Speech #940068874

I have spent some time studying the special problems of the farmworkers and their families. and the conditions under which they live. For example. 2 years ago my committee held hearings in Florida. Some of the Members may remember that for the first time that anyone can remember since World War I we actually were frightened by the prospect of a runaway typhoid epidemic commencing in the Southeastern part of the United States with a group of people who. because of their living patterns. were in danger of being carriers throughout the migrant mainstream all the way from the South. through the middle of the United States. and up across the country. We found typhoid carriers that had started from Florida. in New Jersey and in Michigan. and in other places. We managed to track a majority of the people who were ultimately determined to be carriers. There were over 170 people who were diagnosed as typhoid victims. Most of them were found at the time we finally located them. through the communicable disease center in Atlanta. Georgia. and the Center for Migrant Workers in the city of Little Rock. Ark.. to be potential bombs for the people they were with. The problem with the approach the gentleman from Kentucky takes. is that we have discovered that these people may or may not become identified as migrant workers. That depends a lot on. say. supposing that they have planned to be migrants this season. and the crop they were going to leave to go to for some reason is not going to be harvested because something happened to it. So people who thought they were going to be migrants were not migrants for that year. In the State of Florida less than half of the socalled seasonal farm workers were able to find employment last year. and so we had more of them who became migrants who would have qualified under the gentlemans amendment. As I read it. what the gentleman is doing by drawing this finite kind of definition. is that he is appearing to be helping the migrants. but he is not doing anything for them that the law is not doing already. so he is not adding anything to the care that would be available to the pure migrant by his amendment. and seems to be trying to prevent some other people who might be on the same boat now with the migrants from getting the same attention. The problem is that you cannot make that kind of a distinction because a seasonal farmworker is not a migrant. particularly in the area we saw where this typhoid outbreak took place near Homestead. Fla.. where they all lived together in the same camp. Some of the migrants leave. some of them would leave. but for whatever reason decide not to this season. and next season they decide they will stay there and try to get work in Florida. So we have all those kinds of situations that can obtain. and none of them may remain constant. One of the things we are troubled about is that in this particular instance the local health authorities did not make the diagnosis. it was first made by the local people referring to the amount of children who were showing up who were first being diagnosed by the doctors as having abdominal pains usually associated with appendicitis. and then finally somebody was smart enough to realize that that was an awful lot of appendicitis to be appearing in one camp at one time. so it took some time before they got access to a reasonable medical diagnosis. to the point where finally they were exposed to a sufficient investigation of their health conditions. and examinations. to determine that what we had on our hands was a typhoid outbreak. At that point the local officials in Florida became sufficiently alarmed to open the hospitals to the migrants. when in fact. as the doctor said. theoretically only a seasonal worker living in that camp. who did not intend to leave Florida as a migrant. should have qualified. Trying to draw the definition that the gentlemans amendment draws is totally unrealistic.