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A lawsuit was filed by six black Americans in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi.
These individuals have spent most of their lives working on Mississippi farms.
Now they are suing their former employer after they were replaced by foreign workers on the H-2A visa program, the lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit begins, “The Plaintiffs in this case are six Black American farmworkers who have been systematically underpaid and denied job opportunities in favor of white foreign workers by their employer, Pitts Farms Partnership (PFP), for years.”
You can read the full lawsuit here.
The H-2A visa program allows U.S. farms to annually outsource an unlimited number of American jobs to foreign workers.
The foreign visa workers have come from South Africa to Mississippi.
A little more than 16,000 foreign visa workers were imported to take American jobs on U.S. farms in 1997.
This number has grown significantly.
A record 213,400 foreign visa workers were reported in the U.S. in 2020.
This increase in the H-2A visa program is more than 1,200 percent in less than 25 years.
