Though I would pretty strongly disagree with many of her political views, this author has a personal account of her interactions with an illegal immigrant family employed by a dairy farm, and the squalid living conditions with which they were provided in exchange for work:

I’ll close with an example of “relative poverty” that, a decade or more later, still warms my heart. My friends Abel, Cristina, and their children Macario, Rogelio, and Liliana, lived at the dairy farm in Western Washington where Abel worked. As was too often the case, he was offered “housing” in lieu of wages; this allowed dairy farmers to cram entire families into dilapidated travel trailers while paying them half wages from daily split shifts — two milkings a day, seven days a week. The Valencia family lived in one of the nicer trailer homes I was accustomed to, a 17-foot trailer with a working toilet, although the children urinated outside so as to not tax the trailer’s waste system. Cristina cooked with water from a hose dragged through the field and wedged into the window of the trailer. She and Abel slept on one fold-out bed; Liliana had a bunk and the boys slept upright on one of the couches. Cristina helped Abel milk the cows, unpaid; the herd got larger and the milkings got longer and were too much for one man to finish, so she wrestled with the milking hoses and waded through the muck to help her man.

One day, Abel slipped on the milking parlor floor. A cow stepped on him, crushing some ribs and injuring his shoulder. His employer had been deducting workman’s compensation from his $1,000-a-month checks, but as it turned out, the boss hadn’t been applying them to the State fund, and Abel had no coverage. His shifts were covered by his wife and eldest son until Abel could limp out to the paror and attach the apparatus to the milk cows. And the entire time, Abel and Cristina burst with gratitude and astonishment at the kindness of the boss — because he didn’t fire Abel like he could have, and they didn’t lose their home. I ate dinner with the Valencias every Wednesday; Cristina would fix pollo en mole and I would visit for an hour or so before I taught my classes. Their children were grateful for my classes — they could read, unlike their parents — and Abel and Cristina were grateful that they were all together, the children in school and Abel regularly employed. Sometimes the kids at school would make fun of Rogelio, because he smelled funny; sometimes Liliana would beg to stay home so she could help Papi; and sometimes Macario would talk about how he was going to drop out when he turned 15 and buy a car and work at the pallet factory and make $6 an hour.

I think that one of the take-aways of this article, at least as it relates to illegal immigration, is that many of these business elites, agricultural owners and the like are truly morally sick people, and they have the money to turn the bits of our politicians. If they had their way, everyone in America would be living as these illegals making the same wages, just as long as it kept them living in the lifestyle they prefer.