Last summer, New Mexico state special agents inspecting a farm found thousands more cannabis plants than state laws allow. Then on subsequent visits, they made another unexpected discovery: dozens of underfed, shell-shocked Chinese workers.
The workers said they had been trafficked to the farm in Torrance County, N.M., were prevented from leaving and never got paid.
“They looked weathered,” says Lynn Sanchez, director of a New Mexico social services nonprofit who was called in after the raid. “They were very scared, very freaked out.”
They are part of a new pipeline of migrants leaving China and making unauthorized border crossings into the United States via Mexico, and many are taking jobs at hundreds of cannabis farms springing up across the U.S.
An NPR investigation into a cluster of farms, which the industry calls cannabis “grow” operations, in New Mexico found businesses that employ and are managed and funded largely by Chinese people. They’re seeking opportunities in a flourishing U.S. cannabis market after the coronavirus pandemic led to a global economic crisis. But some of the businesses have run afoul of the law, even as states such as New Mexico have legalized marijuana.
One of the workers encountered at the farm in Torrance County is 41-year-old L., who came from China’s central Hubei province a year ago. He asked NPR to use only his first initial because he is anxious about legal prosecution in the U.S. and China.
L. told NPR he struggled to find work in China during the pandemic lockdown. He was forced to move out of his home after a state developer demolished his house to make way for a new project, but his new apartment was never built and he lost his deposit. When L. went to the developer’s office to protest, he got into a physical fight with employees of the company and was jailed.
That was when a disillusioned L. saw videos on Douyin, a sister app of TikTok in China, about people purportedly earning good money in the United States.
“There was one influencer who kept messaging me his pay stubs in California showing how he was making 4-, sometimes $5,000 a month and telling me how easy it was,” L. says. He got in contact with an agent who promised to help him get to the U.S.
To read more, click on NPR