By Edward Schumacher-Matos
Saturday, April 17, 2010; A13
Originally from: Florida Hispanic Immigration News
Blame Edward R. Murrow. The legendary broadcaster's last major report, "Harvest of Shame" in 1960, set the template for today's muckraking filmmakers. It also helped create today's illegal immigration quandary.
Murrow meant well. He catalogued shortchanged pay, scandalous living and working conditions, and other horrors suffered by foreign migrant farm workers in Florida. The documentary set off a public outcry and a congressional battle over the moral rot behind the nation's fruits and vegetables. In 1964, led by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and an alliance of churches and unions, Congress shut down the migrant worker program, called Bracero.
But in so doing, it also cut off millions of poor Mexicans who, by flowing back and forth across the border, were lifting themselves and their country out of poverty. They and their U.S. employers, many of them decent bosses in genuine need of workers, reverted to illegality.
Posted By: Ayanna Spikeshttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/16/AR2010041604054_pf.html
or
http://uspolitics.einnews.com/news/florida-hispanic-immigration
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