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“The Department of Labor does basically nothing,” says Jeff West of LLS. “It’s up to us,” he says, to insure workers are not mistreated. The effectiveness of this voluntary system depends on the whims of contractors. LLS managers–who charge workers a relatively low $165 fee–know many recruits by name and say they view their work as a ministry. Before boarding a bus to the United States, each LLS worker is offered a shrink-wrapped copy of the New Testament and a company flier. “God, Country, Work, and Family: LLS Shares Your Values,” it reads, and encourages workers to call an 800 number with any problems. Other recruitment agencies can be less forgiving. When H-2B workers at New Orleans luxury hotel chain Decatur Hotels spoke out against low wages and decrepit housing last year, the agent who processed their visas immediately visited the hotels, the workers say–but not to support them. “She said we should feel lucky to be here, that some people would give their lives to be here,” says Maria Ramos*, one of the workers who met with the agent, Virginia Pickering of Accent Personnel Services. “It was very hard to hear.” (Pickering declined to be interviewed for this story.) Thus, workers are often inhibited from speaking out. Most of those interviewed for this article did not want their names published for fear of retaliation. A 1997 report by the US General Accounting Office found that the H-2A program’s requirements were difficult to enforce because guest workers “are unlikely to complain about worker protection violations…because they fear that they will lose their jobs or will not be accepted…for future employment.”

Fernando Rivera and his co-workers in Westlake are an exception. Within months of arriving in Louisiana, they began meeting with organizers from the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. Dozens of workers just off their shifts would pack into an apartment in the wee hours, plotting how to get Redd to return their passports and visas. Rivera was especially motivated: His mother’s operation was approaching, and as the only family member with the same blood type, he wanted to be in Mexico in case she needed a transfusion.

In February the workers issued a joint press release with African American Katrina survivors, saying they planned to conduct a citizens’ arrest of a local “slaveholder.” With the police and press looking on, the two groups marched to Redd’s office and demanded the release of the workers’ documents. They got the passports, but Redd escaped, and he continues to employ H-2 workers. Rivera was fired and returned to Mexico; in his four months as a guest worker he had earned about $3,000.

The Westlake protest was a rare show of solidarity between two communities often pitted against each other in the immigration debate. “Guest workers are taking our jobs,” says Curtis Muhammad, a former SNCC organizer who helped lead the protest, as we sit on the porch of his rickety duplex in flood-damaged Tremé, one of the country’s oldest black neighborhoods. “But we’re not going to fight them about jobs. Our struggle is to unite so that we’re not hurt by the process.”

I ask him how he justifies comparing guest work to slavery. “Do you know the story of the Middle Passage?” he asks. “In slavery, you send a slave catcher, they go to the chiefs and make a deal. They say, We’re going to take your people to heaven, and they show them a few pretty things from heaven. You load them onto the ships and only when they get out to sea do they know they’re slaves. You take them to one owner, and if they leave they’re a runaway. Well, with guest workers…” He trails off, his meaning clear.

As dusk falls in Lockport, Louisiana, a few dozen men gather around plastic banquet tables in a nondescript warehouse, next to a yard strewn with rusty tools and the hollow hulls of half-assembled boats. The men, guest workers employed by a local shipbuilder, are complaining about their jobs to organizers from the newly formed Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity. They are tired, they say, of paying close to $400 per month to live “like chickens” in windowless dormitories and eat spoiled food. They earn only $8 per hour, a far cry from the $21.50 that unionized Americans at a nearby shipyard take home. “We keep on hoping there will be some justice,” says Enrique Ceja, a welder from Veracruz. “This was our American dream, but we were fooled from the moment we were recruited.”

Organizer Daniel Castellanos listens patiently. To get here, he slipped past a sheriff’s deputy at the gate–there to enforce a strict no-visitors policy–as he has many times at labor camps like this one. A former guest worker from Peru, Castellanos helped found the Alliance last year after he and several co-workers sued Decatur Hotels, accusing the company of luring them to New Orleans with false promises and failing to reimburse them for up to $5,000 in travel costs. The group now claims 500 members. In May it hosted a regional summit where visa holders from six countries drafted a statement urging that their voices be heard in any discussions about a new guest-worker plan.

“Bush says the guest-worker program is going well, but it’s not going well for us,” Castellanos tells the workers now, to nods from the crowd. “You come here supposedly with the same rights as an American worker. But they give you the most dangerous jobs, and they pay you less.”

In February the workers issued a joint press release with African-American Katrina survivors, saying they planned to conduct a citizens’ arrest of a local “slaveholder.” With the police and press looking on, the two groups marched to Redd’s office and demanded the release of the workers’ documents.

They got the passports, but Redd escaped, and he continues to employ H-2 workers. Rivera was fired and returned to Mexico; in his four months as a guest worker he had earned about $3,000.

The Westlake protest was a rare show of solidarity between two communities often pitted against each other in the immigration debate. “Guest workers are taking our jobs,” says Curtis Muhammad, a former SNCC organizer who helped lead the protest, as we sit on the porch of his rickety duplex in flood-damaged Tremé, one of the country’s oldest black neighborhoods. “But we’re not going to fight them about jobs. Our struggle is to unite so that we’re not hurt by the process.”

Yet even as these workers begin to take action, the ground is shifting under their feet. The Senate is currently debating legislation, long sought by George W. Bush, that would add up to 200,000 more guest workers to the rolls each year. Modeled on the H-2B visa program, the Senate plan contains no mention of reimbursement for housing, travel or recruitment costs, and no opportunity for guest workers to become permanent residents. Guest workers could change jobs, but only to companies already certified to take part in the program. The bill would ban employers with a history of serious labor law violations from hiring guest workers and increase the ranks of Labor Department investigators. But guest workers and their advocates say these protections do not go far enough. In a scathing new report on the H-2 program, the Southern Poverty Law Center argues that a new guest-worker visa should be completely portable, with employers paying all costs of recruitment.

The Nuevo Leon state government offered in 2005 to match Mexican workers with United States companies at no charge to the workers. About 300 Mexicans have found jobs through the initiative. But any Mexican government effort will have to work to escape the shadow of the infamous bracero program, a joint US-Mexico venture that brought more than 4.5 million farm laborers across the border during and after World War II. In the program, which closed down in 1964 amid public outcry over poor working conditions, both governments cooperated to deduct 10 percent from all the braceros’ paychecks, supposedly to establish a retirement fund. But the money disappeared deep within the Mexican banking system, and most braceros never saw a dime.

Even if a system with stiffer worker protections is developed, employers accustomed to cheap unregulated labor might not use it. Research by the Arizona-based think tank ThinkAZ shows that in states with large undocumented populations, businesses avoid hiring H-2 workers, preferring the flexibility of an illegal workforce. Farmer participation in the H-2A program, with its housing requirements and wage guarantees, has remained almost flat in recent years. Meanwhile, the more laissez-faire H-2B system has flourished, with the government adjusting the cap several times to cope with skyrocketing employer demand.

“The tendency has been for the H-2 program…to devolve into a system that approximates the exploitative, illegal, underground labor market it was (in part) designed to replace,” writes Griffith, the anthropologist, in his 2006 book American Guestworkers. “Indeed, there is some evidence that without this downward trend in conditions…legal guestworkers become less attractive to U.S. employers.”

Whatever the outcome of the current Congressional debate, it’s clear that the stakes are high, both for guest workers and for those who profit from the current system. Just two weeks after I left Monterrey, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee’s Santiago Cruz was found beaten to death in a pool of blood in the union’s office. While the Mexican police investigate his murder, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has ordered protection for the union’s remaining staff members in Mexico. Union leaders are convinced Cruz was killed for organizing guest workers.

“There’s a whole ring of opposition to us, from recruiters to growers to all the interests that take advantage of a low-wage workforce,” union president Baldemar Velásquez tells me a few days after the killing. “We’re cutting into their corrupt business, and they don’t like it.”

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