Dolores Huerta and the H-2A Visa

Because of President Donald Trump's commitment to federal immigration law enforcement and a Politico profile titled "What Would It Take to Get Citizens to Work the Farm?", Dolores Huerta, the 95-year-old California labor activist, is back in the news. Huerta worked with Cesar Chavez to create the National Farm Workers Association, now known as the United Farm Workers. When she was just 25, Huerta began lobbying the California legislature on farm labor issues and founded the agriculture workers union soon after. In her early 30s, Chavez and Huerta worked together to create major victories on behalf of exploited farm workers who were also exposed to potentially deadly pesticides. President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

Obama was widely and properly criticized for honoring Huerta, a hardcore socialist who was arrested more than 20 times in her career as an agitator. Among her proudest successes, she listed Spanish-language ballots, welfare for immigrants, toilets in farm fields—a sanitary necessity—and the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which granted amnesty to more than two million illegal immigrants. But Huerta never abandoned her extreme socialist views, for which Obama rewarded her with the nation's highest civilian honor.

Huerta is a perfect fit for today's progressives, a movement that, in the 1980s, was in its infancy when Huerta took up the cause. Following up on Huerta's support for President Ronald Reagan's IRCA, Politico reporter Samuel Benson asked Huerta if amnesty might happen with President Trump. Huerta replied definitively not and used phrases that, 40 years ago, may have resonated but today are worn out. After Huerta said that "The problem with this administration is, they're so racist. Racism rules, fascism rules with this administration. I don't know, I guess I could just wait until they get enough robots to do the farm work," she also said that a possible labor shortage this harvest season may be attributable to President Trump's administration's immigration policies: "It's an atrocity, what they've been doing to the immigrant community."

But when the interview turned to the H-2A visa, Huerta's evaluation of the temporary, non-immigrant cheap labor program was spot-on. Huerta noted that H-2A agriculture workers are uncapped, which means an unlimited number of foreign nationals can enter. They don't qualify for Social Security, cannot get unemployment insurance, cannot unionize, become citizens, or even get a green card. Farmers save money by employing H-2A workers. This, Huerta concluded truthfully, is "a step above slavery."

Not only does the H-2A program stack the deck against farm laborers both domestic and foreign-born, but the visa is rife with fraud and abuse. To follow up on Huerta's and many other critics' point that H-2A employment is merely "a step above slavery": H-2A visas are tied to a single employer, which means that regardless of the penurious wages or the abhorrent working conditions, the laborer is not free to seek better conditions. And he complains at his own risk—most likely resulting in an employer's phone call to DHS to advise that his employee is no longer compliant with his H-2A visa's terms.

When labor contractors become H-2A middlemen, the farm laborers' situation becomes even more precarious. The farm labor contractors who employ H-2A workers weaponize their complete, structurally created dependence upon them. As a result, H-2A workers rarely contest their wage and working conditions. Andrea Schmitt, a lawyer for Seattle-based Columbia Legal Services who has worked on many class-action lawsuits on behalf of H-2A and other farm workers, told Farm Workers' Justice journalist Izza Drury, author of "No Way to Treat a Guest," that the threat "of 'do not rehire lists,' and the hazard of retaliation is so baked into every single part of the whole [program] because of the ties to a single employer and the way in which recruitment systems work in Mexico that [H-2A workers] just won't stick their necks out at all."

Schmitt is currently working on a case where she hasn't been able to get a single H-2A worker to give testimony about what a drop in wages would mean for their life, for fear that such testimony would result in their termination, deportation, and placement on a do-not-rehire list.

A natural reaction to H-2A abuse would be to call for federal oversight and intervention. But rigorous enforcement would impede Big Agriculture's donor class's cheap labor addiction, which makes it an unappealing option. Moreover, the feds cannot plead ignorance. Various U.S. Attorney's offices, Customs and Border Protection, the Department of Labor, U.S. Postal Inspection Offices, local county sheriffs' offices, the U.S. Department of State's Diplomatic Security Service, the FBI, and the Southern District of Georgia U.S. Marshal's Office were all involved in a 54-fraud count indictment, USA v. Patricio et al. Two dozen defendants have been indicted on federal conspiracy charges after a transnational, multi-year investigation into a human smuggling and labor trafficking operation that illegally imported Mexican and Central American workers into brutal conditions on South Georgia farms.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 created the H-2A visa and has ably assisted H-2A fraud and inhuman treatment for nearly 40 years. The only success, to use the word loosely, the H-2A has had is to block automation in the field, the lasting solution to farmworkers' inhuman treatment.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org