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California Rep. Raul Ruiz, an ER doctor, visited farm worker community to aid in COVID-19 testing

August 13, 2020

While House Democrats have passed novel coronavirus pandemic legislation that finally provides assistance to immigrant workers left out of previous legislation (and currently stalled by Senate Republicans), one member is going even further to ensure this community doesn't fall through the cracks. California Rep. Raul Ruiz, an emergency room physician, has tested farm workers and their families in Coachella Valley, NBC News reports.

"A son of farm workers, Ruiz is in his fourth term in Congress," the report said. "He also has worked as an emergency room physician and helped direct medical relief in Haiti after its 2010 earthquake. His medical skills and legislative role often intersect on policy issues. Ruiz wrote legislation passed by the House that was aimed at requiring medical personnel and equipment on the border after the deaths of young children who had been detained by Border Patrol."

The novel coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated the risks farm workers already faced in their labor. In just one example, "[i]n the U.S., migrant workers tend to live in employer-provided barrack-style housing, typically with bunk beds close to each other," migrant rights advocates Mónica Ramírez and Rachel Micah-Jones wrote for Prism in April. As a result, the virus can spread like wildfire among workers and their families.

Sick workers "go home and they don't have the luxury of having a space or a spare bedroom for them to self-quarantine away from their family," Ruiz said in the NBC News report. "And oftentimes there's three generations who share a two bedroom trailer, two bedroom apartment or two bedroom low-income housing … Eventually somebody in their family is going to get sick."

NBC News cites a Purdue University report estimating that nearly 100,000 agricultural workers across a number of states have contracted COVID-19. Another researcher with the California Institute for Rural Studies "found that as of July 1, the prevalence of COVID-19 for agricultural workers was 1,410 positive cases out of 100,000, while the rate for workers in all other industries was 455 cases per 100,000—a difference of almost 1,000 cases," Frontline reported.

"In the farmworker population, we are seeing increasing positivity rates and the rate of transmission is very high in the eastern Coachella Valley where farmworker communities exist," Ruiz said in the NBC News report.

Worsening this crisis is that workers might be afraid of accessing care due to things like immigration status. Testing community members at locations including churches and trailer parks can do a lot for families that might may cautious, however. "When I go out to test," Ruiz said in the report, "I often see hard-working people coming in after a hard day at work, with calloused hands and dirty clothes from working out in the fields, picking crops, with a tired look on their face wanting to be reassured they don't have the coronavirus."

Ensuring the safety and well-being of these workers should be a top concern, and not just because they're responsible for feeding America. They deserve stronger protections because they are valued and worthy. "I know that we are doing important work that is feeding the rest of the country," Teresa, an undocumented farm worker from central California, told BuzzFeed News in April. "There are a lot of workers in the field. We are essential workers that this country needs."

"From California to Massachusetts, there are organizations working with agricultural workers to address the overwhelming issues their communities face," Prism's Tina Vasquez reported in March. "These are groups like NC FIELD, which works directly with migrant and seasonal farmworker youth and families to address inequalities and fill service gaps in the agricultural community by referring farmworkers to needed services, conducting educational programs, and teaching farmworker youth grassroots organizing principles through programs like Poder Juvenil Campesino."

Dr. Ruiz said in NBC News' report that many community members he meets "Feel empowered to take the virus seriously and to make better decisions. They mentioned that it's good to know that people care enough about them to go out to the community into trailer parks, where they live, in order to give them information. It makes it seem more real and more important and that it's an urgent issue."

Issues:Health Care