The H-2A Program
The United States has a history of creating legal pathways for exploiting the labor of racial minorities in agriculture since the abolishment of slavery. From the New Deal’s agricultural exceptionalism of the 1930’s—which still persists as legislation that excludes farmworkers from many worker protections, including the right to overtime and the right to collective bargaining—to the harmful and racist Bracero and H-2 “guestworker” Programs of the 1940’s. The Bracero Program imported millions of Mexican workers to the Southwest, only to deport over 2 million Mexicans and U.S. citizens under Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback,” one of the largest mass deportations in our history. The H-2 Program, which lasted over 30 years, supplied Florida’s sugarcane industry with Caribbean workers, mostly from Jamaica. This program was also rife with worker exploitation and culminated with police raiding a worker strike, with guns and dogs drawn on the workers. Hundreds of workers, some wearing only underwear and slippers, were rounded up and summarily deported.
Today’s H-2A Program allows U.S. employers to import temporary foreign workers for agricultural work. Under the Program, the employer applies for the visas and recruits the workers, usually through agents in the workers’ home country. Workers hired are bound to that employer for the duration of their contract. They are bound because their H-2A visas, which give them work authorization and legal status in the U.S., are only valid while employed by the sponsoring employer.
The Program imposes requirements on the sponsoring employer, including prohibiting the employer from charging the workers costs associated with getting the job; requiring employers to provide free housing that complies with minimum standards, complying with all other applicable federal, state and local employment-related laws, and to pay a premium wage.
However, the H-2A Program relies on the fiction that all employers will comply with the regulations. As Shirley Chisholm said, “when morality comes up against profit, it is seldom profit that loses.” The H 2A Program makes it easy for unscrupulous greedy people to exploit vulnerable workers to maximize profits.
Growers in need of workers usually outsource the recruiting and hiring to farm labor contractors (FLCs), avoiding getting their hands dirty by any false promises and illegal fees charged during recruitment. FLCs are often unsophisticated fly-by-night operations without the capital or business acumen to employ dozens (sometimes hundreds) of foreign workers under the complex H-2A Program. Nevertheless, FLCs have become the standard H-2A “employers,” thus allowing farmers to avoid liability for unscrupulous, illegal, and violent practices, as was the case in Operation Blooming Onion, where only two of the 24 individuals indicted were growers.
H-2A workers are recruited from poor communities in Mexico and Central America, where jobs are scarce and wages are low. Recruiters lure workers by promising these wonderful job opportunities in the U.S. and often charge the workers a variety of illegal fees to secure those jobs. Workers then borrow large sums of money to pay these fees, thinking that they will be able to repay those loans with their H-2A jobs. When the workers arrive, they are in debt, and sometimes the debt is owed to the same FLCs who hired them.
The H-2A Program offers growers and FLCs a captive labor force. Employers will cut corners and bend the rules to maximize profits knowing that this captive labor force is not likely to quit their job or complain because if they do, they will lose legal status in the U.S. and be unable to repay their loans. Many employers confiscate worker’s travel documents and threaten workers to prevent them from leaving their jobs. Unsurprisingly, we have an epidemic of worker exploitation and labor trafficking conditions in the H 2A Program.