In 1981, the travel writer Tom Miller made a spot-on prediction. President Reagan was then planning an experimental program to allow US growers to hire 50 thousand Mexican farmworkers each season on temporary contracts, a program that would be enacted into law in 1986 as the H-2A visa program. Writing in The New York Times, Mr. Miller feared this newest bracero program—bracero is the name used for contract farmworkers in two earlier guestworker programs—would fail to protect against the abuse of workers, just as its predecessors had.
Tom Miller knew our southern border well. He had traveled all 2,000 miles of it and had written extensively on US relations with Latin America in popular books and magazine articles. He died in 2022, living long enough to see his prediction come true. The H-2A program today provides the cheap farm labor the US agricultural economy depends on, but stories of worker abuse appear all the time. Tom did not live long enough to witness a sobering milestone just around the corner. Soon, if trends continue, the US will bring more than half a million H-2A workers to our fields each year, ten times the fifty thousand originally planned.
Given the explosive growth of the current bracero program, and urgent calls on both ends of the political spectrum to modernize it, we’d do well to remember what went wrong with the last one. Let’s take a look back at some history.
The United States entered World War I in April 1917. One month later, growers in California and other western states were allowed to hire “otherwise inadmissable aliens” from Mexico on six-month contracts, ostensibly to compensate for US workers diverted to war jobs. The Mexican civil war was then just ending, and peasants displaced by the fighting were desperate for jobs. So both countries saw benefits. However, when this first bracero program ended in 1921, Mexicans continued to cross into the US for work, now without authorization.
Fast forward to the 1930s. With record numbers of US citizens unemployed and many flocking to California to seek farm work, the US repatriated hundreds of thousands of Mexicans in an attempt to free up jobs for US workers.
In 1941, the US entered World War II. With thousands of its citizens either enlisting or taking manufacturing jobs to aid in the war effort, growers in western states pleaded for help. Starting in 1942, they were again allowed to hire farmworkers from Mexico on temporary contracts, presumably only for the duration of the war. However, despite Japan’s 1945 surrender bringing the war to a close, the bracero program went on. And with the 1951 passage of Public Law 78, this second bracero program effectively became permanent, with annual admissions growing to levels unseen during the war, peaking at 445,000 in 1956.
US growers loved the program and its seemingly endless supply of non-union workers, desperate for jobs and willing to do “stoop work” at low wages. On paper, bracero workers were entitled to wage protections and other safeguards against exploitation and abuse. With few enforcement mechanisms in place, however, the reality was something different.
In 1955, the labor activist and writer Ernesto Galarza toured bracero labor camps to see what things were like, visiting 156 such camps. The next year, his 80-page report “Strangers in our Fields” shone a light on numerous cases of wage theft, racism, and other indignities that braceros suffered as a matter of course. The federal government was quick to refute many of Galarza’s findings, issuing its own report to try to highlight the supposedly bad facts and misleading statements in Galarza’s report. But public opinion had begun to turn toward Galarza’s view. Also, many lawmakers believed there were enough US citizens to fill these jobs if only workers were paid higher wages to attract them. The government ended the program in 1964. By then, an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Mexicans had worked as braceros over the 22 years this “temporary” program was in place.
Among the biggest fans of the demise of the second bracero program were the labor leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. With that program out of the way, it’s no coincidence their United Farm Workers union soon won a 40-percent increase in wages for grape workers, in 1966. And the grape and lettuce boycotts of the late 60s and early 70s would help facilitate passage of the landmark California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, establishing for the first time ever the rights of US farmworkers to unionize. However, those rapid gains of organized farm labor would not last for long.
After the second bracero program ended, former contract workers kept on crossing the border from Mexico seeking work—now without authorization—and US growers kept on hiring them. The growing problem of illegal border crossings, and the never-ending need for cheap farm labor, prompted the Reagan plan that so worried Tom Miller and led to his 1981 prediction. He saw what was coming, dubbing the plan “Bracero Program No. 3.”
In 1986, the United States enacted the sweeping Immigration Reform and Control Act, or IRCA. One of its key provisions was to make it against the law for employers to hire undocumented workers. But to ensure a steady supply of farmworkers, IRCA also dusted off and modified a decades-old temporary labor program known as H-2. The US had established this temporary and seasonal visa program in 1952, primarily for Florida sugar cane cutters from Jamaica. Under IRCA, the US would issue not one but two types of guestworker visa: the H-2A for agricultural work and the H-2B for non-agricultural jobs. The H-2A remains essentially the same today as when it was enacted 37 years ago, spelling out numerous conditions for hiring foreign agricultural labor, some of them identical to the old bracero rules.
In its first full year in 1987, the US certified just 44 H-2A visas, but it did not take long for the program to surpass the adoption rate of either of the bracero programs. In 2012, the US certified more than 75,000 H-2A visas. By 2018, that number had grown to almost a quarter of a million. Now in 2023, the number of certifications is approaching 400,000.
H-2A farmworkers are better off than the earlier bracero workers in some important ways. First, they are not subject to dehumanizing procedures, such as delousing with DDT upon arrival, nor long registration and induction periods that might deprive them of food for days on end. More broadly, H-2A farmworkers are entitled to numerous provisions of the 1983 Migrant & Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, including the right to disclosure of and compliance with terms of employment, housing that meets federal and local standards, and transportation in vehicles that meet federal safety standards.
They are also better paid. Each year, the US Department of Labor sets a minimum wage for H-2A farmworkers known as the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR), which is generally well above the federal minimum wage, and often more than ten times what a Mexican farmworker could earn at home in Mexico. Growers hate the AEWR. But it is an undeniable benefit to the worker.
So do we treat H-2A farmworkers better than we treated earlier braceros? Thankfully, in some ways, yes. But is their treatment on par with that of other low-wage workers in the US? No, it’s not even close.
First let’s consider the housing. One observer, after visiting numerous farmworker labor camps, noted how it “ranges from good through indifferent to downright bad.” That was Ernesto Galarza writing in 1956. But anyone today who visits any number of migrant labor camps, certainly in North Carolina where I live, could use those very same words. Growers have few incentives to maintain and repair farmworker housing beyond what is necessary to pass annual inspection. Providing free housing to workers is a cost of business that few employers must bear.
I believe most H-2A employers do their best to treat workers fairly. As in any line of work, some do not. But how many workers in this country are prohibited from seeking a new job when their employer cheats them out of wages, works them to exhaustion, or otherwise mistreats them? H-2A contracts prohibit workers from changing employees during their contract period, institutionalizing a power imbalance unheard of in other settings. Of course, unionization and collective bargaining have been used to halt unchecked worker mistreatment for decades. But as agricultural workers, H-2A farmworkers have no federally protected right to those options. Nor are they entitled to overtime pay, no matter how many times they work for more than 40 hours in a week.
And then there’s the human trafficking. By allowing farm labor contractors to participate in the H-2A program we all but invite the notorious contratista to exploit foreign workers. They can lie to them, indenture them, steal from them, and treat these human beings as something less. Earlier this year, a story from Prism Reports detailed the results of an 18-month investigation into this little-known but widespread accommodation of human traffickers. Sadly, the Department of Labor’s enforcement of program rules, which would discourage such behavior, is on the decline—and the contractors know it.
There’s something else baked into the H-2A program, something that will never make a headline but deserves recognition nonetheless: How many workers in this country are separated from their families for up to ten or eleven months each year just to earn, if they’re lucky, maybe $15 thousand in a year? Last year I met two H-2a farmworkers in North Carolina who each had been away from home for the better part of the past 30 years. And both have sons now doing the same thing. If there is a more poignant display of family values in this country, of enduring harsh living and working conditions to provide for one’s family, year after year with no end in sight, I’ve not seen it.
US lawmakers on both side of the aisle are under increasing pressure to do something about the H-2A program. Here’s what they should do:
First, the farm labor contractor must go. Employers should be directly accountable for the welfare of their H-2A farmworkers, banned by law from hiding behind an intermediary who might do anything to increase their profit margin. Unfair to smaller farms? They could join a collective to spread both the cost and burden of program compliance. Today’s North Carolina Growers Association is a model for this approach, acting as a joint employer, facilitating farmworker mobility across growers, and willing to stick their necks out to ensure workers are treated fairly.
Second, we must help growers, especially smaller ones, shoulder the cost of housing farmworkers. They have families to support too. In an ever-competitive global market, they cannot simply pass along this unusual cost. Our growers are entitled to meaningful tax breaks or other means of subsidizing the cost of housing farmworkers, in return for reasonable and verifiable evidence of doing well by their workers.
Third, it is high time to give all US agricultural workers—guestworker or not—the right to overtime pay and other basic labor rights. In 1938, farmworkers were excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act because they were Black and had no voice in Congress. Academics refer to this as agricultural exceptionalism. Surely, 85 years is long enough to recognize and refute such a racist stain remaining on our book of law. Most farmworkers today are Latino, still lacking a voice in Congress, and still doing some of the most strenuous and low-paying work anywhere. If anyone is entitled to overtime pay, I say it’s them.
It appears this latest incarnation of the bracero program is here to stay.
“There is nothing more permanent than temporary workers,” writes Philip Martin of the Wilson Center, drawing on an old adage to describe our nation’s insatiable need for cheap farm labor. He may be right. Our H-2A farmworkers are both perennial and essential. The least we can do is treat them with more dignity and respect.
Sources
“Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States”, Southern Poverty Law Center, 2013
The Migrant & Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, US Department of Labor
Miller, Tom. “Bracero Program No. 3”, The New York Times, October 5, 1981
Photo credits: Top half: Michael Durbin. Bottom half: Extension Bulletin Illustrations Photograph Collection, Oregon State University Special Collections and Archives Research Center, Corvallis, Oregon.
Michael Durbin 