#36 – Boyce Upholt

#36 – Boyce Upholt

October 12th, 2026

Editor’s Note: Full episode video is available here.

###

Angus (00:00)
This is Everything Is Somewhere. I’m Angus Stocking. My guest today is a returning guest. Boyce Upholt spoke with us some time ago about his wonderful book, Great River, and we’re going to touch base on that again today. Also, he’s got some new projects, an online magazine that he’s been editing and producing, and a great article in The New Yorker. So, with that introduction, Boyce Upholt, welcome back to Everything Is Somewhere.

Boyce (00:26)
Thanks for having me, Angus. Glad to be here.

Angus (00:28)
Yeah. And Boyce, I enjoyed the Great River extravagantly and praised it extravagantly. And I predicted then that it would be recognized as a classic, something like undaunted courage or writing of McPhee. how has it done for you? Is it getting the recon recognition that I think it deserves?

Boyce (00:49)
I yeah, I I’ve been ha I mean, it’s hard to know. It’s still it’s only two years old, so we gotta give it some more time.

Angus (00:54)
Okay.

Boyce (00:54)
But I was proud. It won a a couple awards. One was the Willie Morris Prize for Southern Nonfiction, which means a lot to me as someone who has moved to the South and embraced this place. and then also what meant a lot to me, the James V. Swift Medal for maritime literature, sort of that’s done through the St. Louis Mercantile Library, which is deeply tied with the navigation industry. And as a guy who’s like a canoeist that is skeptical of parts of the navigation industry, it was cool to see that nonetheless the book was objective enough and spoke of that history in a way that that this community that felt like, not necessarily my community, was embracing it as well. So that’s all great. And yeah, I continue to do some talks around it. I just flew back from Colorado earlier this week where I was speaking to the stormwater and floodplain managers who were interested in the Mississippi River.

Angus (01:38)
Well, congratulations, it’s all well deserved. and then you mentioned you know, a writer in the south, and one of the things I liked about the book and you know, fits with our podcast, is your close association of your place on earth, the lands of your birth and where you live, with your writing. You’re a southern writer.

Angus (02:01)
How important is that to you? And what are you doing in that area? How is that manifesting itself now?

Boyce (02:07)
Yeah, yeah. It’s strangely important to me. As again, it’s not because this isn’t the land of my birth. I mean, I think I wind up writing a lot about how growing up in the suburbs of the northeast, I never really found a way to set down roots. And it was when I moved to Mississippi, and now I live in New Orleans, these places just grabbed me. And yeah, it just means a lot to me to understand the place where I am. And so the Great River is about more than a million square miles of the Mississippi’s watershed, but in some ways it was just me trying to understand the hatchery landscape, right, the land between the levees are in my backyard when I was living in Mississippi there.

So, but I think you’re also alluding to a current project of mine. So last year I launched a new print magazine called Southlands. And since we’re on video, I can hold it up here. we’re publishing twice a year. It’s sort of this oversized magazine, nice and thick, telling stories about the culture of nature in the south. So I felt like a lot of the journalism I was asked to do about the environment in the South was always focused on pollution or sort of environmental justice issues. and those are very important stories to me.

But it felt like if that’s the only stories that we hear about this region, it becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy. And again, I’ve felt a weird sense of homecoming since living in and my spending my adult life in the in the south. And so wanted to have a publication that paired those kinds of critical stories with stories that celebrate the traditions and the places that have helped this place feel like home.

Angus (03:30)
Hmm. And what kind of stories are you telling then? What what is Southlands bringing to the magazine landscape that you didn’t find before?

Boyce (03:41)
I mean, again, it’s sort of some of these positive stories or just different ways of looking at it. So, one example in the I’ve only read it’s trying not to make it the Boyce project, and I’m mostly doing editing, but in the first issue I did write one of the features and it was about an effort to bring gravel biking to the Arkansas Delta, right? So this region that meant some part of part of my research of the book. And I had talked to some editors at other national magazines, and they either weren’t interested in gravel biking or they weren’t interested in that region.

And I thought it was a really interesting effort, right? The Arkansas Delta is deeply impoverished. It’s not a place where people go to recreate. And so I thought this nonprofit that was thinking, can we get people to come in here, have this travel experience, and get them to reckon with American history and poverty and landscape. I thought that was a fascinating story. So that that’s the kind of it’s an example, right?

It’s like we do a lot about recreation. we do a lot about place, you know, a cover story for the first issue was all about prescribed fires and how they’re that tradition, people out west in California are having to relearn it, but it’s always been done here in the South. This has sort of been the place where it’s been passed down through generations. Our second issue, we had a cover story about southern rock climbing, which is actually a an incredibly rich tradition. So just looking, yeah, looking more broadly at the ways people engage with this landscape here.

Angus (04:56)
Yeah. Yeah, a couple of those topics are things that I would like to talk more about. in gravel biking, super important for landscape moving through. And then well I should probably read more of the magazine and come up with yeah…

Boyce (05:10)
I’ll get you some copies. Happy to do so, yeah.

Angus (05:14)
And maybe you can hook me up with some of your writers to talk more about that.

Boyce (05:18)
Absolutely.

Angus (05:18)
Sounds very Everything is Somewhere oriented.

Boyce (05:20)
Yeah, I think so.

Angus (05:21)
And the bulk of this interview I hope we can spend on a New Yorker article of yours. I think a great article, and it really hit home for me in a number of ways, and that was about what was the title and what was the overall topic?

Boyce (05:37)
I don’t even remember the title. Like it’s one of these because it was a digital piece. And so we don’t get the fun titles. I’ll have to look it up. But it was basically, here it is. How white South Africans are reshaping the Mississippi Delta, which captures quite a bit of what it was about, right? It’s about how the farms in the Mississippi Delta, which is famous as sort of the land where the blues was born, right? This historically black region, but now on many, if not most of the farms, the bulk of the agriculture label labor are yeah, white South Africans coming in on seasonal farming visas.

Angus (06:05)
Okay. And what I’d like to do, Boyce, if you’ll be patient with me, I’d kind of like to give an overview of what I know or think I know about South Africa and apartheid and current migration and maybe the current infrastructure. And I’ll say right up front, I think most of what I have gathered in my life is wrong and needs correcting. And one thing I admire about your writing is that you’re so research heavy in that when you do speak, it doesn’t seem to be coming from a political place or some preconceived ideology, but grows out of what you’ve learned in deep research. Is that fair to say?

Boyce (06:54)
I hope so. It’s what I you know, I I definitely have my own political point of view, but I think, you know, it’s funny I grew up wanting to be a novelist sort of stumbled into journalism. But I think the old fashioned idea, not of objectivity, but like every piece I do I try and challenge my preconceived notions and like see is there anything I’m getting wrong? Because truth and whatever that means, it’s a complicated thing, but I’m always trying to get to some kind of truth. And so ideally, yeah, it’s it’s as again not balanced, but just considering different ways of thinking as possible.

Angus (07:26)
Great. So here’s thing. So Nelson Mandela was freed in nineteen ninety. And so for the eighties, when I was a teenager, most of that time, we were going through the apartheid era and also the exclusion of South Africa from like the Olympics. It was in the news a lot. It was a racist issue or racial boycott issue, a political issue. And I was just kind of becoming aware of the world, right? And news. And the impression I gained then was that South Africa for whatever reason was made up of mostly white people who owned everything and had built everything and kept black people, natives I guess, out of power and arrested dissidents and it was just kind of like slavery, and that the rest of the world bravely gathered together and excluded these people and fought against apartheid and achieved great victories with Nelson Mandela’s release and and then that achieved it kind of left the news and it left my consciousness, but you know, the good guys won.

And then some time goes by and I start to learn more about South Africa and it starts to become in the news. And now I’m more conservative, maybe, and I’m way into infrastructure as a land surveyor and working with engineers and writing about it. And this other story kind of begins to introduce that that much of what people admired about South Africa was more or less built by white settlers. And with the change in makeup, a lot of that infrastructure began to, you know, degrade or fall apart as infrastructure does, you know, and as it is in this country and so forth. And then moving forward to the current day, with mass migration and so forth in in the news, there’s this kind of odd signal and like an outlier of white immigration to the United States that’s encouraged. So there’s this like swirl of infrastructure and politics and race and immigration. And I in a way I don’t know what to think, but I’m also th you know, I so I guess I guess I just to lay it out for you, that’s kind of the stew of things going on in my mind. And you addressed like all of that. What how did apartheid start in South Africa? What did it grow into? And what is the current situation with immigration?

Boyce (10:14)
I’m gonna jot some of that down. and let me like give a little of my…

Angus (10:17)
Ha ha

Boyce (10:18)
…my own background too, right? Because I’m 42. So I was 10 years old when the apartheid ended. And so I think it’s interesting. I’ve talked to some stuff, I’m still doing some reporting on this the same topic. I’m working on a podcast series for it. So I’m continuing to talk to people and I’ve talked to other people who very similarly, right? Like this was the fight against apartheid was such a formative political experience for them helped turn them who they who they are. And for me it was quite it, right? It’s just like I had this in my childhood years I must have absorbed. I think that that was the time period where like South Africans were sometimes the villains in movies. and so this vague sense of that villainy without being too young to really grapple with the complexities of it. Yeah, I think Lethal Weapon or yeah, yeah…

Angus (11:00)
Yeah, lethal weapon, right? Yeah.

Boyce (11:05)
Yeah, yeah, that’s the big one.

Boyce (11:07)
So it, you know, like it was just this like low-level cultural signal that I was just barely young and old enough to grasp. And then, like you said, I think it disappeared from my consciousness. So I just had the sense of like white South Africa-bad. and then while living in the Mississippi Delta 10-ish years ago, I would start to see these groups of young white men in very short shorts. That is always the signal of the white South Africans, it seems.

Boyce (11:31)
They were showing up in these farming communities, small towns, f small farming towns in Mississippi. And I was very confounded. And a lot of my friends who didn’t work in agriculture were also like, why are they here? And a little bit disturbed, right? Because you think about you have that sense of that history and the history of South Africa and the history of apartheid and the the the the white perpetration of that. And then living in the Mississippi Delta, a majority black region where white people own almost all the land hold the majority of the wealth. There’s a huge amount, a large, impoverished and frequently un or underemployed black population in this place. And so to see white laborers coming into farms is a very strange thing. and so that was like the background. And then the story came about because it was a co-production with the Food and Environment Reporting Network, where as of I think when this podcast comes out, I will be a contributing editor. But my editor there was like when Trump started talking about white South Africans, which we’ll come back to, I think.

Boyce (12:23)
He’s like, well, aren’t they don’t aren’t they already here, voice? You you’ve spent time in Mississippi. Do you think there’s a story there? And so I decided to go back to these communities where I used to live and try and get to know some of these South Africans. So that’s sort of my background in all this. And I say that as a caveat of like, I am not at all you’re gonna have listeners to this podcast that may well know more than me about the history of apartheid or even the present-day situation in South Africa, right? I am I have learned a lot about those things in an effort to try and understand this dramatic cultural change that is happening in a place that I consider one of one of several homes, right? So not an expert on any of this. With that caveat, I can talk a little. I mean, like my the the question of how apartheid came to be, the way I’ve come to think of it, the my the research for this piece is I mean, it’s complicated by other dynamics in South Africa, right? So this was a initially the initial colony was established by Great Britain. And so you have British people.

Boyce (13:19)
But then you wind up getting a mixture of Europeans in South Africa. This is centuries ago, right? And and one of the groups that came in…

Angus (13:24)
Yeah.

Boyce (13:24)
…were these Dutch Huguenots and mostly Dutch, a little bit of French ancestry in there. And they’re coming and living in this colony. and some of these people wind up feeling frustrated by like they felt like the British were treating them as the underclass. They w they weren’t really interested in like participating in this British maritime coastal, you know, globalized colony. And so they began to move inland and set up farms in interior South Africa. and so this is the group we know now know as Afrikaners. They used to be known as Boers. and they were for many years they like there were wars between the Boers and the British. And the Boers were often seen as the underclass and there were certain things that was really done to oppress them. And so the rise of apartheid was in part a very intentional effort to consolidate a new nationalistic political identity in South Africa. So some of these Afrikaners were pushing to get their language in schools, pushing to have more to have this to build power by coming together as a community. But in doing so, as that morphed through the years, they did come to power. And then they sort of extended this olive branch to the British as well and made this more pan-white identity in South Africa, in part because

Boyce (14:39)
As in Mississippi, it was necessary, like they were always a minority compared to black African populations. There’s also interesting colored popularity, right? So, like this it a very global place where you have some Indian immigration, so there’s just mix racial mixture, but the white people were always a minority. And so this is going to be a political issue in anything like a democracy. And so part of apartheid was this effort to consolidate a white identity in a way that would allow whites to maintain political power. And it was to varying degrees of of auth like authenticity, right? Like it was claimed to be like, we’re gonna give blacks power by putting them in their own nations, separate but equal, as we was the parallel here in the US. I I and I think you’re some people that will say like that was true. It was true. We were trying to help black people out. It’s hard to give a whole lot of credit to that because of the way

Boyce (15:34)
This was structured, it was essentially disempower. Like if they got shifted out of South Africa and into their own independent nations, they were gonna have no passports that would allow them to like they would be become stateless in essence. So deeply problematic in that way. But that’s yeah, let’s

Angus (15:46)
Can I ask…

Boyce (15:47)
Yeah, I’ll pause there because that’s a lot and and I d I haven’t answered all your questions yet, but but go ahead.

Angus (15:51)
Well, so couple things. First, I had no idea that there was a Brit British Dutch offer Connor that’s kind of its own separate racial you know cultural battle on its own. And then

Angus (16:06)
How did so development is a big part of this, right? We’ve got, you know, for lack of a better term, third world versus the first world clash. How did like f physical infrastructure play into this? Were the British and or the Boers building ports and railway bridges. I mean who owns the built stuff?

Boyce (16:30)
Sure. The in some ways that piece of that particular the infrastructural history of South Africa is beyond my expertise. So I’m not gonna try and claim anything I don’t know. but I think what i I can talk a little bit about that relates to that is the present day situation, which has a lot to do with why these white South Africans are coming to Mississippi, right? So we have apartheid that ends in nineteen ninety four, in part because you know, local people voted it would it just became clear this was not a sustainable solution, especially in an increasingly globalized world, where like the they were seen as villains and I think for good like I think the rest of the world was saying like this isn’t good South Africa and that was the correct thing to to be saying. And so this internal pressure this pressure became like we we aren’t gonna be able to make it as a country if the rest of our world if the rest of the world is looking at us as evil and we’re doing this this thing that’s problematic. And so had to change.

Boyce (17:17)
That’s 30 years ago, 30 plus years ago, right? And then you have this extended question of, and again, very there’s a lot of parallels in Mississippi and other parts of America, right? So you have this long history where because of this political structure, huge wealth, property is disproportionately in the hands of the white minority. and now, and so what has happened in both the US and South Africa is

Boyce (17:43)
I as I see it, sort of with apartheid with Jim Crow, where Jim Crow’s ended 30 years earlier, but there were a lot of in some ways intentional parallels there. That this was a political system where okay, not only is wealth and property in the white hands, but all of the political powers in the white hands. Basically, the black majority has no say over the politics. And what has happened in both on both continents is an extension of political enfranchisement. So black.

Boyce (18:06)
Southerners, black people in the US can vote, right? Which was not like not that long ago was not that was basically not true. Same thing in South Africa, right? All this was in a very swift moment, democracy was extended to the whole of the country, which almost which meant immediately black people were gonna come to power because there was this black majority. And that that’s you see with like Nelson Mandela becoming president, things like that. that is the easier transition to get like it’s easier to spread political power than economic power.

Boyce (18:32)
And so what has happened in both continents, both places, again, is even so half a century after the end of Jim Crow, 30 years after the end of apartheid, most wealth and most property remains in the hands of the white minority. And so that has created economic problems in both places. An interesting thing. So now I’m finally gonna get to infrastructure. And the interesting challenge of that.

Boyce (18:55)
In the South African context is again, I don’t quite know who or when built it, but like South Africa was an interesting, like like you could go visit South Africa as an American or a British person in the 1980s, 1990s and be like, wow, I feel like I am not in the developing, like feels different than my stereotype of Africa. This is the developed world.

Angus (19:14)
Yeah.

Boyce (19:14)
We have dams and we have power grids, we have all this stuff functioning in the way that we’re accustomed to in the so-called developed world.

Boyce (19:22)
The issue was that those systems were for white only townships and they were not servicing, you know, black people that were living elsewhere, often clustered in slums. And so one of the challenges that South Africa has faced as it is attempting to as it is transitioned towards a more democratic political power. Well, it also means that these infrastructural systems all of a sudden have people that were just assumed not to be users of the system before. They get pulled into the political system and they’re also users that and so there has been, I think it’s not a problem anymore. But what you hear from a lot of South African white South Africans that immigrate to the US is that they’re really frustrated with brownouts, right? The power grid is overstrained.

Angus (20:02)
Mm.

Boyce (20:03)
And when from the white South Africans, they’re gonna say that’s because this is being we when we were in control, we managed this well. Now black people are in control, they’re not managing it well. Maybe there’s some of that at play, but I think you can’t ignore also the fact that all of this infrastructure, again, is being spread over a larger pool of people and has to be used differently. And so that really colors that picture there.

Angus (20:22)
Well, and you hear one of the main factors in the infrastructure world that I know is what’s called the talent shortage. where not white people or black people or any other race, but just simply people with engineering talent are not being trained in engineering. They’re you know, or and they’re not coming into the system. And so there’s just not enough talented people who have engineering expertise replacing a generation that is you know, retiring or leaving or dying. and so it sounds like, you know, quite aside from race, it could just simply be, you know, there’s a greater need and fewer people who know what they’re doing, an expertise problem. Would that be fair?

Boyce (21:14)
Yeah, potentially. Again,

Boyce (21:15)
I don’t know enough to know. I like, like that that kind of problem can happen. I mean, I think one again, this is South Africa’s such a complicated place to discuss, but another thing, this is very realistic, a program called the Black Economic Empowerment Program in South Africa, where again in in part of this effort to redistribute wealth and power in a in a way that was needed after apartheid, there are now essentially quotas. So

Boyce (21:37)
Right. A lot of the work in South Africa is state work or working for these big mining companies, the diamond mines, things like that. and j companies that take state contracts are now sort of scored on how many of their jobs are going to black people. And so a lot of these white immigrants into the US, seasonal or otherwise, you know that that’s another complaint you’re here. They’re like, We just can’t find jobs in South Africa because there’s a government system that prioritizes other people. and it’s just so it that

Boyce (22:03)
Again, I think you will might hear from white South Africans that that means that like less qualified people are being hired. I am not convinced that’s true, but I the individual experience that I hear from people coming here, I can’t discredit it. Like they’re just really frustrated. They’re like, I can’t get a job at home. at and I used to have this job. And it’s com it’s complicated in that like all of a sudden the pool of people that are in consideration for this job has grown tenfold if you bring in the black majority. And so it makes sense that it’s harder for you to get this job, but it it is a for people who hear stories from their parents and grandparents about like working for the state, working for power companies, things like that for years, it is sort of a quite a reversal to all of a sudden not be able to get those jobs.

Angus (22:41)
Well, and that kind of replicates, it sounds a little like DEI, where white males sometimes feel excluded from the job market in the United States because of DEI hiring practices and a lot it’s very hard to talk about, but at root there are some truths there and some exaggerations.

Boyce (23:03)
Yeah, I feel I mean it’s, you know, as someone who lived in Mississippi for a long time, I think I like DEI I start to talk about because it’s become such a hot button topic. But I have always felt that I mean, this is the pro like the problem with history is like there’s a lot there’s a lot of injustice in history. And unfortunately to correct that, there are some things that are somewhere close to zero sum.

Boyce (23:24)
And like I do, I you know, if you look at the numbers, we if we were a truly equitable society, we will we we have some work to do in what is labeled DEI and diversifying who has these jobs. And that’s complicated because one of the legacies of that history is often white males are better educated and so maybe better positioned for those roles, but you’re never gonna undo the old unbalance unless you like ruffle for some feathers and and tell qualified people. And I the way I’ve always felt as a white guy is like

Boyce (23:52)
You know, I’m gonna do like, I don’t know. Then it’s on me to be even better. Like I better be good enough that I can’t be hired. And I’ve so I’ve never been bothered personally by DEI stuff and just said, Look, I’m gonna I’m gonna just be so good that no one can you know, that there is no competition here and they’re gonna have to pick me for whatever this thing is. If I’m not picked, that’s how it goes.

Angus (24:12)
Hmm. Thank you. I appreciate your perspective. Let’s move on to your actual article.

Boyce (24:19)
Yeah.

Angus (24:23)
So I I guess y you’ve gone some way toward e explaining or laying the foundation for what’s really surprising here is that this is white people coming to the United States to work in agriculture it’s it’s partly because job opportunities. It’s not you know anti white anti white racism in South Africa. It’s more because you know the reason anyone you know seeks to emigrate and just to make some money. is that a fair summation?

Boyce (24:58)
Yeah, I think I mean, I think money is the biggest motivation by far for these guys coming, right? So these guys are working to put put more context on it. the Mississippi Delta, the region I’m talking about, is mostly at this point like big soybean farms, some corn farms, some rice farms, big sprawling grow crop farms. And these farms are not these aren’t crops where you’re down hand picking weeds or handpicking the produce, right? These this these are farms that are largely worked by people in very high-tech, very expensive machinery. So the job is for part of the year it’s fixing up that machinery. Sometimes you got to get down and fix some irrigation pipe, right? There is some physical labor, but the core of it is like mechanics and then driving these tractors. and so that’s what these guys, these guys are coming to do it. And the farm I focused on is in Chatham, Mississippi. I think there’s five or six white South African employees, one local black employee, a couple other part-time employees. but these guys can’t come because they can make like the exchange rate means they’re making four times as much money working on this farm in Mississippi than they would back home.

Boyce (25:51)
And then again, a lot of the four times money if they could get that job. A lot of them have told me that we can’t find jobs back there. So that’s why we come here. But a lot of them do say, you know, I mean, basically everyone I’ve talked to, there’s a lot of violence in South Africa. Right. And and so

Angus (26:06)
Mm-hmm.

Boyce (26:06)
This I alluded to the context of the story, right? At this point, the US asylum system, refugee system, President Trump has overhauled it and basically is only allowing white South Africans into the country in that system because he’s saying there’s a genocide.

Boyce (26:19)
And that white South Africans are being targeted to be killed, to have their land taken from them. that word genocide has a very specific meaning that by all objective statistics, it’s not being met in South Africa. but

Angus (26:31)
Yeah.

Boyce (26:32)
These guys are, it’s a violent place. Everyone, black or white, is exposed to and often suffers from violence. But so a lot of these guys are saying, you know, few of them have like sort of firsthand, but like second degree, like friends of friends have been killed in in robberies or things like that. And so there is this sense of let me come to America now. It’s a safer, more comfortable place. And it’s hard. These guys often do talk, you know. In I I’ve been down, spent some Saturday, like had a Saturday night hanging out at a barbecue with these guys. The more the drinks that get poured, the more that you get a different kind of expression of this. And toward the end of those nights,

Angus (27:05)
Mm.

Boyce (27:05)
I do hear some things that border on what I would call racism or just like a complicated experience of race, frustration over these policies, preferring white people, thoughts about whether or not black South Africans or black Americans are qualified for jobs, things like that. So race hovers over this whole thing in an interesting way. But ultimately…

Angus (27:23)
Yeah.

Boyce (27:23)
…when I talk to these guys, I’m like, you’re coming here because when you are looking like if I was in their position, I would probably make the same decision. entirely rational decision of like I can make more money, I can feel safer, I can be in a like healthier community if I pick up and and move to America instead of living in South Africa.

Angus (27:40)
So you did embedded journalism.

Boyce (27:42)
I did, yes.

Angus (27:43)
Good on ya.

Angus (27:45)
Couple of things.

Angus (27:45)
That’s so interesting and so different, you know, from what I could for one thing, one of the things happening there, this is not unskilled labor moving into pick crops. This these this is skilled labor. This is like running the equipment and maintenance and you know from the point of view of the farming farming concerns in the South, they’re getting people who can

Angus (28:09)
They’re filling a talent shortage. But they’re okay, so it’s not just labor, it’s skilled labor.

Boyce (28:16)
Well, I’m gonna pause that. I think skilled versus unskilled labor is a really interesting terminology when you’re thinking about agriculture.

Angus (28:21)
Okay.

Boyce (28:23)
Because I think it takes an incredible amount of skill to be an effective like if you are on a peach farm or a blueberry farm or whatever, the to be able to very quickly put your hand out, feel that piece of produce, decide whether or not it’s appropriate, ready to be picked, get it into a bushel is both incredibly tremendously physically difficult, but it all also takes real skill. and this is this is part of the podcast that I’m working on. We’re gonna go a little bit deeper than the New Yorker piece did about the history of farm labor. But I mean, I think at what we in some ways, I think it takes more skill to do that than it does to sit in a tractor that has GPS system, right? It’s like higher tech and you have to have a certain technical fluency, but it is much comfortable like you’re sitting in air conditioning and and putting some buttons, pressing some buttons on an iPad and I think in an interesting way, the way, yeah, the the economics of farm labor have always been strange, skewed. we’ve always had these systems and workarounds that allow us to write like like there was enslaved labor at one point, and there’s always been undocumented immigrants.

The program that is bringing people in now, the H2A program, that’s what these South Africans are arriving on, was built in essence because in the 80s under Reagan, Reagan was like, I’m about to crack down on undocumented immigration. Farmers were gonna be in a lot of trouble if they couldn’t have undocumented immigration. So the Reagan administration said, like, let’s make a pipeline that allows you to have some other way to get foreign labor in here. and so what we call skilled labor in agriculture to me is much more often less about skill and more about like, this is closer to something that a an American would be willing to do. and so we have to price it accordingly. all that’s all that said, also, I mean, I do have like the farmers legally, before you can get an H2A worker, you have to demonstrate that you cannot find any domestic, not even local labor, but domestic labor.

In practice, I think that typically means local labor. No one’s very few people are crossing the country to move to rural Mississippi to take these jobs. and they can’t these guys can’t find local labor, right? So even though this is a much higher paid job and a more comfortable job than your like when if you picture Mexicans picking produce in the Central Valley. Nonetheless, this large underemployed black population, people don’t seem interested in that. And I’ve tried I’ve talked to some black youth about it and I think some of this has to do with the history and the re like like why would you want to do work in this field that has such a long history of exploitation between these to to the black and white communities in this place. And so again, the f the farmers are making a rational decision and bringing these white South Africans because they can’t find anyone else to do it. The white South Africans often some of them I’ve met people who went to agricultural high school or high schools or were trained in as like mechanics for John Deere in South Africa. So they’re just coming there some of them have to get trained, but many of them are coming over here already really understanding the kind of things they’ll be doing on these farms.

Angus (31:18)
Hmm. Boyce, did you ever happen to read John McPhee’s book on oranges?

Boyce (31:25)
Yeah, it’s been a long time, but it I mean McPhee is is one of my favorites, so

Angus (31:29)
Well, I your masterful mini lecture there about skilled labor reminded me of he had a long section in that book about orange pickers, and as he went into detail and described the work of one picker that he befriended and became he was an embedded journalist too. what emerged was that a person crawling around in a big orange tree. I mean they’re not little trees. They’re big and they’re complicated and they actually climb the tree. It was a highly specialized athletic skill. I mean and these

Boyce (32:04)
Absolutely, yeah.

Angus (32:05)
These folks were kind of like circle circle sole performers, you know, in their to move around safely without falling, without breaking a neck, and also get enough oranges per minute to make it worth everyone’s time.

Angus (32:22)
He described them as basically skilled subcontractors and could, you know, make a a year’s wage in a season. And you’re saying that

Angus (32:31)
Skilled labor in agriculture that what we think of as unskilled is in fact quite skilled, and that should be reflected in compensation. So that’s one

Boyce (32:41)
Yeah, well, let me I mean, just to give an example of a w to give credence to and then a caveat, right? Like some historians I need to dig into this claim, but I’ve been talking to people about this, right? If you look back to the days of enslaved labor enslaved labor, the most expensive slaves would be the ones that were expert pickers, right? So like the most ac like you would pay the mo like that indicates this is a highly skilled thing and so you’re gonna pay more to get those people.

Boyce (33:04)
the issue, yeah. I mean, like, yes, they should be paid more, but I think when you look at s what we call skilled and unskilled labor in the modern agricultural economy, I mean, basically, how much would you have to pay an American to do that work? Right. It would and if we paid that much, the margins on an orange operation would be untenable. Whereas like it’s our modern food system where we’re so accustomed to cheap food, it’s untenable for us to like actually pay laborers the appropriate compensation that they deserve for the level of skill, danger, physical experience that they have to have. And that’s part of why we have these sort of like pipelines and systems where we bring in immigrant labor. It’s just a super complicated thing. Like it’s like how do how should any of us feel about that? I’m like, I’m glad that my grocery bill’s not higher. But it’s also you have to recognize that our food system is built around some in-baked exploitation in essence.

Angus (33:54)
To your knowledge, are there any South Africans coming to the United States to work in other areas like power plant operation or engineering, highway maintenance, is it or is it so far mainly agriculture?

Boyce (34:09)
Didn’t he? One thing I should say is South Africans are coming not just to Mississippi, but anywhere that soybean farms are, right? Anywhere where there’s big row crop farms. So there there are a lot of it’s an interesting thing. I think there’s a lot of rural communities in America right now that are experiencing this very sudden, I mean not so, but like decade long influx of white South Africans. but nobody knows that because rural America is there’s no newspapers right. It’s like it’s just happening, it’s happening everywhere, but we can’t document it or see it unless you live in those communities. I think that’s super interesting.

Boyce (34:37)
There I would guess that there I mean, like I know there has been a lot before all these reasons we discussed, there has been a lot of out migration of whites from South Africa for decades. and so I would think that they are they’re also, I mean, I’ve heard reports of this, haven’t looked closely, but there’s a there’s a different H to B visa, right? So H to A is seasonal agricultural work, H to B is other kinds of seasonal work. So it might be like working at the ice cream shop at a in a community that like gets a big influx of tourism in the summer and not the rest of the year. It’s like these things, these ebbs and flows, right? So and

Angus (35:07)
Yeah.

Boyce (35:07)
like Mar-a Lago actually has quite a number of H2B employees. And my guess would be that a lot of white South Africans and potentially maybe some black South Africans are coming in on those visas, but it’s not something that I looked at closely in my report.

Angus (35:20)
Yeah. That was another interesting thing about your article. I’d kind of I’d picked up the impression from what little I’d seen on the news that these were, you know, for the most part, people escaping violence that just wanted out of South Africa. But what you’re describing is, you know, coming for a season and going back home. and it’s you know, it’s a it’s a part time job, which makes perfect sense.

Angus (35:46)
But it’s a little different than the impression I picked up from the TV.

Boyce (35:51)
Well, I will add I’ll add some nuance to that. I mean, so there are right, there were there are some asylums that have people that have come as refugees that are coming more permanently. but even in this pool of agricultural laborers, I mean, I would a lot of them are like, I wanna come every season and go home for three months and I wanna do it for the next twenty years, my entire working life, and then I’ll retire to South Africa. So it’s like it’s semi permanent, but go back. But there are, my estimate is about half of the people I interviewed intended to get green cards. And so again, some of that is just like that that allows me to go back and forth for 20 years and go back. But every farm I went to, there there was someone who had like, I I knocked up my local girlfriend. I’ve got a kid here. Like there are people that are staying for good. and that is interesting in its own right. when I talk to people who report on other corner, right? So the 90% of the people who get H2A visas are Mexican.

Boyce (36:38)
10%, like, and South Africans are the number two sending country now and they’ve been growing rapidly, but it’s still dwarfed by the number of Mexicans coming to work again in these produce fields. And when I talk to people who report in that part of the H2A world, they’re like, it’s basically unheard of for someone to get a green card, for someone to be able to extend this H2A visa into a long-term stay. Because the whole point of the visa it’s built, it was built to again, it was to replace illegal, undocumented immigration. And so it was supposed to like have all these structures to ensure these people were only temporary and would go back home. And so there’s interviews that are being conducted and you’re supposed to prove that you have strong ties back in the country of origin and not be staying. And so it is really interesting to me to see how many of these white South Africans are being treated on a different standard and and give it have have an easier time sticking around when they wind up being like, I like this place. And I met this woman that I like. And so we’re I’m gonna stay here now.

Angus (37:32)
Is that because South Africa is more like America than other places? Is there a like a cultural bridge that’s easier?

Boyce (37:40)
Let me pretend like that you know, when Trump famously talked about, or I forgot someone in the Trump administration, I can’t remember who, but this is part of the talk of why do we like some countries better than others is because certain cultures fit better in America. That is a very complicated claim to me. I mean, America is and always has been an incredibly diverse place. And so these I mean, one of the things about the white South Africans, right? I told some of that history earlier about how they moved to the interior of the country and how they built farm. Like they are their story is very similar to the pioneer story of America. And even the historic sort of conflict between the Boers and the British, you can think of it, there’s a parallel between sort of today’s American politics of rural versus coastal elites and this, right? and so they do map on to they fit very nicely among the white people in rural Mississippi. And I when I go to bar owners, when I go to store owners, they’re like, they’re great, they’re such great customers.

But there’s a large permanent Hispanic population in Mississippi. And those people in my book are American too. And so like what like so they’re more they’re the white South Africans are more like the Americans that are in power. it’s hard to say what I haven’t been able to figure out in my reporting just structurally how it is that South Africans get to stay and other people don’t. It’s somewhere in this murky world of all of these paperwork and who signs off on what. It it does seem like the people in power are just happier to sign off on these people sticking around.

Boyce (39:00)
But to me, it comes back to these DEI issues. I think that is less a reflection of like that they are a natural better fit in America and more that like the people that hold the strings are closer than these people.

Angus (39:11)
I feel like you’re describing no generalities apply. There’s nothing simplistic that you can say in one or two sentences that covers the situation. Is that it’s it’s simply more complex than is can be it needs a New York article to say anything valid about…

Boyce (39:31)
Yeah, well yeah, yeah. I mean, the one of the interesting things we haven’t even gotten to is like in Mississippi there have been lawsuits because again, I mentioned this earlier, the eight like if you’re hiring H2A employees, you have to make sure you’re not you have to say like there’s no local need and then their presence is not supposed to impact any local existing labor force. And there are again, we said that it’s hard for farmers to find workers, but that’s that seems to be it’s hard to find n young new work farm workers in Mississippi. There is a generation of 50 to 70 year old black workers that are aging out. But there were a number of cases where that existing labor force was being paid less than the South Africans and in certain cases were being sort of pushed out by these South Africans.

And even that, so like that’s the farmers will tell you it’s more complicated than that. Like of it shouldn’t a twenty-five-year-old farm employee doing physical work be paid more than a sixty-five year old farm employee that can’t do the same things? And yes, probably, but under H2A law, that gets hard to do. but in this setting where there is so much history of racial injustice, it it’s it’s pretty uncomfortable to see the fact that black employees are getting underpaid and pushed out of jobs for white people to come out of a nation with a history of apartheid. So yes, it’s just w that’s one of the challenges of this reporting project.

There’s always a temptation to like wrap things up neatly with a bow. But kind of everyone I talk to the white South Africans, I’m like, it totally makes sense to why you’re coming here. I talk to the white farm owners and I say it’s totally makes sense to me why you’re hiring these people. But then I talk to black people in Mississippi who are really frustrated that this is happening, and that makes sense to me too. and so it’s yeah, none of it is like simply good or bad. This is just the mess of an interconnected globalized world that we live in today.

Angus (41:12)
Well and the other thing as you’re ta you’re describing a complex, messy system with a lot of inputs and outputs, but it sounds honestly like it kinda works that people are getting jobs, crops are getting picked, there’s some winners and losers, but it doesn’t sound dramatic.

Boyce (41:32)
I mean I to the extent that I think it’s not working again, and this is particular to the Mississippi Delta. I said, like the South Africans are coming everywhere. But I this there’s a little parallel to this that I could say anywhere. I’m not convinced that our American agricultural economy it is working for the farm owners. but

Angus (41:46)
Yeah.

Boyce (41:47)
I think a lot of rural agricultural communities are shells of themselves because as jobs like

Boyce (41:54)
As jobs have mechanized, there’s become less jobs in these communities, right? As farming jobs have turned into machinery, there’s just less people live in those communities. And and then to the extent that we do have jobs, if it tends to be immigrants that are only here part of the year, you are not building a sustainable local community. and so what I what you can look at in Mississippi in particular, again, there is a large black majority in this region.

Boyce (42:19)
Often living in poverty. And when you look at the history, it’s like when tractors came along, there were concerted efforts, like I forget, I don’t have the details of this down, right? But that’s at one point there was sort of a proposal, hey, let’s make a training program. So the black residents here that are right now are sharecroppers, they can learn how to run these tractors. And the local congressman, white guy, who is very much a segregationist, said, No, we’re definitely we’re not gonna teach these people how to do this, right? And so there has been historical efforts to not create this educational chain that would allow local people to come into this. There have been there haven’t been efforts to sort of bridge the traumatic history of your maybe, I mean, there slavery the Delta wasn’t very settled during slavery, but you your maybe your great grandparents, your grandparents were sharecroppers, they were super exploited. And so now you don’t want to do this work.

But young black kids in the Delta aren’t really being trained and told the j the work is so different now. It’s sitting in an air conditioned cab. It’s do it’s like you like working on cars. This is you’re working on machinery, right? And so it’s working to the extent that farmer the people who own the land are able to get a labor force. And it’s working to the extent that these white South Africans that are looking for a way out of White South Africa are getting there. But when I look at the Delta as a community and when I look at farming communities, I think there’s a lot that is not working in these communities and that like w could we have followed a different path that would have kept more of a human community here that would have distributed, like kept more job, good, well-paying jobs that would make these more sustainable places.

Boyce (43:42)
And you can say that ship sailed, but I think at this point in places like the Delta, it is working think we’re thinking about what kind of parallel programs can we have so that we can get closer to that. How do we teach the young black kids coming out of high school or high schools that don’t have a whole lot of opportunities in front of them? How do we get them to think about these farming jobs? How do we restructure those farm these farms so that they have more jobs for these people? That to me would be I mean, like it these are just the the amount of rural poverty is a direct outgrowth, I think, of sort of the strained structures of our farming economy.

Angus (44:11)
Thank you. This has been like a super conversation, partly because in this

Angus (44:19)
Have you noticed how many times in this interview and in your article and talking about this, we both have been comfortable out of necessity just saying black and white and and not equivocating or you know talking around. It is something about actual work being done here by actual people and it it simplifies it to that extent. It it is a black and white issue, if you which is I guess I’m just coming it’s it’s interesting to me because so often in conversations with my friends or on Facebook or X or whatever, we’re avoiding that basic reality of black people and white people. And that just seems to get blown over and we have to talk if we’re gonna talk usefully at all. so thank you for taking that on and educating us.

Boyce (45:07)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think

Boyce (45:09)
It’s a result of, you know, again, I grew up in suburbia in Connecticut where it to me, my experience was entirely white experience. I w the town was not all white, but I didn’t I didn’t see that. But it’s hard to live Mississippi is a black and white place where a lot of the communities there’s still literally a train track that divides the white neighborhoods and the black neighborhoods. and so it’s it’s hard to to live in that place and reckon with and write about that place with that like it’s if you’re not seeing that and starting to talk in those and it’s yeah, it’s not always that so like there are more and more I have you like people that are able to slide across those communities, but it it is still a an important worthwhile rubric of thinking through in these communities because of that fact.

Angus (45:46)
Yeah. I in conclusion, maybe I’ll if I could press you on

Angus (45:50)
A little bit. Are there, you know, as you’ve thought about the article and you’re preparing for the podcast, does any of it boil down to one or two or three like clearly policy initiatives that you can state clearly, we should be doing this and not that, or we should stop doing this? Does any of that emerge from you from something that you’ve really settled on that you will say or willing to say definitely?

Boyce (46:15)
I think the simplest one I think has cut has to do with education in the Delta, right? Like in the Delta, other places like it. And I was talking to a farmer early couple days ago who like lives in Arkansas and has these has white South Africans, but would really like to have some local black employees. And like he like, Yeah, I was at this I was spoken speaking at a high school and people just did not understand these jobs and what they could be, right? Like that, there is a disconnect there, and I think there’s a huge opportunity for

Boyce (46:40)
To help people understand what is the modern farming economy, what is modern farming labor, and like build connections that allow local people to get these decent paying jobs. There’s $22 an hour, things like that. Never gonna make a ton of money, but that’s a lot better than going and working at Dollar General or something like that. So that is the one policy where like that that’s simple and easy. I mean, I do think that the H2A system at large needs some reforms. I’m gonna piss off some of my farming friends by saying that, but I it’s f

Boyce (47:08)
These South Africans are generally treated very, very well. Right. So the, you know, last time I was on the farm, one of the guys learned that his father had passed away. And the farmer, his employer, was like, Well, you gotta go home. And I like, I you you’re not making enough. I’m gonna pay for your flight so you can go back to this funeral, right? And that’s an incredible, generous thing to do. That’s a really expensive flight. and so these guys aren’t there are some stories of white South Africans being exploited through the H2A system. These guys are not we’re not being exploited.

Boyce (47:33)
being very well treated. But the like what I’m talking about in terms of this Mexican labor, I mean the whole system is structured in such a way that it often encourages a lot of exploitation and abuse. And so I think I don’t it’s complicated. It’s like if we again if we fix that issue, we are l raising the cost of farm goods. But to me, justice demand like like I don’t want people there’s just like so many stories of people who basically

Boyce (47:58)
There’s a recruiter that they have to pay to even get the job in the first place, which is illegal, but it’s very hard to stop or control. And so these people are coming to the US basically in debt slavery, and they have to pay off that debt before they can go home. And like that is not okay. Like that leaves them really vulnerable to a lot of other issues. And that’s not if that’s the the labor system that’s driving our driving our farm economy, that’s not a great thing. so

Angus (48:19)
Yeah.

Boyce (48:19)
that’s not a clean or simple proposal, but it’s sort of like that that is important to me. That that’s ugly enough to me that it should be fixed up.

Angus (48:25)
That was great. And I appreciate and this whole conversation. Boyce, where do people go if they wanna you know subscribe to Southland or what website? what do they do?

Boyce (48:35)
Yeah.

Boyce (48:35)
my website’s boyceupholt.com. Although I have been bad. I’ve been so busy lately. I have a four month old child that’s made it hard to keep up with that. So to follow my work generally, probably easiest to follow be on Instagram, BoyceU. and then Southlands, I I hope I do hope people are interested in that. it’s Southland Mags SouthlandsMag.com is the place to find that. So

Angus (48:54)
Great. And can you email me your preferred links and I will get them in the show notes.

Boyce (48:59)
Of course.

Angus (49:00)
Okay. And thanks again and I hope we speak again. And if you can hook me up with some of your writers, that I think would be fruitful for both of us and get you some copies of the magazine and then you can flip through and see if there’s stuff of particular interest. So yeah. Yeah.

Angus (49:14)
Great. Thank you so much. I and I’ll email you my address.

Boyce (49:19)
Awesome.

Angus (49:20)
Boyce, thank you so much. have a great afternoon. Bye for now.

Boyce (49:21)
Yeah. Thanks,

Boyce (49:23)
You too, Angus. Yeah, take care.