Images of Dust Bowl migrants, made famous by John Steinbeck's bestselling novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), tend to dominate the historical memory of workers migrants during the Great Depression. The Depression Era. However, even as thousands of Okies and Arkies hit the road in search of survival, they joined migrant workers who had traveled the country looking for work long before the Great Depression and would continue to do so for decades thereafter. These migrants, many of whom are racial and ethnic minorities, have historically worked for low wages and lived in horrible conditions. The Great Depression only exacerbated their plight. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Assessing the absolute number of migrant workers over the course of a decade is difficult. In 1937, sociologist Paul S. Taylor tentatively estimated that there were between 200,000 and 350,000 migrant workers traveling throughout the United States each year. Although many migrants worked in California, where some would be displaced by the arrival of Dust Bowl migrants, migrant labor was not just a West Coast phenomenon. For example, thousands of Mexican and Mexican-American migrant workers toiled across the country, from the cotton fields of Texas to the sugar beet fields of Colorado, Michigan, and Ohio. Thousands of African Americans and whites (mostly displaced sharecroppers from Georgia and Alabama) worked regularly along the Atlantic coast, toiling during the winter months in the Florida Everglades and the U.S. from the north during the summer. Finally, thousands of other migrant workers have taken less clear paths through dozens of states in search of work. The Great Depression, which began in the 1920s in many agricultural regions of the country, compounded the difficulties faced by migrant workers. As the number of workers looking for work increased during the Great Depression, the amount of land in production decreased. Additionally, farmers who were also facing economic hardship—falling prices for their crops, rising taxes, and mounting debt—were looking for ways to cut costs, and cutting workers' wages was often the only option. which they had. The labor surplus (in 1933, in California, there were approximately 2.36 workers for every available job) made it extremely difficult for workers to be paid the full value of their work. As a result, wages fell across the country during the Great Depression. Migrant workers in California who earned 35 cents an hour in 1928 earned only 14 cents an hour in 1933. Sugar beet workers in Colorado saw their wages drop from $27 an acre in 1930 to $12 .37 dollars per acre three years later. In Texas during the Great Depression, migrant families could expect annual incomes of between $278 and $500, hundreds of dollars less than what experts at the time estimated it would cost to a family of four just to survive. domestic workers – migrant workers also tend to live in horrible conditions. It was not uncommon for farmers to house migrant workers in cabins, shacks, chicken coops, barns, portable wagons, and even open fields. Those who found refuge inSmall cabins or abandoned farms often had to deal with broken windows, torn screens, missing doors and leaking roofs. Most migrants, whether living alone in fields or in specially designated migrant camps, remained isolated from surrounding communities. Often seen as racial and class outcasts, migrant workers were rejected by local communities. While the nation's industrial workers could turn to the New Deal to solve some of their problems, migrant workers found themselves largely outside the reach of most programs and legislation. In discussing the status of migrant workers in the United States, historian Cindy Hahamovitch has argued that they were in fact “stateless.” Unlike industrial workers who gained the right to organize in unions and bargain collectively, migrant workers were left outside the bounds of the New Deal's most important legislation. Neither Section 7a of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 nor the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 included migrant agricultural workers. When Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act establishing minimum wage provisions in 1938, agricultural workers were once again exempt from federal protections afforded to other types of workers. Certainly, the political weight of agricultural interests helped keep farmworkers outside the protections of the New Deal. Idealistic notions about farm labor and rural America may also have made it difficult to pass laws to protect or empower migrant workers. Even legislation passed explicitly to address the problems plaguing rural America – the Agricultural Adjustment Act – has done little to help migrant workers. In fact, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) likely worsened conditions for many migrant workers who saw their jobs disappear along with the harvest reductions demanded by the AAA. Additionally, many farm workers' jobs were lost when farmers used their government benefits to buy new machinery. The only New Deal agency that attempted to address the needs of migrant workers was the Resettlement Administration, which was replaced by the Farm Security Administration (FSA). By 1942, the FSA had built ninety-five camps to accommodate approximately 75,000 workers. Many of these camps provided housing, health services, schools, laundry facilities, and adult education programs. With the exception of FSA camps, when migrant workers turned to the state for assistance, they faced an uphill battle. Racist private and public humanitarian agencies across the country, but particularly in the South and West, have often denied migrant workers benefits or granted them benefits far below those granted to other workers. Even federal relief agencies, including the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, have worked collaboratively with local authorities to plan relief benefits based on growing seasons. Migrant workers often found their meager benefits cut just when their work was needed in the fields. In this way, the federal government helped maintain a vulnerable, low-income workforce. Mexican and Mexican-American migrant workers felt the full force of state power during the Great.