Secret Lives of America’s Migrant Farmers

An innovative college program opens privileged young eyes to the million undocumented laborers who toil away in an invisible America.

Photos by Michael Durbin

It’s early June at Camp Chestnut Ridge in Efland, North Carolina. Towering pines outside the dining hall are still dripping after a night of hard rain. I take a seat at a breakfast table where most of the college students are quiet, still shaking off sleep. But one of them is bright-eyed.

“What brings you here?” Eric Britton asks me.

I explain I’m researching a story about Student Action with Farmworkers, the non-profit that assembled these thirty students from schools across the country.

Loosely affiliated with Duke University, SAF has sent more than 700 college students — they call themselves Safistas — into migrant farmworker camps as interns with various educational, legal and healthcare agencies.

The interns are here for a week of orientation about the estimated one million, mostly undocumented migrant farmworkers in the U.S. and the issues they face: workplace hazards, inadequate housing, low wages.

Not all of what they learn comes from SAF instructors, and no…