By John Binder/Breitbart News
As Breitbart News reported in November 2021, a number of black Americans along the Mississippi Delta filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against their former employers — Pitts Farms and Harris Russell Farms — for laying them off only to replace them with white foreign H-2A visa workers from South Africa.
Black Americans who spent most of their lives working on Mississippi farms are suing their former employer after they were replaced by foreign workers on the H-2A visa program. https://t.co/X7DKTy8Dla
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) November 13, 2021
Data shows U.S. farms use the H-2A visa program to import cheaper foreign visa workers. The black Americans who filed the lawsuit claimed they were paid $7.25 to $8.25 an hour while their foreign H-2A visa counterparts were paid nearly $12 an hour.
The settlement, of which the terms have not been publicly disclosed, will send a message to employers looking to discriminate against Americans in favor of foreign visa workers, lawyers representing the black Americans suggest.
“These settlements are an important step and we are going to keep moving forward in an effort to eradicate these abuses throughout the Delta,” attorney Rob McDuff said in a statement.
Attorney Amal Bouhabib said “many other Delta farms are engaging in these unlawful practices” and she expects “more suits will be coming against those who do not pay fair wages to the local workers.”
Featured image by: Spencer Platt/Getty Images