Strawberry Fields

A grim report from the annals of illegal immigration in America: an archived 1995 Atlantic story on the Californian strawberry-picking industry. Plus: a screed against scruffy, Latin-looking illegals - from 1896. Money quote:

The question today is not of preventing the wards of our almshouses, our insane asylums, and our jails from being stuffed to repletion by new arrivals from Europe; but of protecting the American rate of wages, the American standard of living, and the quality of American citizenship from degradation through the tumultuous access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from the countries of eastern and southern Europe.

And lepers everywhere! I tell you: the nineteenth century was one frigging amnesty after another. And the seventeenth century! We had no control of the borders whatsoever.