of legislation. For instance, we discussed Public Law 78. That is the Mexican migrant labor legislation.

This discussion developed the information that they fix a minimum wage of 50 cents an hour for that contract labor. The commissioner of labor in the State of Texas said they have sufficient labor of their own if they got a better minimum pay standard set up. With that 50 cents rate of pay there in the State of New Jersey, that uses a lot of labor from the British West Indies and Puerto Rico and they even enforce a minimum standard of 75 cents an hour; in some instances even higher.

He said that it was possible for a tomato producer in Arizona or Texas to produce tomatoes, ship them to New Jersey, and they could sell them cheaper than you could grow tomatoes on the farm adjoining the Campbell Soup plant in New Jersey.

Senator, it looks as though we are going to have to work out on this group that is putting across that subsidy for those commercial farms down along the Mexican border and that would apply to Arizona and California as well. We are just simply subsidizing and adding to the surplus of farm products while they do it through this cheap labor and a minimum of 50 cents, and taking jobs away from migrant workers in this country in favor of the Mexicans. I hope the Senator gives that some serious consideration. Senator WILLIAMS. We had hearings yesterday that developed some of the same figures you have cited. We are familiar with them. I have been out to the Southwest and have had firsthand testimony to the effect that there would be a great deal more stability there if Mexican labor were not imported in such large numbers. I talked to the commissioner of labor from Texas and he knows there would be more stability if Texans were not forced to leave Texas, creating the void into which the imported labor moves.

Mr. THOMPSON. Senator, our colloquy with Commissioner Batt also developed into a discussion of the need for consideration of changes in the minimum wage legislation from which agricultural workers are exempt, as you know.

Mr. BAILEY. But including commercial.

Mr. THOMPSON. But including commercial farming operations.

I had occasion early this year to visit in Jamaica where I talked with the authorities there on the subject of farm labor. They are quite happy with the arrangement which they have made which guarantees a minimum wage to their workers and a guaranteed number of hours. They feel quite strongly, however, that the children are not as well cared for as they might be here, as far as their education is concerned. As a matter of fact, their Commissioner of Education, who incidentally is advised by two very brilliant young Oxford Dons who are in residence there and who help them with their educational problems, they are trying to advise their workers, in the light of the conditions here, to leave their children behind when they come to the States and then pick them up when they come back. Obviously, this might be a little bit better for the living conditions of the children and for their educational program, but a man with as many children as you have realizes that the more time the family unit is together, as a unit, the better off the children are, That is one reason why you commute so much.

Senator WILLIAMS. I am a migrant, you know.

Mr. THOMPSON. This problem has many ramifications. I do not think there could be any question about the need for this type of legislation. It is, as you characterized it, modest. We sacrifice many things on the altar of a balanced budget around here in recent years, but that does not mean we cannot make some sort of progress at least.

Senator WILLIAMS. The amounts here are modest indeed meeting a very big problem. The figure for summer schools is $250,000 a year and for interstate study, $300,000 a year. These figures are unusually small for discussion in this body, as you know.

I notice the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare supports the principle very strongly that is expressed in this legislation. They have the routine suggestion, however, that the States do the job.

Mr. THOMPSON. Yes.

Senator WILLIAMS. I do not know if H.R. 10379, dealing with adult education, is being discussed here, but this, too, is a grave problem. We see adults, migrant farm people, who just do not have the rudiments of understanding of how to live a sanitary life even when farmers have the money to invest in adequate housing and sanitary facilities. It is an unhappy fact that a great majority of these people just do not know how to use flush toilet facilities, shower facilities and simple things like screen doors and screens on windows. They take them off or kick them off. They do not understand them.

I think this education bill for adults would do the same thing for adults that we hope to do for children, provide new opportunities for what we would consider

Mr. BAILEY. I would say to the gentleman we have had some interesting testimony on that phase of it as far as adult education is concerned.

Senator WILLIAMS. It is interesting. For instance, we stopped one day at a farm camp that was within sight of the spires of Princeton, N.J., and saw there screens that had been kicked out.

Mr. THOMPSON. At Princeton?

You

Senator WILLIAMS. Within sight of the spires of Princeton University and we were told by the farmer that the first thing the people do when they arrive in the summer is prop the screen door open. see, even this simple fact of life, of keeping out flies and insects, is not understood.

Mr. BAILEY. Let me say to the Senator, when I was holding hearings on the impacted school legislation in California, a series of about 25 or 30 hearings, that the committee charged me with holding a hearing in the field of labor at Bakersfield. The hearings there were necessary on account of the difficulty it had on the Di Giurgio farm in the San Joaquin Valley. I got my first contact with this deplorable situation there. They had a place where these migrant farmworkers were and they were mostly Mexicans.

The Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization in that area testified that during the 90 days previous to the hearing he had removed 315 Mexican wetbacks off of the farm. They were concentrated in a little spot of 2 or 3 acres they called the Weed Patch. You

talk about unsanitary conditions. It just was not believable that they could bring those people in there; no schools whatsoever provided, no facilities, and no sanitation of any kind.

Senator WILLIAMS. That is right.

Mr. BAILEY. It is just a disgrace to America.

Senator WILLIAMS. That was not an exceptional situation.

Mr. BAILEY. No, and I take it that would be true of a lot of those camps where you have that concentration, particularly in those bigger commercial farm operations.

Senator, we appreciate deeply your coming here and if I succeed in making a dent in this Mexican farm bill, Public Law 78, you finish up the rest of it over in the Senate, and then we will agree with you when it comes back over here.

Senator WILLIAMS. Over there I think the Committee on Agriculture will have it.

Mr. BAILEY. I know what your accommodation is over there. We have some of that in the House.

Senator WILLIAMS. Thank you very much.

Mr. BAILEY. Let me at this time clear the record of the point where the Senator's full statement will be submitted for inclusion in the record.

(The statement follows:)

STATEMENT OF HON. HARRISON A. WILLIAMS, JR., U.S. SENATOR
FROM THE STATE OF NEW JERSEY

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, it is a great pleasure and privilege to appear before you this morning on behalf of H.R. 10378 and other legislation designed to improve educational opportunities for the children of our agricultural migrant work force.

First of all, I wish to express my deep appreciation and thanks to the chairman of this subcommittee for calling hearings on this important legislation and for the expeditious way in which he is acting to give these bills serious consideration during this session of Congress. We expect to have similar hearings very shortly on the Senate side, and I certainly hope that we will be able to follow the excellent pattern set by the chairman and members of this subcommittee.

Mr. Chairman, since I am not wedded to any particular details of the pending proposals, but am primarily interested in helping enact a bill to improve educational opportunity for migrant children, I shall speak only briefly on the provisions of the legislation, confining my remarks in the main to the general need for this legislation and the unhappy background which gave rise to its introduction.

The bill, H.R. 10378, sponsored by the chairman of this subcommittee and S. 2864, sponsored by me on the Senate side, generally follow the well-established, sound precedent in the federally impacted area school legislation. Briefly, the migrant educational legislation provides a simple three-part, 5-year program: First: To help bear the additional cost of educating the children of migrant workers during the regular school session, the Federal Government would for the first 2 years, pay 75 percent of the State's average cost of educating the child for each day of attendance. After the first 2 years-that is, for the remaining 3 years of the program-the Federal Government would share 50 percent of the cost.

Second: The bill provides for annual grants totaling $300,000 for the establishment of summer schools. Local educational agencies and institutions of higher education would be eligible to sponsor these summer schools.

Third: Planning grants totaling $250,000 annually would be provided to the State educational departments to be used to promote interstate cooperation, the development of educational programs, material and demonstrations and the transmission of school records for migrant children. In other words, the third part of the bill is a catalyst designed to get the best possible end product under the parts I and II programs.

The rationale underlying the federally impacted legislation, like that underlying the pending measures, is simply this: when parents and children move into a community, without contributing to the local tax base, and when there is a substantial Federal interest and responsibility involved in the overall circumstances, there is a Federal duty to aid the school of that community in meeting the unique problem presented.

In the case of migrant children, we find all the elements of Federal responsibility and an extremely great need for aid at the local school level-perhaps a greater need than is found in many communities now receiving federally impacted aid.

The Federal responsibility arises from the nature of the lives of agricultural seasonal workers and the fact that they move across county and State lines several times during the course of a single season. Though most of them have a State which they call home, the great majority are actually "stateless" when it comes to calling upon their State for the general welfare aid that is available to settled, year-round residents. Since these people are not citizens of States in the sense which is relevant in this kind of legislative context, we are forced to conclude that they are, in large measure, Federal citizens. Though this may strike some as a novel, legal concept, I believe almost all of us can agree that it is certainly a valid concept as applied to assuring adequate educational opportunity to the children of migrant farmworkers. The parents of these children provide an essential service to our economy, by making themselves available throughout the country to satisfy peak labor needs at harvest time.

Now, keeping in mind that this group of citizens, because of economic conditions beyond their control, contributes little or nothing in the way of State or local taxes, let's consider for a minute the kind of impact they make on local school systems. States like Texas, with approximately 95,000 domestic migrants at the peak season, or California, with about 60,000, or Florida, with more than 25.000, provide good examples for measuring the impact. The number of children accompanying workers in each of these examples can be calculated on the basis of the Department of Labor's estimates that there is approximately one child for every five workers. Therefore, we may safely conclude that there are at least 19.000 migrant children in Texas at peak harvest time, about 12,000 in California, and 5,000 in Florida.

But the fact that a rather large number of children is involved is only part of the problem. The heart of the matter involves the relatively brief periods of their enrollment in any given school. So what we really have to deal with is an influx of large numbers of children into local school systems for short periods of time-for sometimes as little as 2 weeks.

Mr. Chairman, I think we need no documentation of the fact that most States and local school systems simply do not have the funds, instructional capacity, or classroom space needed to cope with the educational needs presented by such an influx of children. It is too much to expect States and local communities to pay the full cost of educating this large number of children. Though their parents, as American citizens, are entitled to have their children receive an adequate educational opportunity, the fact still remains that the parents generally do not help underwrite the cost of education as do resident taxpaying citizens. Most schools are already overcrowded and understaffed, and it is hardly surprising that even the most dedicated community can do little to shoulder this added and heavy burden.

Although the picture as I see it is rather dark, it becomes darker still when we remind ourselves that we aren't talking about the typical, urban community. We're talking about the rural sections where the educational financing problems are most acute. We know of situations in which rural communities, having a normal population of about 1,500 to 2,500 experience a population increase of double or nearly treble its normal figure with the arrival of the migrant work force at harvest time. Even though this condition comes only once a year and might, therefore, be called by some a "transitory" condition, it is not transitory for the migrant children. It is an everyday problem because they are constantly going from one community to another.

And, of course, it is the migrant child-his future, his right to a fair chance in life that causes our basic concern. The facts about his educational opportunity are almost as shocking as when John Steinbeck wrote "The Grapes of Wrath," just 21 years ago. Some of our educators tell me that, relatively, today's migrant child is worse off than during the "grapes of wrath" days, and I, frankly, am not prepared to debate the point.

For thousands of migrant children the school year begins-if at all—just any time or many times a year. Moving as they do from State to State, sometimes as often as seven times a year, they barely have time to pick a classroom seat before they are taken away again. Migrants often leave their quarters well before school ends and return well after the next school session begins. These conditions have been highlighted by direct testimony taken in public hearings by the Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. During a subcommittee hearing in the State of Minnesota, Mr. Eugene Meyer, elementary school director, speaking on behalf of the Minnesota Commissioner of Education, had this to say:

"In a summary of the notification that we received from the farm section of the Minnesota Department of Employment Security, there were 249 families that were reported to us. We immediately notified the county superintendents of the information on the forms; and of these 249 children, most of them arrived after May 1, and 35 percent of them arrived after May 11. So that it means that there is very little of the school term remaining after the children arrive."

In view of the conditions described by Mr. Meyer, which are representative of the situations we are finding in almost every State, it is little wonder that the migrant children are behind in schoolwork and, frequently, are not passed on to the next highest class with their contemporaries. For most of them, school is little more than a series of frustrating beginnings, abrupt endings and unfinished lessons.

What does this add up to in terms of human facts and figures?

A study of children in Florida, Virginia, Texas, and Illinois revealed that 75 percent of the migrant children have serious educational deficiencies attributable to lack of formal training. Bay County, Mich., reports the same figure on deficiencies. An Oregon survey showed 32 percent deficient by 1 year and 26 percent deficient by 2 or 3 years. Testimony taken before the Subcommittee on Migratory Labor showed that serious deficiencies existed for migrant children in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Along these same lines, the survey papers of the 1960 White House Conference on Children and Youth noted that most of the children of migrant families "are far below grade level and that their school achievement generally is under fourth grade, the attainment established for literacy in the United States." The U.S. Office of Education reports that the migrant group has the lowest educational attainment of any group in our Nation.

Before concluding, Mr. Chairman, I should like to quote from another authoritative source regarding the plight of our migrant children.

"Unquestionably, the children of migrant agricultural workers, as a group, have fewer educational opportunities than any other group of children in our society. There are many factors contributing to this situation, including the need for school-age children to tend younger children, the employment of very young children in migratory families, and the disruptive effects of a migratory life. Of lesser importance, generally, is the resistance of communities to school attendance of the migrants. Despite growing concern and action, on the part of State and local educational agencies and other private and public organizations, to improve the educational opportunities of these children, the education of most migrant children does not meet even minimum requirements for effective citizenship."

Interestingly enough, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, this clearcut acknowledgement of the problem is taken from the Health, Education, and Welfare report on this legislation. Unfortunately this report goes on to say that Federal legislation on this subject should not be enacted.

I submit, Mr. Chairman, that the significant part of the Health, Education, and Welfare report is found in its description of the problem which I have quoted and not in its views of how to handle the problem.

Mr. BAILEY. Again, thank you, Senator.

Senator WILLIAMS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. BAILEY. The committee will stand adjourned subject to the call of the Chair.

(Thereupon, the hearing was adjourned at 12:10 p.m.)