Yaxchibonam
Agricultural work
The expanded visa program demands labor in exchange for residency.
Every year, as part of the United State’s guest worker program, thousands of men, predominantly from Mexico, travel from their home country to the U.S. mainland for seasonal farm work. Their wages, healthcare, housing, and payment for transportation to and from the farms, is covered under the H-2A farmworker visa program. But the system is rife with abuse, inhumane housing and working conditions, wage theft allegations, and even comparisons to modern-day slavery.
With little fanfare—even as the Trump Administration cracks down on immigrant deportation and threatens DACA—use of the program has exploded. The program has ballooned from 139,832 visas in 2015 to 257,667 in 2019. In 1996, it issued just 11,000 visas.
Today, the Trump Administration is seeking to expand the program as part of its far-right vision for “legal” immigration. In deference to large corporations in want of dependable low wage labor, it is seeking to expand the existing farmworker program and broaden “guest worker” arrangements to new sectors.
In 2017, the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee proposed a new “H-2C” program, which would expand the types of work covered beyond farm fields to include forestry, fishing, and aquaculture. The new approach would undermine workers’ ability to sue employers, and shift costs for health insurance, housing and transportation onto workers. It even proposed allowing employers to deduct certain costs from wages, and to withhold 10 percent of workers’ wages until workers returned to their home country. These wage deductions and withholdings, critics warned, could easily be used to coerce workers.
Along with extending the visas to three years, it lowered wages and ultimately tied workers in cycles of debt. It amounted to nothing short of modern indentured servitude, critics said.
The proposed program amounted to nothing short of modern indentured servitude, critics said.
U.S. Representative Hank Johnson, Democrat of Georgia, testified that the plan as envisioned would be devastating for workers: “You are setting up a situation where at the end of the pay period, there’s not going to be any money owed to the worker. And in fact, the worker will owe to the company or to the [farming] association or the farmer—the worker will actually owe money.”
That is not all. The H-2C proposal also allowed “previously unauthorized farmworkers” to enroll in the program from within the United States, presenting a worrying coercive choice for undocumented workers currently in the country: face deportation or enter a work program.
This bill was killed when Democrats gained control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, but the ideas behind it have not gone away.
The Trump Administration is now looking to use executive action to push rule changes aimed at “modernizing the H-2A program and eliminating inefficiencies.” John Bauknecht from United Migrant Opportunity Services warned these changes would allow employers to self-inspect living conditions, make major changes to job terms in the middle of the farm season, and change the hiring process in such a way that sharply reduces employers’ current obligation to recruit U.S. workers.
The rule changes would also lower workers’ wages, expand the program to other industries, and shift costs for transportation—currently paid by employers—onto workers, again risking the creation of an indentured worker system. The changes were filed in July and received public comment in September.
A “compromise” is now being considered in Congress, but the proposal, known as the Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2019, maintains core regressive elements of the H-2C legislation. Crucially, it also creates new tools of worker coercion.
“After months of negotiations,” a United Farm Workers Foundation’s spokesperson said in a statement, “UFW and UFW Foundation are enthusiastic about passing legislation that honors all farm workers who feed America by creating a way for undocumented workers to apply for legal status and a roadmap to earn citizenship in the future.”
This bill has gained support from Democrats, Republicans, industry groups, and the United Farm Workers Foundation. Like the H-2C proposal, this bill would allow people already in the country to apply for the program. But this comes with a catch: it sets up a system of required labor for any of these workers who wish to qualify to apply for Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR) status. A core element of the “compromise” is this path toward residency and eventual citizenship.
People in the country who have worked in agriculture for at least ten years would be required to participate in the work program for four years before they can apply for LPR status. Others, who have worked in agriculture for under ten years, must participate in the program for eight years before they can apply for LPR.
It’s labor in exchange for a chance at U.S. residency.
In a statement about the proposal, Ramon Torres, president of Familias Unidas Por La Justicia, an independent farm worker union based in the Pacific Northwest, said, “In Washington State we are seeing a rapid rise of the H2A program. . . . We have experienced first-hand the exploitation workers that are brought under the H2A visa program have suffered. Wage theft, denied medical assistance, cramped living quarters, inhumane production standards, and even death.”
It’s labor in exchange for a chance at U.S. residency.
Torres went on to say that the union opposes “any expansion [of the program] that has the potential of harming more workers and displacing the local work force.”
Though the path to citizenship is framed as a “compromise,” the bill, which Familias Unidas Por La Justicia could not support “in good conscience,” remains essentially coercive. What kind of choice does someone in a detention center have, for example, when offered entry into a work program that will allow them to remain in the country? What choice does someone fearful of deportation have?
Arguably, the bill gives employers new tools of coercion over workers. When employment is a requirement for qualifying for legal residency, a worker who is one year from qualifying would likely be very reluctant to stand up to his or her boss.
On top of this, the bill proposes an expansion of E-Verify, a reform that has passed in multiple states that requires employers vet their employees through a national immigration electronic database.
Using E-Verify as a bargaining tool, Torres said, “is a non-starter. We believe that it is a trojan horse in future immigration reform negotiations. As workers we will not take part in causing harm to workers in other industries.”