Dr. Sandy Smith-Nonini, assistant professor of anthropology at Elon, participated in a panel on “The Costs of Globalization” sponsored by the Feminist Students United at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Wednesday night, March 17.
Dr. Smith-Nonini’s talk focused on how neoliberal trade agreements, combined with restructuring in U.S. agribusiness has facilitated a rapid shift to dependence on Spanish speaking migrant labor in rural North Carolina. She described the abusive conditions of farm labor and the problems inherent to the current H2A guestworker program, and argued that the Bush Administration’s proposal for a nationwide expanded foreign guestworker program is likely to replicate many of these structural inequities. Farmworker advocates favor alternative legislation, called the AgJOBS bill, which offers routes to legalization for workers and their families after several years of work in the United States.