coldhearted scientist وداد

FOR EXPLANATION AND SOURCE SEE BANDERA TRICOLOR

“Where we are there’s very little work,” Ana Maria Méndez, 25, tells me. She and a cousin made the eighteen-hour car trip from their small town in Veracruz, where most people subsist on homegrown corn and beans. Now Méndez fidgets nervously on a chair in the LLS waiting room, her short hair pinned back from her round face, wondering aloud whether she’ll be allowed to take the $8-an-hour job she’s been offered with a landscaping company in Missouri, a place she’s never been. To get there, she mortgaged the house where her husband and two children still live to pay $1,000 in travel costs and fees.

“Even if they turn me back, I’m going to go,” she says. “I would go illegally. I’m scared, but to come all this way and go back with nothing would be worse.”

Méndez’s debt is not unusual. If guest workers’ dreams begin in their home countries, say advocates, so does the abuse. With visas in high demand, H-2 workers can pay recruiters thousands of dollars in fees for the privilege of being matched with a US employer. While some of that money covers legitimate expenses like bus fare and the $200 government charge for visa applicants, the rest lines the pockets of middlemen. Guest workers from Asia have paid up to $20,000 for their jobs; in Mexico, the going rate ranges from $300 to $2,000, according to local officials, just below the cost of hiring a coyote.

Here in Monterrey, a bustling hub of international commerce, a quasi-legal trade in cross-border labor is quietly thriving. There are high-tech outfits like LLS, with its new computers and six branch offices, and there are unmarked houses where cash changes hands in moldy back rooms. With little oversight, labor recruiters are free to make inflated promises and to charge whatever they choose for their services.

“There’s always someone looking to commit fraud,” says Alejandra Ocádiz, director of the Office of Migrant Assistance for the state of Nuevo Leon. In one among many cases of wrongdoing by recruiters her office investigated last year, one company, Aicotramex, placed ads asking candidates to submit their passports and $650 for a “pre-authorized” appointment at the US Consulate. After dozens of people paid up, the company’s office closed and its owners disappeared.

Recruiting agencies enjoy particular leverage because of the rules governing H-2 visas: Workers need a job offer from a US company before they can receive a visa. Once they get the permit, they must remain employed at that company only. Take a job somewhere else, and they’re immediately considered illegal. Upset their boss–or that employer’s agent–and they risk not being requested the following year.

At LLS, one of Monterrey’s largest recruiting agencies, workers submit their names and contact information to an electronic database. A kind of Match.com for low-wage labor, the program allows employers to view workers’ photos and search by categories that, along with skills and home state, include gender and marital status. On the trip north, the company’s chartered buses, equipped with GPS tracking units, send signals back to the computer system. Company owner Jeff West shows me a screen with a neon line indicating the path of a bus transporting agricultural workers to the Midwest. West, a former golf course developer from Michigan, invented the software himself. He hopes one day to add radio-frequency identification chips to workers’ passports to monitor them in real time.

“If a worker gets off the bus to go to the bathroom, the employer will know,” he tells me proudly.

Mexican law prohibits recruiters from charging workers for their services, but apart from the efforts of state officials like Ocádiz, the government doesn’t do much to enforce the rule. And in an example of the difficulties of crafting transnational labor policy, the US State Department has no position on the law.

“They just tell us not to exaggerate,” says Omar Santos, manager of North American Labor, a Monterrey recruitment firm. “Don’t let your costs vary too much from the service you provide.”

In the absence of government action, one union stepped into the breach. The Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), a small, scrappy outfit, represents about 6,000 Mexican guest workers in North Carolina’s tobacco and cucumber fields. In 2005 the group won a court ruling prohibiting farmers in the state’s main growers’ association, and their agents, from charging workers for visas or transportation.

At the union’s Monterrey office I meet Santiago Cruz, a young Oaxacan with a ready smile who picked tomatoes and chilies on Ohio farms before becoming an organizer. Cruz and other FLOC staff spend hours talking to workers about their rights in the park outside the consulate, where visa seekers begin lining up at dawn and vendors ply the crowd with snow cones and fliers for cheap hotels. Originally opened to assist the union’s members, their office was soon flooded with calls from nonmembers looking for a guide through the visa application labyrinth.

“The recruiters don’t respect seniority,” says Cruz. “If I’ve been working somewhere five years, and Juan comes in and it’s his first season, they tell Juan, give me $2,000–I’ll send you instead.”

Because recruiters have workers’ addresses and information about their family members, Cruz says, even some unionized workers are afraid to complain. “The recruiters from North Carolina are more careful now,” he says. “They know someone is watching them. But if the workers don’t report [a problem], there is nothing we can do.”

Back at the LLS office, Ana Maria Méndez is happily clutching her brand-new visa, preparing to board a bus to Missouri. She studies the letters on the white card carefully, as if trying to memorize every detail, then climbs the bus steps, the only woman in a group of dozens of men. Laden with its human cargo, the bus pulls away from the curb and rolls off into the night.

Like Méndez, Fernando Rivera had high hopes for his tenure as a guest worker. The 24-year-old law student from Mexico wanted to help purchase an $11,000 operation for his mother, who has liver cancer. When a friend told him he could earn $10 an hour slinging tacos at a restaurant in Louisiana, he jumped at the chance. But when Rivera arrived last October in Westlake, a two-street hamlet several hours west of New Orleans, he discovered that his employer was not a restaurant but a labor contractor named Matt Redd. Redd housed more than 100 workers in rat-infested apartments with eight people sharing a single bathroom, according to Rivera and other workers, confiscating their passports and hiring them out to businesses in the area. He paid Rivera only $6.50 an hour, Rivera says, and when the paychecks arrived, there were often hours missing.

“Matt Redd would sell us to the highest bidder,” Rivera says. “The money passed through his hands and afterward there was never very much left.” The only Latinos in a town of about 5,000, Rivera and his co-workers say they often endured racist slurs and were stopped several times by police demanding identification. When Rivera asked Redd to return his passport so he could prove his identity, Rivera says, Redd refused and threatened to call immigration.

“It was hell there, but there was nothing else to do but bear it,” Rivera says.

Redd admits to taking away the passports but says he was unaware it was illegal. “When we go through this process and pay to get people here, with the attorney’s fees and transportation fees, it was some collateral that we had to make sure they stayed and worked for us,” he says.

He says any discrepancies in paychecks were mistakes that were soon corrected, and chalks up Rivera’s other charges to jealousy of other workers. He believes he is providing an important service to Lake Charles County, which he says had a labor shortage even before Hurricane Rita. “The employers here, they’re not getting cheap labor by any stretch of imagination, by the time we pay these people’s workers’ compensation and taxes,” he says. “What they have is someone that shows up. They win, their customers win and the workers certainly win.”

To be continued…