What Rural America Can Learn from Haitian Immigrants

This is the sixth article in the Barn Raiser series “Rethinking Immigration and Health on Maryland’s Eastern Shore,” drawn from the author’s research for her book Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America.

It took months to convince Junior to talk to me. He was busy, working full-time at a manufacturing plant and caring for his young family in his spare time. His family was apprehensive about him speaking with a stranger—an anthropologist, no less—eager to record personal details. Finding time for an academic interested in Haitian life on Maryland’s Eastern Shore was a distant priority.

When he finally agreed, it was clear he still wasn’t convinced our conversation was a good idea. He was polite but guarded. And when he began describing his years where he first worked at the local poultry processing plant, I understood why.

“Still now, when I think about it, I hate the fact that I started working at the chicken plant,” he told me. “It was not a good experience. I did not like the people. I did not like the way they treated me. I did not like the way that the supervisor was treating me.”

Junior’s story—and the stories of other Haitian workers I interviewed during my decade of research on Maryland’s Eastern Shore—reveals something that rarely makes it into conversations about immigration: the human costs it takes to do the work that keeps rural economies running, and what it means to survive.

But his story also reveals something else: a model of resistance and self-determination that rural America would do well to learn from.

‘They consider us like their slaves’

Haitian immigrants on the Eastern Shore often find their way to the poultry processing plants that dominate the local economy. For newly arrived Haitians, the plants are often the only option. Most come to the Eastern Shore because of severe economic precarity in Haiti or other parts of the United States where work has dried up. As Roseline, a Haitian immigrant who has lived in the area for nearly 30 years, explained: “I think a lot of immigrants come here because there is a lot of factory work.” Without transportation, English skills, or established networks, the poultry plants—which actively recruit immigrant workers—become the default. The conditions are brutal—but the alternative is no work at all.

“You take the chicken by the leg, and then you hang it on a hook, and it keeps going,” Junior said of the assembly line. Workers move in unison, one body filling in for another when someone falls behind. The pace never stops.

But the hardest part, Junior explained, wasn’t the work itself. It was the rigid racial hierarchy within the plant—white administrators at the top; African American supervisors in the middle; Haitian workers at the bottom.

“Your boss is yelling at you, and you have to keep hanging at a very fast speed,” Junior told me. “And then when you slow down because you are human and you get tired, she will come riding at you on the bike and yell, ‘What are you doing? Why did you stop?’ ” He paused. “Especially when you are Haitian, they do not expect you to stop.”

Vanessa, another Haitian worker, described the toll through tears, rapidly waving her hands up and down to demonstrate the knife work: “Like this, like this! It’s in the same place, the same kind of work, same chicken, same pressure.” She struggled to find words adequate to the experience. “It is really painful, physically. They consider us, Haitians, like their slaves because they need our blood, our bodies.”

Daniel, who spent five years in the plants, used the same metaphor: “Working at a chicken plant, Haitian people call it like a slavery job, but you get paid for it. That is what it is. It is hard, and they do not really treat the people right. It is very controlling.”

The comparison to slavery isn’t rhetorical excess. It reflects how Haitian workers understand their position—essential to the functioning of the industry, yet treated as infinitely replaceable. Their labor creates value; their bodies absorb harm; their humanity goes unrecognized.

Learning to say ‘no’

What made Haitian workers particularly vulnerable, Junior explained, was language. Managers took advantage of workers who couldn’t speak English, who didn’t know their rights, who couldn’t push back:

They always take advantage of the Haitians because they do not know the system. They do not know that they got the right to say, “That is over my limit.” My first year, I did not have a lot of English, so everything they do, everything they said, I had to agree with them just because I did not have the language to explain myself and say, “That is not fair.” So that is the year I suffered the most.

Then something shifted.

“The second year, I started picking up some English and then saying ‘no’ and explaining why I think this is not fair. They did not like me because I could say ‘No.’ ”

Junior describes this small act—learning to say “no” in English—as transformative. “I think that the first time I said ‘no’ is the first time things started to get better. I remember all of the guys in the line started treating me different because I can talk to them now. They no longer talk behind my back because I answer when they say something.”

This is resistance: not dramatic confrontation, but the steady accumulation of small refusals. Learning the word that allows you to set a limit. Finding your voice in a system designed to silence you.

The cost of survival

Junior eventually quit the poultry plant. “One day I came and said, ‘That is enough.’ It is time for me to wake up and do something different—go to school and try to change my life.” Soon, he found work in a manufacturing plant. Although not paradise, it represents something the poultry plant never offered: a way out.

Still, he remained tied to the poultry industry, usually the only form of work available to Haitians in the area, including his mother. And the consequences of that economy extend far beyond the plant floor.

Junior’s father never could bring himself to work there. When he first interviewed for a job, he became scared about the pace of work and the occupational risks. Without access to that employment, he had no means of making a living in America. Going back and forth to Haiti every six months became his only option.

It cost him his life. Junior’s father died in the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

This is what we don’t see when we talk about immigrant labor in the abstract: the impossible choices, the risks absorbed by families, the way an economy built on disposable workers disposes of people in ways that ripple across borders and generations.

What rural America could learn

Haitian workers I interviewed understood their situation with devastating clarity. They knew the system was designed to extract maximum value from their labor while minimizing their humanity. And yet they found ways to resist, to support each other, to maintain dignity in conditions designed to strip it away.

“We try to be united,” one worker told me. “A lot of the other people do not like us. They do not like Haitians. Especially at work, they do not like us.” Solidarity emerged not despite of exclusion but because of it.

Rural America is facing its own crisis of abandonment—hospitals closing, young people leaving, economies hollowing out, the sense of being written off by distant powers. The conditions are different, but the experience of being treated as disposable isn’t entirely unfamiliar.

What can rural communities learn from immigrants who have developed sophisticated strategies for surviving exactly that condition?

They might learn that resistance doesn’t require dramatic gestures—sometimes it’s as simple as learning to say “no.” They might learn that when formal systems fail, informal networks of mutual support become essential infrastructure. They might learn that dignity isn’t something granted by employers or governments; it’s something you claim for yourself, in community with others.

Junior’s story doesn’t have a triumphant ending. He got out of the plant, but his mother still works there. The system that killed his father continues to operate. The racial hierarchies that made his life miserable remain intact.

But he found a way to change his own life. He refused the logic of his own disposability. He learned the word that let him set a limit.

“The first time I said ‘no’ is the first time things started to get better.”

That’s not nothing. In fact, it might be everything.