How Legal Immigration Is Keeping Farms Afloat

LAKE VILLAGE, Ark.—On a breezy day, sun and shadow dance across Mencer farms, turning it into a patchwork of green in the fertile Arkansas Delta. It is humid here in the deep South, where the clock seems to run slower and the temperature hotter than in other places. Lake Village is a small town sitting along Lake Chicot, an abandoned channel of the Mississippi River. Over thousands of years, flooding deposited rich alluvial soil, making it ideal for crops like rice, cotton, soybeans, and corn. As a child, William Mencer’s grandfather handed him a cowboy hat and a garden hoe to dig up the pigweeds growing between the crop rows....