“If you want to get rid of illegal immigrants,” says Alabama sweet potato farmer Keith Smith, “quit eating.” The farmer, lamenting his inability to find adequate farm labor after Alabama passed its toughest-in-the-nation immigration law, HB 56, highlights an important reality: if you eat, you’re almost certainly benefiting from the labor of undocumented […]Continue Reading →
Not long ago, I was talking with a friend about the living conditions of migrant farm workers in Maneadero, Mexico. I had just made a trip to the Baja California town, and I described people living in tin shacks, packed ten to a room. Some folks sleep on the ground, in the dirt, under […]Continue Reading →
I spent most of last week in Jackson, Mississippi, on a retreat with some good friends from the Christian Community Development Association, hosted by the John M. Perkins Foundation. Dr. Perkins, who is now 81 years old, is one of my heroes. Born into a sharecropping family in Mississippi, Dr. Perkins grew […]Continue Reading →
Guest Blog by Wendy Tarr Editor’s Note: Today’s guest blog is a video piece produced by CLUE (Clergy & Laity United for Economic Justice) in Orange County, California, with a brief explanation of the video’s origins by CLUE Orange County Director Wendy Tarr: This video was created by Clergy and Laity […]Continue Reading →
Ruben Vives, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, just won a Pulitzer Prize for an investigative report exposing corruption in the suburban Southern California town of Bell. City administrators there had been illegally swelling the city coffers so as to be able to pay themselves salaries of nearly a million dollars per year—until […]Continue Reading →
