FOR EXPLANATION AND SOURCE SEE BANDERA TRICOLOR
While unfamiliar to most Americans, the program has become the template for an expanded guest-worker program now being hotly debated in Congress. Proponents of the plan argue that temporary labor visas give immigrants greater rights and protections while providing employers with a reliable labor force. Yet workers, labor organizers, lawyers and policy-makers say the history of the H-2 visa delivers a very different lesson. They charge that a program designed to open up the legal labor market and provide a piece of the American dream to immigrants has instead locked thousands of them into a modern-day form of indentured servitude. Congressman Charles Rangel has called guest-worker programs “the closest thing I’ve ever seen to slavery.”
Brought in to work for specific companies on stints of up to a year, guest workers cannot legally leave their jobs even when their employers are abusive. While some earn enough to buy a house or open a business in their home countries, others accrue crushing debt to labor contractors who demand thousands of dollars in fees to connect them with US employers. The Labor Department does not enforce the conditions guaranteed by employers in visa petitions, and there is little recourse for those who are cheated out of promised wages or work hours. Often living in isolated communities where few people speak their language, guest workers rarely complain about mistreatment.
“Many guest workers have told us [their situation] is worse than being undocumented,” says Mary Bauer, a lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Center who has filed several class-action suits on behalf of guest workers. “The employer controls the worker’s right to be in the United States. And that creates a dramatic disparity in power between the worker and the employer.”
As labor unions and immigrant advocates agonize over whether to support a new guest-worker program, many such workers’ fates are being decided in court. Dozens of lawsuits accuse H-2 employers and labor contractors of abuses ranging from failing to pay minimum wage to firing visa holders when they become injured. Several of the suits emerged from Southern states where lax enforcement of labor laws and a small undocumented population have encouraged an influx of guest workers to perform jobs once largely held by African-Americans. Along the Gulf Coast, guest workers involved in post-Katrina reconstruction have formed a new group, the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity, to press for better working conditions and oversight.
But most of the people gathered at Latin Labor Solutions (LLS) today–the farmers from Veracruz, the construction workers from Michoacan–are not thinking about these large policy debates. They are thinking about their futures. If they receive visas, their journey north will be different from those of the estimated 400,000 Mexicans who enter the United States illegally each year. There will be no treacherous, throat-parching march through the desert, backpacks on their backs, bandits at their heels. Instead they will board air-conditioned buses that will deliver them directly to jobs in the United States, where they hope to earn enough to provide for themselves and their families. Monterrey is the first step. Here is where their dreams begin.
To be continued…
coldhearted scientist وداد 