Take a break from politics for a few minutes and share with me the powerful experiences of Baldemar Velásquez, founder and president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), an AFL-CIO affiliate. He wrote a daily blog while working recently as an unknown field laborer in North Carolina to see firsthand the conditions of tobacco workers.

There are many reasons economic immigrants come to this nation—driven out of their home countries by bad trade deals that fail to consider the impact on workers or because they are fleeing unfettered corporate greed that seeks out impoverished nations to pay the lowest possible wages. Last week in this spot, I took a look at why border crossings start in the boardroom.

Once in the United States, immigrants are ripe for employer exploitation—and many U.S. employers don’t hesitate to do so.