Sometimes, Ramsden and his peers in Mississippi might hop down in the mud to lay irrigation pipe. But their work typically involves operating machinery. The region’s farms mostly grow commodity row crops such soybeans, corn and cotton, which require modern tractors running complex software; laborers monitor G.P.S.-guided equipment that automates planting depth and seed spacing. Jason Holcomb, an emeritus professor of geography and global studies at Morehead State University, told me that South African H-2A workers in the U.S. first found jobs on the Great Plains in the nineteen-nineties, working on custom harvesting crews that travelled from farm to farm, to cut crops. Historically, this work had been a rite of passage for high schoolers and college students in the region. But in the nineteen-nineties, as regulations tightened, local interest waned. Now South Africans represent the fastest-growing source of H-2A farm labor in the U.S.: from 2011 to 2024, the number of visa holders has increased by more than four hundred per cent and the number of South Africans in the program has increased fourteenfold. Ramsden told me that on a flight from Atlanta to South Africa, in November or December, at the end of the working season, you might find that two hundred and fifty of the three hundred passengers are farm workers headed home. “If this program went away tomorrow, farming would cease,” Walter King, one of the co-owners of Nelson-King Farms, said.

For the South Africans, part of the draw is money. Ramsden estimated that workers in Mississippi could make at least four times the wages they earned back home. But it’s not just the pay that sends them abroad—there’s also a feeling that they are escaping anti-white sentiment. Many of these men in the Delta are the descendants of colonists who, beginning in the eighteen-thirties, embarked on the “Great Trek,” a migration from the coast of South Africa into the region’s interior to establish farms, and, later, whole republics that were independent from the British Crown. They called themselves Afrikaners to indicate their commitment to what they saw as their homeland, unlike the Brits still tied to London.

In the twentieth century, Afrikaners seized power in South Africa. Eve Fairbanks, the author of “The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning,” told me that, in the Afrikaners’ narrative, farmers were “the total backbone of the country—the great ones, the heroes.” (The word “Boer,” which means “farmer” in Afrikaans, is sometimes used interchangeably with Afrikaner.) They talked about themselves as a people who had tamed an empty place, making nationhood possible. To maintain the illusion of democracy in a country that was majority Black, Afrikaners created the apartheid system, which, nominally, created smaller, independent states for different ethnic groups, but effectively denied citizenship to Black South Africans, stripping them of the right to participate in politics, own land, or move freely. (The architects of apartheid were inspired by the Jim Crow policies of the American South, which effectively disenfranchised much of the region’s Black majority.)

In 1992, after decades of external pressure and internal resistance, the country voted to end the system. But imbalances in property ownership persisted: today, white South Africans, who make up around seven per cent of the country’s population, still own seventy-two per cent of its private farmland. Meanwhile, millions of Black South Africans still live in informal settlements.

(AP) — For every 100 foster children in Mississippi’s custody, the state has only 52 foster homes. To recruit more families to care for these children, the state is joining the Trump Administration’s A Home for Every Child Initiative, Gov. Tate Reeves announced Tuesday.

Mississippi is the fifth state to join a pilot of the initiative behind Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Each state will be required to share updated data with the federal government about its child-to-home ratio, which will be shared on an online dashboard.

To incentivize states to opt in, the federal government is allowing these states to forgo tedious paperwork associated with Children and Family Services Reviews. These federal performance reviews of state child welfare programs look at metrics such as the percentage of cases in which states deployed appropriate risk and safety assessments or concerted efforts to prevent family separations.

Under those reviews, states develop Program Improvement Plans to address problem areas. But states who join the push will no longer be required to conduct these. The last PIP from Mississippi available on the federal website is from 2019.

The initiative is not tied to additional federal funding, but a federal representative said the reduction of red tape will allow the state to target funds for necessary casework.

“On average, states were sending us 300-page reports of mostly duplicated and recycled content across years that the federal agency did nothing with, frankly,” said Alex Adams, assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families under the U.S. Department of Human Services. “A lot of what this is doing is liberating the time and energy of the best caseworkers that they have to better deploy that time to actually benefiting kids as opposed to checking boxes and all those things that just sap time and energy.”

Reeves said the state’s child welfare agency, the Mississippi Department of Child Protection Services, has already begun using data to determine where and what kind of foster homes are most needed across the state. Many children who come into state custody require therapeutic care requiring a higher level of licensing.

“Instead of broad recruitment efforts that don’t always meet specific needs, we are moving towards targeted recruitment, identifying the right families for the right types of placements,” Reeves said. “At the same time, we are working to cut unnecessary red tape that discourages qualified families from stepping up and stepping forward. Good people who want to help children should not be overwhelmed by bureaucracy.”

In the absence of licensed foster homes, some children who come into state custody end up in short-term rentals, hotels, Airbnbs or even in government offices, Adams added.

“This is a beautiful building, but I don’t know that government buildings are conducive to stable, loving, nurturing environments that every child deserves,” Adams said during the press conference at the Walter Sillers Building in downtown Jackson.

Andrea Sanders, director of CPS, said the agency is working on a modern, digital application process for prospective foster parents. She also said a new campaign to recruit foster families will launch soon.

“That’s part of the work that we’re doing to make sure that this becomes a transparent process where the agency is fulfilling its role to help support and provide information to foster parents,” Sanders said.

A federal announcement of the A Home for Every Child Initiative says it also aims to reduce the number of children entering the system by prioritizing other interventions.

“By investing in prevention, we can reduce unnecessary entrees into foster care while still protecting children who truly need intervention,” Reeves said.

The Tuesday announcement did not provide specific details about how Mississippi plans to increase prevention through the initiative.

The Family First Prevention Services Act, enacted in 2018 during Trump’s first term, was designed to pump unprecedented levels of funding into states to support the stability of biological families – such as mental health and substance abuse treatment and in-home parenting programs – to prevent the need for foster families.

It took years for Mississippi to submit a state plan to the federal government to start receiving these funds. The plan was approved last August, but the state has yet to fully launch the program.

A Home for Every Child is a product of HHS’s Administration of Children and Families. Laurie Todd-Smith, a deputy assistant secretary for that agency and former Gov. Phil Bryant’s senior policy advisor, recently visited Mississippi ahead of the announcement to assemble suitcases for foster children as part of a partnership with evangelical Christian parachurch organization, Focus on the Family.

The problem they sought to solve: Children carrying their belongings from home to home in trash bags. “Nationally, it’s 57 homes to every hundred children. In Mississippi, it’s 52 homes for every hundred children. So our goal is to get to a one-to-one ratio. A home for every child,” Todd-Smith said at the Jan. 14 suitcase event, WLBT reported.

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This story was originally published by Mississippi Today and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

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