Guest worker programs propagate indentured servitude in the 21st Century.
by Jake Karr
This year, around 700,000 people will arrive in the United States legally through various temporary work programs. They will reach our shores or cross our borders as neither permanent residents on the one extreme nor illegal immigrants on the other. Their arrival is bittersweet: they come for the age-old American promise of work, but they are not like all those hopeful immigrants of the American imaginary who dream of a better and new life. They are, in fact, officially designated as “non-immigrants.” Their time in the country has a fixed expiration date and so, although many return year after year, they have no prospect of ever being placed on the “path to citizenship”—seen now as one solution to the current underclass of 11 million illegal immigrants already in the country.
Because they are neither citizens nor legal residents, workers in these programs are not afforded the same protections and privileges as U.S. workers. Department of Labor (DOL) laws that could prevent their mistreatment are either unenforced or, in some cases, non-existent. Stories of systematic abuse abound. Violations of minimum wage and minimum standards of living are widespread. The degree of exploitation endured by these foreign workers—who range from farm and factory workers to nurses and doctors—depends on the nature of their work, the political power or will of their own home governments and the whim of the employers to whom they are bound. Yet exploitation—or, at the very least, the very real potential for exploitation—is everywhere.
Through a moral loophole in our public policy, we continue to propagate a modernized form of indentured servitude that is completely at odds with our modern values. As the issue of immigration reform once again takes center stage in the Theater of the Absurd we call Congress, it is time we take action to defend the rights of these workers—and our principles in the process. Recent congressional proposals reprehensibly hint at the possible expansion of our antiquated migrant labor programs. Progressive proposals from civil society groups call for serious structural reforms, additional legislation and enhanced government oversight. However, what we need is not to ameliorate the conditions of bonded labor but to abolish it altogether, once and for all.
Indentured labor in the U.S. territory actually predates the founding of our country. Alongside slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the colonies relied on predominantly European peons to build the future of the nation. It is estimated that 50 to 70 percent of all early immigrants to North America arrived through some sort of debt slavery, though they were allowed to remain here as freemen once their service was completed. After the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, a steady stream of immigrants from countries such as China, Japan and the Philippines provided the extra provisional manpower to fuel the economic growth of the Gilded Age and beyond. During World War II, in response to a shortage of able-bodied American men, the United States launched the notorious Bracero Program, which led to the persistent abuse of millions of Mexican migrant workers—until the Civil Rights and Farmworkers Movements helped to hammer a nail in its coffin in the 1960s. However, the H-2 visa program, which was created for related reasons in 1943, is still in effect. The H-2 program has become the primary vehicle by which U.S. companies can “import” unskilled workers for seasonal work—that is, the primary vehicle by which U.S. companies can carry out this ancient practice in the twenty-first century.
The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 split the program into the subcategories H-2A for agriculture, and H-2B for non-agricultural labor such as forestry, housekeeping, construction, carpentry and restaurant work. In 2011, 106,000 workers were funneled through these two programs alone, known for having the least protections and worst abuses of any of the temporary work programs. Nine out of ten workers that fall under the H-2 classification hail from Latin America, and the vast majority come, unsurprisingly, from Mexico. Of the 55,000 H-2A visas issued, 52,000 were from Mexico; of the 51,000 in the H-2B program, the most significant country contributors were again Mexico (over 36,000), Jamaica (almost 5,000) and Guatemala (up to 3,000).
Today, we attempt to put a modern, more palatable spin on the practice of indentured servitude. We label meager improvements in servants’ rights “reforms,” and we call the servants themselves “guest workers.” However, as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) emphasizes in “Close to Slavery,” their important exposé on this issue, “Far from being treated like ‘guests,’ these workers are systematically exploited and abused.”
For many, the journey of exploitation begins at home, where labor recruitment firms, crassly called “body shops,” traffick in poor, Third World workers on behalf of U.S. companies. They are what we used to call coyotes, and they are—as this more accurate and descriptive name suggests—scavengers. These outsourced contractors are almost always unaffiliated, so that U.S. employers over here cannot be liable for any of the misdeeds committed over there—which can include things like forcing desperate guest workers to go into debt in order to pay fraudulent upfront fees and promising false wages and accommodations in return. For example, according to the SPLC, “guestworkers from Guatemala generally pay at least $2,000 in travel, visa and hiring fees to obtain forestry jobs in the United States” through the H-2B program. That’s a little less than half the Guatemalan Gross National Income per capita.
Once in the country, the circumstances for guest workers can become even direr. Some U.S. employers seize the passports and Social Security cards of their foreign employees, effectively holding them hostage for the duration of their stay in the States. There are well-documented cases of employees who complained about working conditions to their employers, only to be silenced with threats of deportation.
In situations such as this, the obstacles precluding guest workers from the U.S. justice system are often insurmountable. Most H-2B workers are not eligible for the same federally-funded legal services that would be available to any U.S. worker. Such legal aid is available in theory to those in the H-2A program, but fear of reprisal and the lack of DOL commitment stop most from speaking out. Furthermore, many workers are not even aware of their rights, since efforts are rarely made to overcome the language barrier confronting poorly-educated, primarily Spanish-speaking migrants.
The main vice of the guest worker programs, according to SPLC President Richard Cohen, is the fact that migrant workers are tied to the company whose name is on their visa. Employees are prohibited from seeking other employment, and therefore are vulnerable to easy exploitation. With limited or no access to the courts, migrant workers must choose between total submission to their supervisors or the risk of deportation. Since they know that their employees are completely dependent on them, some employers almost literally get away with murder, practically imprisoning their employees in substandard housing or withholding their wages. Instead, Mr. Cohen contends, “Guest workers should have “the protection of the marketplace, just like everybody else.” Without this, U.S. workers—with the full range of protections afforded them— cannot compete with migrant workers who can be legally underpaid and abused. The result is a system that negatively affects guest workers and union workers alike.
Guest worker programs promote an un-free labor market, so it would seem incongruous for business interests to promote their extension. Yet a common complaint of the private sector is the oft-repeated refrain that there are some “dirty jobs” that Americans just refuse to do. We should not buy into such dismissive propaganda, the rhetoric of cost-cutters who logically prefer cheap, unregulated foreign labor to more expensive, unionized American laborers.
U.S. companies that intend to recruit for jobs overseas must appear to adhere to the very vague and often unenforced DOL stipulation that they “initially attempted to find U.S. workers to fill these slots.” They call this “positive recruitment” and, tellingly, even on the DOL website, that term is in quotation marks. In reality, most employers don’t go through too much trouble to secure a native employee base for these sorts of jobs, and the government has only recently (as of last year) mandated “the creation of a national electronic job registry for all H-2B job orders to improve U.S. worker access to these temporary jobs.” As long as U.S. companies can continue to look outward for sources of low-cost labor, they will not have any incentive to look inward.
Big-business advocates also like to argue that these low-wage, no-benefit jobs are vital to our economy, and thus we should not do anything that might jeopardize the status quo. Take a moment to consider that line of reasoning. It might seem, at first glance, like a reasonable claim: we as a nation rely on the products of certain labor, so we must ensure that there are workers willing to do what must be done. On second thought, though, it is easy to perceive just how shockingly bankrupt this position is. Consider now that the same exact argument was made on behalf of slavery, which was indeed the foundation of the Confederate economy. This is as short-sighted an argument in 2013 as it was 150 years ago. The indentured servitude that continues to this day in the form of legalized guest worker programs underscores the stagnation of outdated sectors of our economy that refuse to modernize, either technologically or morally. Business owners may cry that without such exploited labor, they cannot stay competitive, but any business model that relies on exploited labor should not be competitive. Companies should be forced to adapt to modern times and modern values, lest they fail.
Guest worker programs have not been at the forefront of the current immigration reform debate, but they need to be. Neither President Barack Obama nor Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano have so much as mentioned the issue in recent public appearances. As always, the focus is on dealing with existing illegal immigrants by paving them a metaphorical “path”—and on thwarting future illegal immigrants by fencing off that actual path known as our southern border.
Common-sense proposals for the reform of guest worker programs expand the rights of seasonal workers, increase federal oversight over employers and cut out the outsourced middlemen. But as long as the entire system exists, exploitation will continue. There’s a popular saying in the Spanish-speaking world, hecha la ley, hecha la trampa: “Where there’s a law, there’s a loophole.” Even the best proposals, which extend the possibility of lawful permanent residency and eventual citizenship to guest workers, are insufficient, because our promotion of human rights in the long term will not absolve our inhumanity in the short term.
Nevertheless, these perpetual peons deserve to be given the option to reside in the United States, at the very least. After all, shouldn’t all those who help build and sustain our economy be able to take part in our society? We like to boast about the United States as a nation built by immigrants, and that is true enough. Not all of them chose to come here, of course, but at the end of the day, at least they were given the opportunity to stay. It’s about time we show these “guests” of ours some true hospitality.
Art by Rachel Haberstroh