In the orchards, questions about immigration reform
by Tony Barboza
Washington state offers a cautionary tale for would-be reformers in Washington, D.C.
YAKIMA, Wash. — Calling itself la voz del
campesino, the voice of the farmworker, Radio KDNA blares
Mexican ranchera music across the Yakima Valley, a dry, high-desert
valley lined with irrigated rows of Washington’s famous fruit
trees. Every morning, an announcer at the Spanish-language public
radio station reads off the names of orchards that are hiring,
linking farmworkers with the growers who need them.
Like
many farming communities in the West, Yakima County is home to a
large Latino community. Forty percent of residents have roots in
Latin America, according to the state. "We’re settled here,
we have houses here, our families are here," says Erasto
García, a farmworker who has lived in the valley for nearly 20
years. "And we do the hardest work: farm work."
As a
legal United States resident, García is an exception to the
rule in agriculture today. Farming associations openly acknowledge
that at least 70 percent of their 1.6 million-strong work force is
in the country illegally.
The system is a grand
wink-and-nod. Farmers hire workers, fully aware that they might be
illegal. But by the time they’ve verified the workers’
paperwork — a process that can take up to a month — the
workers in question are often long gone. The workers live in
constant fear of being caught, and the farmers end up flouting the
law, but the system works: Each year, the fruit gets picked.
So last year, when Global Horizons, a California-based
labor contractor, brought 150 legal guest workers from Thailand to
work in two Yakima Valley orchards, it created quite a stir. The
program has sparked a debate among growers, local workers and state
officials about the impacts of — and the need for —
foreign labor.
The Yakima fracas also offers a cautionary
tale for politicians and activists on the national level, as the
Bush administration and agribusiness push for sweeping immigration
reform. Some of that proposed reform looks a lot like an expanded
version of what already exists: the guest-worker program that is
causing such a ruckus in Washington.
The middlemen
A little-known federal agricultural
guest-worker program, called H-2A, lets farmers apply for visas to
bring foreign workers into the country, provided there are no
farm-skilled, legal domestic workers available to do the job. The
H-2A program was authorized in 1986, but various forms of
guest-worker programs have been around since 1943. They’ve
been used mainly in the South and East, but have spread West in
recent years. Over the past decade, the number of H-2A workers in
the country has doubled, to over 50,000.
But it is a rare
farmer who has the time and know-how to recruit and hire workers
who live overseas. Most rely on middlemen, or labor contractors to
do the job.
Labor contractors vary greatly in size and
specialty, but they generally work directly with governments and
labor recruiters in countries where there is a surplus of willing
workers. After interviewing, hiring, and securing H-2A visas for
workers, the contractors often shuttle them between farms around
the country.
Guest workers are paid a special
state-mandated minimum wage. In Washington, it’s $9.03 an
hour, about $1.40 more than most domestic farmworkers are paid. And
farmers pay an additional 30 to 40 percent on top of that to labor
contractors for their services. Contractors make their money from
these commissions. They also save on taxes, since the H-2A program
waives taxes employers normally have to pay for social security and
unemployment.
The system allows farmers to shirk
responsibility for any abuses or injustices that occur, because the
workers are the employees of the contractor, not the farmer, says
Bruce Goldstein, executive director of the Farmworker Justice Fund,
an advocacy group in Washington, D.C.
Global Horizons,
the Los Angeles-based labor contractor that brought the H-2A
workers to the Yakima Valley, employs more than 600 agricultural
guest workers each year on the West Coast, all men between the age
of 25 and 39. They are recruited mostly from Thailand.
Applicants must pay fees to both labor recruiters and the Thai
government before they can even get an interview with Global
Horizons, says Michele Besso, staff attorney for the Northwest
Justice Project in Yakima. That can add up to several thousand
dollars.
To make sure the guest workers don’t "jump
contract" in search of better jobs once they’re in the U.S.,
Global Horizons hires only married men who have children, and thus
a clear incentive to use their tickets home. The company also
requires them to put down some collateral, such as land or a house,
which they would lose if they ran away, says Pranee Tubchumpol, the
company’s director of international relations. And workers
agree to have most of their earnings sent directly to a bank in
Thailand, where the money is held until their return.
Global Horizons President Mordechai Orian says the company has had
a 98 percent success rate with Thai guest workers. "After years of
doing it, we realized that there’s nothing better than the
Thai people," he says. "They’re humble, they’re
respectful, and they go back home."
Growing concern
John Verbrugge, manager of Valley Fruit, a
2,000-acre fruit operation based east of Yakima, has employed teams
of mostly Latino farm workers in recent years. But in the winter of
2003, the mild-mannered, fourth-generation fruit grower says he
became concerned that the tightening security along U.S.-Mexico
border would cut off the flow of workers from Mexico and Central
America. That led him to contract out to Global Horizons, which
provided him with 31 Thai workers during last year’s harvest.
The company and the guest worker program offered
predictability and legality, he says: "I’m trying to be
proactive. It’s a way to bring in legal people and get my
crops picked."
Still, Verbrugge says the 45-day
application process for H-2A visas is too cumbersome to address
fruit growers’ needs, which vary widely with the crop being
picked. He felt so strongly about it that he starred in a
television commercial that aired across the state in May, paid for
by Global Horizons. In the commercial, he appeared next to trees
drooping with ripe cherries; he told the audience that he was short
on pickers, and pleaded with Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire to
make it easier for growers to bring in guest workers.
Labor organizers and resident farm workers were livid. There is no
shortage of workers, says Erik Nicholson, Pacific Northwest
regional director for United Farm Workers of America: It’s
just the free market at work. As long as workers aren’t tied
to labor contractors, they are free to move from job to job. If
growers want to keep their workers, he says, they have to offer
higher wages and better working conditions.
The H-2A
program has a provision that requires employees to prove that there
are no legal local workers available, but farmworker advocates say
labor contractors and farmers ignore it. The guest-worker program
floods the local labor pool, they say, displacing local workers and
depressing wages.
"I don’t know why they are
bringing people from other countries when there are enough people
here to do the work," says Gilberto Cantú, a farmworker from
Yakima who landed a job with Global Horizons last fall. After he
and a group of other local workers asked for a raise in July, the
company stopped asking them to come to work. But the Thai workers
continued on.
In July, Columbia Legal Services, a
Yakima-based nonprofit, filed suit on behalf of local workers
against Global Horizons, as well as Valley Fruit and Green Acre,
the two orchards that have hired Thai guest workers in the past two
years. The suit charges that the companies gave preference to the
Thai workers over local workers like Cantú, in violation of
H-2A.
Also, earlier this year, the State of Washington
and the U.S. Department of Labor fined Global Horizons for
violating provisions of H-2A that are intended to protect both U.S.
and guest workers. The citations include operating without a labor
contractor license, owing back wages to guest workers, failing to
prove that there were no local workers to do the work, and housing
guest workers in substandard conditions.
State labor
inspectors found Global Horizons’ guest workers living "in
overcrowded rooms without cooking or laundry facilities," according
to a March letter to the Labor Department from Gov. Gregoire. She
concluded that "the (H-2A) program’s implementation by farm
labor contractors has resulted in the mistreatment of both our
domestic and foreign workers."
"We made our mistakes, but
we never mistreated anybody," says Global Horizons president Orian.
He claims state regulators targeted his company because it was the
first to use the H-2A program on a large scale in Washington. He
says it is difficult to judge whether there really are enough
people to do the work because the local labor pool is mostly
illegal.
Global Horizons is appealing the fines, and
Orian defends the H-2A program as "the only way to bring legal
labor to the U.S."
Toward immigration reform
At least 415 people have died in the past year
trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border — a record high,
according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. And as the death
toll rises, so does the pressure to reform the nation’s
immigration laws.
In August, President Bush announced his
plans to push for a guest-worker program. "We’ve got people
being smuggled across… and a network of forgers and document
falsifiers that are trying to beat the system," he said. "It seems
rational to me that ... there ought to be a way to let somebody
come and do jobs Americans won’t do, on a temporary basis."
The administration will have to walk a tightrope if it
wants to get the changes through Congress. It will have to cater to
big business, which wants a reliable, legal, and low-wage work
force; the easiest way to do that would be to offer amnesty to
workers already in the U.S. illegally, as Congress has done several
times in the past. But at the same time, Bush must answer to
hard-line conservatives, who want tougher enforcement of existing
immigration laws and oppose amnesty, seeing it as a reward for
illegal entry into the country.
Several reform bills are
already floating around Congress. One of them, sponsored by Sens.
Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and John McCain, R-Ariz., would give
illegal immigrants already in the country the chance to apply for
guest-worker status and eventual citizenship, if they agreed to pay
fines and back taxes.
A second reform bill — and
the one that has the strongest support from advocates for stricter
immigration control — looks a lot like the current H-2A
program. Sponsored by Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Jon Kyl,
R-Ariz., it would give temporary guest-worker visas only to those
who apply from abroad. Workers already in the country illegally
would have to turn themselves in to be deported — with no
assurance that they could come back legally.
A third
proposal, called "AgJOBS," is a compromise crafted by
representatives of agriculture, industry and labor groups. It
likely has the best chance of passing. Sponsored by Sens. Larry
Craig, R-Idaho, and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., the bill would allow
about 500,000 farm workers already in the country to earn legal
status. But it would also reduce many of the protective measures of
H-2A, easing the burden on employers to prove that they are not
displacing domestic labor, and freezing wages at their 2002 level.
All talk of immigration reform will likely be shelved
while Congress deals with hurricane relief. Meanwhile, in
Washington’s orchards, farmworkers are concerned about how
new policies might affect their situation.
Fortunato
Tapia, a farm worker who lives in Sunnyside, east of Yakima, came
to Washington from Central Mexico 20 years ago, when he was 35. He
was among the 2.7 million illegal immigrants granted legal status
by Congress in 1986. He thinks the country is due for another round
of amnesty.
"They gave us papers, but more people have to
come to take our place," says Tapia. "There has to be another
generation."