Immigration reform, up close and personal

Each spring the men poured out of rickety trucks resembling military personnel carriers, and lived in a barn that smelled of pesticides for the next six months. They wore flannel shirts, faded blue jeans and cowboy boots, no matter the heat, and covered their heads with baseball caps or bandannas. They seemed always to be joking, but their weatherworn faces told a different story about their lives — one of hardship.

I grew up in a ranch house across from a dusty cabbage farm in Yaphank, in eastern Long Island. The men were all migrant workers. As a kid, I would sneak into a patch of white pines in my family’s verdant front yard to spy on them when they broke for lunch. They sat on the edge of the barn’s massive cement loading dock, talking in Spanish at breakneck pace, eating white-bread sandwiches and drinking coffee or beer. Some smoked.

Once in a while, the men caught me peering through the branches, and they pointed or called to me in Spanish. They laughed when I ran back to the house. It became something of a game to see whether I could remain camouflaged through their short meal.

Farming is a tough business. I would skip out of the house early in the morning to play baseball or run through the sprinkler with my brother, and the men were long gone to the fields, hauling aluminum irrigation pipes, repairing crumbling furrow lines or weeding the ground by hand. My family would drive by late in the evening on our way from Burger King in nearby Coram, and they were still there, toiling away.

More than three decades later, my thoughts turn on occasion to these men, particularly at this time of year, the middle of Long Island’s farming season. I wonder how they could have lived this life. Who knows what they were paid — certainly not enough. Like many migrant workers, they probably sent at least part of their meager earnings back to their families 2,000 miles away in Mexico or Central America, or beyond. They were strangers in a strange land, utterly dependent on the farm owner, who lived on a modest suburban block in Middle Island.