Link to article

By Don Jenkins, Capital Press

Attorneys general from 13 states told a federal judge that the life expectancy of U.S. farmworkers is 49, reciting a long-debunked claim still spread by migrant advocates, academics and even government councils.

The claim that farmworkers die young goes back to at least the 1960s. The state attorneys general repeated it in an amicus brief urging U.S. District Judge Kirk Sherriff to toss out foreign farmworker wages set by the Trump administration.

In his decision last month, Sherriff cited other reasons for ruling the wages were too low. He gave no sign he was swayed by the attorneys general.

Nevertheless, Worker and Farmer Labor Association CEO Enrique Gastelum, whose organization recruits farmworkers, said he believes such a claim affects the debate over farmworker wages.

The claim ignores improvements in health care and workplace safety, he said. “I think it greatly influences people’s opinions in the judiciary, the public and policymakers,” he said.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison led the 13-blue state coalition. Washington Attorney General Nick Brown and Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield gave their support.

The attorneys general filed the brief to back the United Farm Workers. The brief blamed infectious diseases, poor housing and lack of health care for farmworkers’ purportedly short life spans.

The brief cited a 2025 article published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

That article cited a 2003 editorial written by two doctors for the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved. But the claim predates the editorial.

According to Google AI, the claim originated in 1998 in a report written for California state legislators. The report cited the National Migrant Resources Program, which later became the National Center for Farmworker Health.

The claim, however, was already old by 1998. Labor activists repeated the claim in a 1971 report to Oregon legislators titled “The Green Ghetto.”

Even earlier references, dating back to 1968, can be found in letters to newspaper editors defending the UFW’s grape boycott. There, for now, the trail grows cold.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, life expectancy in the U.S. in 2024 was 79. The CDC does not collect separate data on farmworkers, spokesman Jason Lefevre said.

The myth has been busted before. Wellesley College bioethicist Charlene Galarneau wrote in 2013 in a journal associated with Harvard that the false life-expectancy claim hides the fact that too little is known about the health of farmworkers.

“The common claim that the average life expectancy for migrant farmworkers is 49 years was found to be unsubstantiated two decades ago, but this ‘fact’ continues to circulate,” she stated.

More than a decade later, the claim lives on.

It was repeated in 2025 in a social science journal article on farmworker housing. The university researchers cited the National Advisory Council on Migrant Health.

The advisory council advised Health Secretary Alex Azar in 2019 that life expectancy for farmworkers is 49 years — “indicating farmworkers are at a higher risk of early death.”

The council attributed the “fact” to a Yuma, Arizona, radio station. Ironically, the radio reporter repeated the claim without attribution in a story about low-income farmworkers laboring into their 60s.

The last time life expectancy in the U.S. was under 49 years was 1907. Gastelum, whose parents were farmworkers, said he would have noticed if the life expectancy of farmworkers was 49.

And if it were true, thousands of pages of health and safety regulations have been wasted, he said.

“Maybe someone needs to freshen up that research,” Gastelum said. “How about if we dust it off and do a new survey?”