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As a child, your heart is broken when you learn that your grandfather really can't pull real quarters out of your ear. And if you're a baseball fan, that disillusionment happens once more to you in life when you first hear the numbers mavens tell you that there is no clutch hitter. None. No such thing.

Oh my, but if you have any romance in your soul, you do so want to believe that there are people in all walks of life whom we can count on to rise to the occasion. Don't you want that?

Click on the audio link above to hear Deford's take on this issue.

This is the second story in a two-part report about sexual assault of agricultural workers in the U.S. Read part one.

It started with a missing paycheck.

In 2006, Guadalupe Chavez, a farm worker in California's Central Valley, was supposed to earn $245 for a week of picking pomegranates. It was money the widowed mother of two needed urgently to pay her bills. When she went to track down the check, a supervisor she'd never met before told her someone had it out in the fields. He said to follow him there in her car.

He stopped in an isolated pistachio orchard, she says. Then, she says, he got out of his truck and demanded her underpants in exchange for her paycheck.

"He said, 'I'm the supervisor, I'm in charge here.' And I remembered that he had told me that he had a gun in his truck," Chavez says in Spanish. "And so when he said that, and he banged hard on the car with his hand, I thought, 'He's serious. If I don't do what he says, he can kill me.' "

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Silenced By Status, Farm Workers Face Rape, Sexual Abuse

In a global economy, does it make sense to allow workers to move freely?

Letting people go where the jobs are would improve the lives of millions around the world, some argue. But others say an influx of labor into the richest countries would devalue workers' worth and actually hurt more in the long run.

A group of experts recently took on this question in an Oxford-style debate for Intelligence Squared U.S. They faced off two against two on the motion "Let Anyone Take A Job Anywhere."

Before the debate, the audience at New York City's Kaufman Center voted 46 percent in favor of the motion and 21 percent against, with 33 percent undecided. After the two sides faced off, 42 percent voted in support of the motion while 49 percent voted against — making the side arguing against the motion the winners.

More From The Debate

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