Working in the Shadows: Immigrant Women Sexually Victimized on the Job

Over four million undocumented immigrant women currently live in the United States. Many of these women are employed in the U.S. food service industry, and, according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), many of these women suffer sexual harassment and sexual violence on the job.

Injustice on Our Plates demonstrates what Legal Momentum’s Immigrant Women Program has often found in its efforts across the country: that undocumented immigrant women are forced to work for little pay in a shadow economy, exploited by their employers while remaining invisible to most Americans.

In June, Legal Momentum released Reforming America’s Immigration Laws: A Woman’s Struggle. We noted that undocumented women migrants are "vulnerable to sexual violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and other gender-motivated exploitation in the workplace. Absent any fear that employees will report these actions and crimes, employers continue to take advantage of immigrant women."

Injustice on Our Plates echoes Legal Momentum’s findings in the U.S. food service industry. The SPLC interviewed 150 immigrant women working throughout the United States. The vast majority of the women the SPLC interviewed said that they suffered sexual harassment and/or sexual violence on the job. At the Agriprocessers Inc. meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa – the site of one of the largest federal immigration raids in history in May 2008 – the women workers described sexual harassment by their male supervisors as “widespread and constant.” According to the SPLC, this type of exploitation is common across the country:

In Salinas, Calif., a worker told the EEOC that farmworkers there referred to one company’s field as the field de calzon, or “field of panties,” because so many women had been raped by supervisors there. In Florida, women farmworkers dubbed fields “the green motel” for the same reason. In Iowa, women said they had encountered the problem so often that they believed it was a common practice in the United States to exchange sex for job security.

Immigrant women are the silent victims of the broken immigration system. Legal Momentum’s Immigrant Women Program advocates for comprehensive immigration reform that considers how even facially gender-neutral laws create more hardship for immigrant women. Congress must create paths to legalization that equitably value women’s work, eliminate 287(g) and/or Safe Communities Programs that often harm immigrant women crime victims, and eradicate backlogs in the family immigration system.

The women profiled in Injustice on Our Plates are the backbone of the U.S. economy, yet they live in the shadows. Comprehensive immigration reform must include provisions to ensure that these women are able to live and work free of sexual harassment, sexual violence, and fear.

Comments

[resume writers]

It's awful that things like that still happen. We need to do something about this problem. Even a simple thing like creating a hot line for those who have problems like this can already be a solution