The A-Team: When Teenage Athletes Replaced Migrant Farmworkers

·10 min·1 clip

The A-Team exposed a contradiction: Americans said migrants took jobs, but teenagers refused those same jobs.

This episode tells the story of the 1965 'A-Team' experiment, where the U.S. government recruited thousands of high school athletes to replace migrant farmworkers. The program failed spectacularly, revealing the skilled, punishing nature of farm labor and America's deep dependence on migrant labor—a contradiction that still echoes in today's immigration debates.

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