Why Guestworker Programs Don't Work

A commonly stated solution for the problem of undocumented immigration is to implement a guestworker problem. Immigrant rights activists routinely note the fundamental problem with this--workers have no rights. The bracero program of the mid-twentieth century saw migrant workers suffer all sorts of abuse. Guestworker advocates say that such abuses couldn't take place today. That's just flat out not true. Mike Elk:

Last year, the leaders of the U.S.-based foreign labor and supply company Global Horizons were indicted in what the Department of Justice considered the biggest human trafficking case ever brought by the federal government. They were charged with holding 400 Thai guest farm workers in the United States against their will in conditions that essentially amounted to slavery.

The workers were given guest visas to work in the United States under the H-2A visa program. They were kept under brutal conditions under armed guard in Hawaii and forced to live in substandard conditions in hot shipping containers "with no carpet, beds, furniture, indoor plumbing, kitchen or air conditioning," according to federal investigators. They were under constant threat of violence from gun-toting guards, and on one occasion a guard told the workers they would be shot if they tried to escape.

Several company officials have already pleaded guilty in plea bargain deals and several others are expected to stand trial. In 2006, when the workers' maltreatment was discovered, the Department of Labor also debarred Global Horizons from participating in the H-2A agricultural guest worker program for the mandatory three years; it issued an additional three year debarment in 2009. Last week, a judge upheld the three year debarment after Global Horizons appealed it.

I don't know if you believe in the power of the modern government to regulate farms so that worker abuse doesn't happen. With our severely hampered and underfunded government, I absolutely do not. After all, what regulations in this country are properly followed? Food safety? Labor? Environmental? None of the above. Even under Democratic administrations, employers and polluters are in control of the regulatory process.

Moreover, our farms are in out of the way places. How many readers  have visited farms with migrant workers? Even among progressive groups, how many are active on these issues. There are some, such as the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in North Carolina and the PCUN in Oregon (sadly, the UFW is basically defunct). But even these worker rights groups and unions are heavily underfunded, under reported in the press, and have virtually no power to stop farm employer abuses. 

Guestworker programs will lead to more abuses like this one in Hawaii. These must be opposed as part of any immigration legislation.

Farmworker Reality Tours

This is a great idea:

At a Watsonville, Calif., strawberry field, a gaggle of the agriculturally curious -- a state representative's aide, an anthropologist, a food service company employee -- gathered around Ann Lopez, whose voice gained intensity as she careened through a farm worker's tale of woe: pesticide exposure, low wages, backbreaking labor.

Lopez, a Santa Cruz-based activist and academic, was leading one of the "Farmworker Reality Tours" that her nonprofit, the Center for Farmworker Families, hosts about five times a year. Lopez is on an evangelist's mission: to show and tell everyone she meets about the plight of Mexican migrants who toil in California fields.

"I think the only way it's going to change," Lopez said, "is if the public says, 'No more.' "

Farmworkers exist behind a drawn curtain. No one sees them. No one even knows where their food comes from. We buy our pre-washed organic spinach, our baby carrots, and our bell peppers (so nice in their 3 packs of yellow, red, and green!). But we never see the fields in south Texas, in the Imperial Valley, on the back roads of western Oregon and central Washington. The same could be said for workers in meat packing plants, which have also been strategically placed in isolated areas, particularly in rural Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska.

Getting people to take tours of farmworkers lives could have an exploitative side to it, but drawing the curtain back on their lives is the only way to create any change.

Similarly, I fully supported Stephen Colbert's appearance before Congress last month. While some called it an embarrassment, if Colbert wasn't there, no one would have talked about farmworkers' lives at all. That's what United Farm Workers president Arturo Rodriguez  knew and why he had Colbert speak. Congressional hearings are almost totally worthless; no one's mind is going to be changed by them and they get no attention from the media. So why not turn it into a circus? It was a great publicity move, even if it took attention away from actual farmworkers and placed it on a privileged white guy.

Of course, most people taking these tours already support the plight of farmworkers. It'd be great to get conservatives on these trips. If I knew of something like this, I'd definitely schedule my classes in. Visiting these fields would be more educational than anything I could tell my students.

Added Illustration

Since Erik wrote about it below.

Florida Tomato Struggle

Brian reminds us of one of the most disgusting and unknown issues in the United States--the virtual, and sometimes literal, slavery experienced by tomato pickers in Florida. He links to Barry Estabrook's piece in Gourmet discussing this:

At this writing, that appears to be the official government position in the state of Florida, and it could explain why the fields of the Sunshine State provide such fertile ground for modern-day slavery. In the past dozen years, police have broken up and prosecuted seven slave operations there, freeing more than 1,000 men and women who were kept captive and forced to work for little or no money and threatened with death if they tried to escape. (For more on the plight of the Florida tomato pickers, see my article “The Price of Tomatoes” in the March 2009 issue of Gourmet.)

Charlie Crist doesn't care. Mel Martinez doesn't care. Jeb Bush didn't care. I'm not sure that leading Florida Democrats care either. There are people trying to help the tomato pickers. The Coalition of Imolokee Workers has worked for a long time trying to bring attention to the plight of these oppressed workers. While they get occasional attention in the liberal press, the nation as a whole doesn't know and doesn't care about these workers.

If you care, you can send an e-mail to Charlie Crist telling him to crack down. I just did and I hope you will too.