.

For this couple, though, the loss isn’t only about statistics. It is their son-in-law who vanished a year ago with six other migrants from a small town in Oaxaca, and after hundreds of phone calls and writing letters to the president of Mexico, they still know nothing of his whereabouts.

This news is deeply sad to me, on every possible level. It speaks of human loss and tragedy and of the violence of the systems we have created and perpetuated, systems in which people are caught and crushed.

Perhaps 80 percent of the migrants in Florida are illegal immigrants and thus especially vulnerable to abuse. During the past decade, the United States Justice Department has prosecuted half a dozen cases of slavery among farm workers in Florida. Migrants have been driven into debt, forced to work for nothing and kept in chained trailers at night.

Farm workers earn approximately $56/day for handling about two tons of tomatoes; wages are calculated based on piece rates rather than hours worked. Existing agreements with Taco Bell and McDonald’s have improved some migrant worker wages to as much as $90+ a day. (That averages out to a little over $8/hour for hard physical labor, an amount I consider horrifically low.) The penny-a-pound increase went directly to migrant workers. However, Burger King’s refusal to play is undermining these hard-earned improvements; according to Schlosser, these workers now face a 40% pay cut as tomato growers “cancel the deals already struck with Taco Bell and McDonald’s.”

What about buyers who want to voluntarily pay extra to make sure that the workers who harvest their food can themselves afford to eat?

Now the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange has threatened a fine of $100,000 for any grower who accepts an extra penny per pound for migrant wages. The organization claims that such a surcharge would violate “federal and state laws related to antitrust, labor and racketeering.”

What can I say? Wow.