“En El Campo,Siempre Es Asi”: A Mixed Methodological Assessment of Spanish-Speaking Immigrant Farmworker Legal Needs in Oregon

Abstract

This paper uses a convergent mixed method approach to assess the legal needs of Oregon's immigrant (Spanish-speaking) farmworking population. We adapt an English-language survey into Spanish, ensuring the validity of the quantitative results by employing intercept surveys at farmworkers' housing complexes, recording qualitative data regarding the ensuing social interactions, and generating ethnographic fieldnotes on the interactions, participants, and surrounding environs. We find that immigration is an umbrella category that structures other legal needs, rather than a legal need co-equal with other important categories such as healthcare, employment, housing, discrimination, and harassment. Our mixed methods approach provided rich descriptions of surveyed concerns as well as detecting and explaining the undercounting of categories such as law enforcement contact and sexual harassment.

Keywords

immigration Latin American experience farmwork Oregon legal needs mixed methods survey research

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Arcury

T. A.

Quandt

S. A.

(2007). Delivery of health services to migrant and seasonal farmworkers. Annual Review of Public Health, 28(1), 345–363. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.27.021405.102106 .

Calavita

(1981). United States Immigration law and the control of American labor. Contemporary Crises, 5, 341–368. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00728511

DeHue

(2001). Establishing the experimenting society: The historical origin of social experimentation according to the randomized controlled design. The American Journal of Psychology, 114(2), 283–302. https://doi.org/10.2307/1423518

Emerson

R. M.

Fretz

R. I.

Shaw

L. L.

(1995). Writing ethnographic fieldnotes. University of Chicago Press.

Emery

C. R.

Jolley

J. M.

(2011). Desistance from intimate partner violence: The role of legal cynicism, collective efficacy, and social disorganization in Chicago neighborhoods. American Journal of Community Psychology, 48, 373–383. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-010-9362-5

Escobar

E. J.

(1993). The dialectics of repression: The Los Angeles Police Department and the Chicano Movement, 1968-1971. The Journal of American History, 79, 1483–1514. https://doi.org/10.2307/2080213

Fetters

M. D.

Freshwater

(2015). Publishing a methodological mixed methods research article. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 9, 3. https://doi.org/10.1177/1558689815594687

Granski

Keller

Venters

(2015). Death rates among detained immigrants in the United States. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 12(11), 14414–14419. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph121114414 .

Green

P. E.

(2003). The undocumented: Educating the children of migrant workers in America. Bilingual Research Journal, 27(1), 51–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/15235882.2003.10162591 .

10.

Grinberg

Toropin

Morris

(2019, July 25). A US-born citizen who was in immigration detention for three weeks has been released. CNN US. https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/23/us/us-citizen-detained-texas/index.html

11.

Hernandez

Gabbard

(2018). Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2015–2016: A demographic and employment profile of United States farmworkers (Research Report No. 13). JBS International.

12.

Holley

(2001). Disadvantaged by design: How the law inhibits agricultural guest workers from enforcing their rights. Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal, 18, 575–623.

13.

Ibarra

Carlos

(2015). Mexican Mass labor migration in a not-so changing political economy. Ethnicities, 15(2), 211–233. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796814557650 .

14.

Kandel

(2008). Profile of hired farmworkers, a 2008 update (Economic Research Report Number 60). Economic Research Service, US Department of Agriculture. digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/key_workplace/559

15.

Kanno-Youngs

(2019, July 2). Squalid conditions at border detention centers, government report finds. New York Times. nytimes.com/2019/07/02/us/politics/border-center-migrant-detention.html

16.

Kim

N. J.-E.

Vásquez

V. B.

Torres

Nicola

R. M. B.

Karr

(2016). Breaking the silence: Sexual harassment of Mexican women farmworkers. Journal of Agromedicine, 21(2), 154–162. https://doi.org/10.1080/1059924X.2016.1143903 .

17.

Kirk

D. S.

Papachristos

A. V.

(2011). Cultural mechanisms and the persistence of neighborhood violence. American Journal of Sociology, 116(4), 1190–1233. https://doi.org/10.1086/655754 .

18.

McCauley

L. A.

Lasarev

M. R.

Higgins

Rothlein

Muniz

J. F.

Ebbert

Phillips

(2001). Work characteristics and pesticide exposures among migrant agricultural families: A community based research approach. Environmental Health Perspectives, 109(5), 533–538. https://doi.org/10.1289/ehp.01109533 .

19.

Mejia

(2018, June 28). Must reads: It’s not just people in the U.S. illegally—ICE is nabbing lawful permanent residents too. Los Angeles Times. latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-lawful-resident-20180628-htmlstory.html

20.

Mirandé

(1987). Gringo justice. University of Notre Dame Press.

21.

Morgan

(2014). Integrating qualitative and quantitative methods: A pragmatic approach. Sage Publications.

22.

Muñiz

(2015). Police, power, and the production of racial boundaries. Rutgers University Press.

23.

Murdaugh

Hunt

Sowell

Santana

(2004). Domestic violence in Hispanics in the southeastern United States: A survey and needs analysis. Journal of Family Violence, 19, 107–115. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JOFV.0000019841.58748.51

24.

Ontiveros

M. L.

(2003). Lessons from the fields: Female farmworkers and the law. Maine Law Review, 55, 157–189.

25.

Patel

Jawetz

(nd). Condition of confinement in immigration detention facilities. American Civil Liberties Union. aclu.org/other/conditions-confinement-immigrant-detention-facilities

26.

Prowse

Weaver

V. M.

Meares

T. L.

(2020). The state from below: Distorted responsiveness in policed communities. Urban Affairs Review, 56(5), 1423–1471. https://doi.org/10.1177/1078087419844831 .

27.

Richie

B. E.

(2012). Arrested justice: Black women, violence, and America’s prison nation. NYU Press.

28.

Roussell

Strange

(2018). Final report to the Oregon Law Foundation on the legal needs of impoverished Oregonians. Technical report for the Oregon Law Foundation.

29.

Ryo

(2017). Fostering legal cynicism through immigration detention. Southern California Law Review, 90, 999–1054.

30.

Slesinger

D. P.

Ofstead

(1993). The economic and health needs of Wisconsin migrant farm workers. The Journal of Rural Health, 9(2), 138–148. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-0361.1993.tb00505.x .

31.

Speri

(2018, April 11). Detained, then violated. The Intercept. theintercept.com/2018/04/11/immigration-detention-sexual-abuse-ice-dhs

32.

Thomas

(2006). A general inductive approach for analyzing qualitative evaluation data. American Journal of Evaluation, 27(2), 237–246. https://doi.org/10.1177/1098214005283748 .

33.

Torbati

(2019, May 3). Exclusive: Trump administration proposal would make it easier to deport immigrants who use public benefits. Reuters. reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-benefits-exclusive/exclusive-trump-administration-proposal-would-make-it-easier-to-deport-immigrants-who-use-public-benefits

34.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (2019). Cooperation between ICE, local law enforcement makes for safer communities. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ice.gov/news/releases/cooperation-between-ice-local-law-enforcement-makes-safer-communities

35.

Villarejo

(2003). The health of U.S. hired farmworkers. Annual Review of Public Health, 24, 175–193. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.24.100901.140901

36.

Weitzer

Tuch

S. A.

(2002). Perceptions of racial profiling: Race, class, and personal experience. Criminology; An Interdisciplinary Journal, 40(2), 435–456. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2002.tb00962.x