Your view of farmers and mine seem a bit different. Then again farmers where i live rarely have farm hands... Well a few do, but they aren't immigrants, instead it's typically local teens. Though most of them also probably have ~100 acres of farmland at most in the first place, so maybe the ones you know work on a different scale.
That said, the farmers I knew still were not 'poor'. Farm kids when I went to high school where the ones whose parents bought them brand new cars to drive when they turned 16 and who could go to Florida every year for a few weeks during summer. They were also big supporters of the schools (most notably the sports teams like baseball and football, and their kids usually played on those teams) and made some fairly large donations so school libraries, football fields, and gyms were often named after farmers (at least 20 or so years ago).
I found them to be much like other people: some were kind and generous, some were in between, others were mean and rotten, and lastly were those tightfisted greedy ones. They were however all business people, but that didn't always mean 'greedy and selfish'. It just meant they ran a business and had to take a broader view than most.