H- 2. B Guestworkers Facing Rampant Abuse. Many foreign guestworkers who come to the United States under the H- 2. B program are cheated out of wages, abused and practically held captive by their employers due to weak regulation and a lack of federal enforcement, a Southern Poverty Law Center expert told a U. S House subcommittee today. Mary Bauer, director of the SPLC's Immigrant Justice Project, told the U. H-2A Agricultural Guestworker Program: Changes Could Improve Services to Employers and Better Protect Workers (Chapter Report, 12/31/97, GAO/HEHS-98-20). Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed various aspects of. The Bracero and European Guestworker Programs Revisited: A Comparative Analysis. The Bracero and European Guestworker Programs Revisited: A Comparative Analysis. Labor News > Guest worker programs: problems and remedies. These include immigration control and a guest worker program. When then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales poked into the problem in 2006 there were 24 fully funded vacancies. Domestic Social Policy Division. The consideration of any proposed guest worker program raises various issues. President Clinton issued a statement opposing an agricultural guest worker program, asserting that a guest worker program would increase illegal immigration, displace US workers, and depress wages and working conditions. S. House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law that the H- 2. B program is rife with abuse because there are virtually no labor protections. The program, overseen by the U. S. Department of Labor, allows U. S. The exploitation of guestworkers and the SPLC's recommendations for reforming the system are spelled out in greater detail in the March 2. Close to Slavery. Read Bauer's testimony before the U. S. House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law: Testimony of Mary Bauer. Director, Immigrant Justice Project. Southern Poverty Law Centerbefore the House Subcommittee on Immigration,Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and. International Law. U. S. House of Representatives. April 1. 6, 2. 00. The H- 2. B Program in the United States. The notion of creating a guestworker program as a possible remedy to illegal. The heart of the problem is that guestworker programs seek to. Immigration and Labor. Farmworker Justice helps farmworkers and their organizations improve wages and working conditions and immigration policy. The H-2A guestworker program fails both U.S. When the Southern Poverty Law Center published. Thank you for the opportunity to speak about the abuse of guestworkers who come to the United States as part of the H- 2 program administered by the U. S. Department of Labor (DOL). My name is Mary Bauer. I am the Director of the Immigrant Justice Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Founded in 1. 97. Southern Poverty Law Center is a civil rights organization dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights of minorities, the poor, and victims of injustice in significant civil rights and social justice matters. ![]() Our Immigrant Justice Project represents low- income immigrant workers in litigation across the Southeast. During my legal career, I have represented and spoken with literally thousands of H- 2. B workers in many states. Currently, the Southern Poverty Law Center is representing workers in eight class action lawsuits on behalf of H- 2. A and H- 2. B guestworkers. We also published a report in 2. United States entitled . As the report reflects, H- 2. B guestworkers are systematically exploited because the very structure of the program places them at the mercy of a single employer and provides no realistic means for workers to exercise the few rights they have. The H- 2. B (non- agriculture) guestworker program permits U. S. The abuses typically start long before the worker has arrived in the United States and continue through and even after his or her employment here. If guestworkers complain about abuses, they face deportation, blacklisting or other retaliation. Because H- 2. B guestworkers are tied to a single employer and have little or no ability to enforce their rights, they are routinely exploited. The guestworker program should not be expanded or used as a model for immigration reform. If this program is permitted to continue at all, it should be reformed. Guestworker Programs Are Inherently Abusive. Guestworker Program As Social Problem SolvingWhen recruited to work in their home countries, workers are often forced to pay enormous sums of money to obtain the right to be employed at the low- wage jobs they seek in the U. S. It is not unusual, for example, for a Guatemalan worker to pay more than $5,0. Workers from other countries may be required to pay substantially more than that. Asian workers have been known to pay as much as $2. Because, generally, only indigent workers are willing to go to such extreme lengths to obtain these jobs, workers typically have to borrow the money at high interest rates. Guatemalan workers routinely tell us that they have had to pay approximately 2. In addition, many workers have reported that they have been required to leave collateral —often the deed to a vehicle or a home— in exchange for the opportunity to obtain an H- 2 visa. These requirements leave workers incredibly vulnerable once they arrive in the U. S. Guestworkers under our current system live in a system akin to indentured servitude. Because they are permitted to work only for the employer who petitioned the government for them, they are extremely susceptible to being exploited. If the employment situation is less than ideal, the worker's sole lawful recourse is to return to his or her country. Because most workers take out significant loans to travel to the U. S. In some industries that rely upon guestworkers for the bulk of their workforce —seafood processing and forestry, for example— wage- and- hour violations are the norm, rather than the exception. These are not subtle violations of the law but the wholesale cheating of workers. We have seen crews paid as little as $2 per hour, each worker cheated out of hundreds of dollars per week. Because of their vulnerability, guestworkers are unlikely to complain about these violations, and public wage- and- hour enforcement has minimal practical impact. Even when workers earn the minimum wage and overtime, they are often subject to contractual violations that leave them in an equally bad situation. Workers report again and again that they are simply lied to at the time they are recruited in their home countries. Another common problem workers face is that they are brought into the U. S. Similarly, employers often bring in far too many workers, gambling that they may have more work to offer than they actually do. Because the employers are not generally paying the costs of recruitment, visas, and travel, they have little incentive to avoid overstating their labor needs. Thus, in many circumstances, workers can wait weeks or even months before they are offered the full- time work they were promised. Given that workers bring a heavy load of debt, that many must pay for their housing, and that they cannot lawfully seek work elsewhere to supplement their pay, they are often left in a desperate situation. Guestworkers who are injured on the job face significant obstacles in accessing the benefits to which they are entitled. First, employers routinely discourage workers from filing workers' compensation claims. Because those employers control whether the workers can remain in or return to the U. S., workers feel enormous pressure not to file such claims. Second, workers' compensation is an ad hoc, state- by- state system that is typically ill- prepared to deal with transnational workers who are required to return to their home countries at the conclusion of their visa period. As a practical matter, then, many guestworkers suffer serious injuries without any effective recourse. The guestworker program appears to permit the systematic discrimination of workers based on age, gender and national origin. At least one court has found that age discrimination that takes place during the selection of workers outside the country is not actionable under U. S. Thus, according to that court, employers may evade the clear intent of Congress that they not discriminate in hiring by simply shipping their hiring operations outside the U. S.—even though all of the work will be performed in the U. S. Many foreign recruiters have very clear rules based on age and gender for workers they will hire. One major Mexican recruiter openly declares that they will not hire anyone over the age of 4. Many other recruiters refuse to hire women for field work. Employers can shop for specific types of guestworkers over the Internet at websites such as www. One website advertises its Mexican recruits like human commodities, touting Mexican guestworkers as . Again, because workers are dependent upon their employer to remain in, and return to, the United States, they are extremely reluctant to complain even when confronted with serious abuse. In order to guarantee that workers remain in their employ, many employers refuse to provide workers access to their own identity documents, such as passports and Social Security cards. This leaves workers feeling both trapped and fearful. We have received multiple reports of even more serious document abuses: employers threatening to destroy passports, employers actually ripping the visas from passports, and employers threatening to report workers to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency if those workers do not remain in their employment. Even when employers do not overtly threaten deportation, workers live in constant fear that any bad act or complaint on their part will result in their being sent home or not being rehired. Fear of retaliation is a deeply rooted problem in guestworker programs. It is also a wholly warranted fear, since recruiters and employers hold such inordinate power over workers, deciding whether a worker can continue working in the U. S. These brokers typically have no assets. In fact, they have no real . When these brokers are able to apply for and obtain permission to import workers, it permits the few rights that workers have to be vitiated in practice. A lawsuit filed in March 2. Southern Poverty Law Center illustrates many of the abuses H- 2. B workers face. In that case, hundreds of guestworkers from India, lured by false promises of permanent U. S. When the workers attempted to assert their federally protected rights, the employer forcibly detained them and tried to have them deported to India. I have attached a copy of the complaint in that case, David, et al v. Signal International LLC, et al. There is no rational basis for this disparity. The H- 2. A Program. The H- 2. A program provides some legal protections for foreign farmworkers. Unfortunately, far too many of the protections exist only on paper. H- 2. A workers must be paid wages that are the highest of: (a) the local labor market's . The expenses include the cost of an airline or bus ticket and food during the trip. If the guestworker stays on the job until the end of the contract the employer must pay transportation home.
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