Only in America with Ali Noorani

In the first episode of our series focused on the agriculture industry, we hear about the often-invisible challenges that fieldworkers face.

Ali talks to Judy Fisk Lucas, the founder and president of Friends of Fieldworkers, a non-profit providing support to immigrant fieldworkers in the major agricultural region of Ventura County, California. Judy and her husband Ted talk about working with farmworkers and the needs they and their families have.

Alejandro Flores-Muñoz is an entrepreneur and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient based in Denver. He started three businesses: Unum Sunglasses, Progressive Button, and, most recently, Stokes Poke. In addition to running his own businesses, he mentors, educates and empowers other DACA recipient and marginalized business owners.

Alejandro talks to Ali about the companies he runs and how he’s helping other DACA recipients and marginalized business owners start and grow their own businesses.

Americans’ perceptions of immigrants and refugees often boil down to a key question: Are immigrants givers or takers to our communities? When you take a deeper dive, it’s clear that immigrants are contributing. Across a variety of industries, they’re starting businesses, creating jobs, paying taxes, and, in many cases, revitalizing entire towns and cities.

“Only in America” is taking a closer look at some of these immigrants and their stories, whether they’re innovators, entrepreneurs or people who work in areas that are typically viewed as lower-skilled. We’ll see that these “givers” aren’t the exception to the rule; they’re highly representative of the broader immigrant community.

In this Special Edition of Only in America, Alex Mensing, Project Coordinator for Pueblos Sin Fronteras, talked to Ali from the Mexican side of the Guatemalan border, where a caravan of migrants were preparing for another leg of their desperate journey northwards towards Mexico City.

Alex says the contingent, mostly of women and children, is fleeing poverty, violence and oppression by the regime in Honduras. He says the migrants feel like everyone - from Mexico, to Trump's United States - is "hell-bent against them".

Ali visits the cattle plains of Idaho, where thousands of hispanic immigrants have powered the booming dairy economy. But industry leaders fear labor shortages if deportations increase.