MIGRANT LABOR Newcomers tough out hard life in Wyoming

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/28/MNL2162BB2.DTL

Dan Frosch, New York Times

Sunday, March 1, 2009

(03-01) 04:00 PST Rock Springs, Wyo. --

Somewhere in Wyoming's vast, barren sagebrush country, Lorenzo Cortez Vargas pokes his head out of the rickety camper where he lives and stares into the dirt.

Vargas, a sheepherder from Chile, spends his days and nights on lonesome stretches of the Rockies, driving 2,000 sheep across Colorado and Wyoming as part of a federal temporary worker program he signed up for more than a year ago.

But like the other sheepherders, or borregueros, in the West, Vargas has barely any contact with his new country, where he earns $750 a month for working round the clock without a day off.

He lives alone in the crude 5-foot-by-10-foot campito with no running water, toilet or electricity, save for a car battery he has rigged to a small radio. A sputtering wood-burning stove is his only source of heat in winter, a collection of faded telephone cards his only connection to home.

"They never tell you exactly what it's going to be like," Vargas, 28, said in Spanish. "But you've got to stick it out here. What are you going to do?"

Sheepherding has long occupied the bottom rung of migrant labor. Most borregueros speak no English; many have only a vague idea of where they are and no knowledge of their legal rights as documented immigrants. The herders enter the country under the H-2A temporary agricultural worker program, which allows companies to hire foreigners if no Americans want their jobs.

FULL story at link.