Why should we care about the well-being of migrant farmworkers?
Most of the food that we buy in Buda — most of the strawberries, for example — are harvested by migrant farmworkers. So we should care about field sanitation, and we should care about farmworkers being healthy because their hands pick our produce and put it in our stores.
I’ll quote a friend of mine: “Just exactly what amount of fecal matter on a strawberry is a tolerable level?”
Not only is there that food safety issue, but it’s also about affordability. We enjoy on a per capita basis one of the lowest food costs of any industrialized nation. As expensive as it seems to us, it would be a lot more expensive if we didn’t have farm workers out there doing this at really inexpensive rates.
Isn’t providing preventative care cheaper too?
Exactly. If we don’t practice preventative care and provide education to help them make healthy decisions, they end up in emergency rooms, and that becomes even more costly to them and the public.
Are there any migrant farmworkers in Hays County?
Very few. Grapes. We do have vineyards in Hays County.
And yet you’ve been working to improve health care here locally, in addition to your national efforts.
We’re taking what we’ve learned over the last many years working with farmworkers, who for the most part are Hispanic, and we’re applying it to similar populations in Hays County who are not necessarily engaged in agricultural employment.
We have a real underground population here in Hays County of immigrant families commuting back and forth to Austin from Buda to work. They’re doing construction and landscaping and domestic work. They work in hotels, clean office buildings, and they’re not earning a lot of money. Many of them are recent immigrants. We have huge numbers of monolingual Spanish-speaking families that haven’t been integrated into the community yet, and we’re trying to change that.
What’s unique about care for this population?
For a family not accustomed to seeking care in the American health care system, there may be aspects of our system that are totally foreign to them. Basic information that you and I might take for granted. We want to make sure that practitioners understand the situation. If they want a treatment plan to be a success, they need to make sure the patient understands the diagnosis being given.
Interview has been edited and condensed.
