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 Editorials | At Issue | August 2006 
Advocates Urge Congress to Expand Guest-Worker Opportunities
 Kevin Diaz - McClatchy Newspapers
| | A Mexican citizen fills out an application form in front of the U.S. Embassy to Mexico to get a U.S. visa. Last year, the State Department issued Mexican workers fewer than 90,000 of the most common types of temporary work visas, those available to farm and seasonal workers. That figure represents about one-tenth of all the visas granted to Mexicans last year for all purposes. (Heriberto Rodriguez/MCT) |
Mexico City - Jesus Rojas wanted no part of the arduous trek across the Sonora desert and no part of life underground in the United States, working in the shadow of the law.
So when a nephew in his central Mexican town of Guanajuato introduced him to a recruiter for an American landscaping company that would sponsor him legally, the 52-year-old handyman jumped at the chance.
"I was one of the lucky ones," said Rojas, who ended up mowing lawns in Delaware every summer for five years. "I had a connection. That's the hardest part."
Congress has adjourned for the month of August without reaching an immigration deal. Republicans in the House of Representatives are holding hearings around the nation to build support for their border-security-first approach, which calls for stopping illegal immigrants at the border. No resolution in Congress is expected this election year.
But while a chorus of U.S. lawmakers are demanding that foreign workers enter the U.S. legally, they've taken few steps toward opening legal channels to Mexicans like Rojas, whose low-wage labor is in great demand in the United States.
Last year, the State Department issued fewer than 89,000 temporary work visas to low-wage Mexican workers like Rojas. That's just a small fraction of the estimated 400,000 to 500,000 of Mexico's poorest who crossed the border illegally to find work.
"It shows the disconnect between the demand for labor here and the supply of legal workers from abroad," said Stuart Anderson, a former Immigration and Naturalization Service official who now heads the National Foundation for American Policy, a Washington-area research center that promotes expanded legal immigration.
Trying to work legally in the United States is a daunting task for people like Rojas. There are two classes of visas available for nonprofessional workers:
-One program, known as H-2B visas - the category under which Rojas qualified - is capped at 66,000 worldwide. These visas typically go to workers in industries with short, seasonal, spikes, such as construction, hospitality and food service. Last year, 60,259 of them went to Mexicans like Rojas, according to U.S. consular officials.
-The other category, agricultural visas, known as H-2A, isn't capped. But industry experts say these visas are used infrequently because of an array of legal and bureaucratic obstacles. Last year only 31,892 were issued; 28,563 of them went to Mexicans.
Both the farm and seasonal-worker visas require advance arrangements with U.S. sponsors, who typically find laborers through Mexico-based recruiters. They, in turn, can charge prospective workers upward of $1,250, the amount Rojas paid to get his first landscaping job with the Brickman Group, a nationwide landscaping company.
"It requires money and connections," said Rachel Micah Jones, the executive director of the Center for Migrant Rights, a law center in central Mexico. "The poorest are not the ones who are getting the jobs."
Immigration advocates argue that an expanded guest-worker program would reduce illegal immigration to the U.S., which has climbed since the 1960s, when the government ended a massive agricultural guest-worker initiative known as the Bracero Program.
The White House backs Senate legislation that would reopen the spigot of legal workers, but it faces stiff opposition from House Republicans who want to shore up border security first.
Critics of an expanded guest-worker program say it would do little but overwhelm the low-skill job market in the U.S., pushing down wages for American workers with high-school educations or less, a category that includes a lot of welfare-to-work cases and inner-city teenagers.
"I don't find any evidence of a labor shortage," said Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based research center devoted to immigration issues. "When I look at the data, it looks like we're letting in a lot of unskilled workers from Mexico."
Complicating the debate over a new guest-worker program is the question of what to do with an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants already living in the U.S.
President Bush has said that many of those who are in the U.S. illegally should be able to seek legal status, but not "step in the front of the line."
Viewed from Mexico, that would mean squeezing millions more through a bottleneck that accommodated fewer than 110,000 temporary-work visas last year, counting all non-business job categories, from religious workers to entertainers and athletes.
In Mexico City, the line to apply for visas snakes around the side of the U.S. Embassy most days and ends on palm-lined Paseo de la Reforma. Armed police stand guard at metal barriers where vendors hawk tortillas and sodas.
Most of the well-dressed people who start lining up by 7 a.m. are seeking tourist or business visas, which together numbered almost 800,000 last year.
Many of those looking for nonprofessional H-2B visas - manual laborers like Rojas - have to travel to the U.S. consulate in Monterrey, hundreds of miles away.
"When they say to be patient and wait, well, there really is no line for workers to wait in," Anderson said.
Ordinary workers like Rojas who manage to find U.S. companies to sponsor them find out that the application process has to go through three departments of the U.S. government: Labor, State and Homeland Security.
The complicated legal procedure is often beyond the reach of all but the most resourceful and educated.
"It's very hard to get all the documents and the visas needed to migrate to work legally," said Karina Arias of Sin Fronteras (Without Borders), a migrant-rights group in Mexico City. "If they could do it, they'd take a bus or a plane, rather than crossing the desert."
A recent report by the National Foundation for American Policy cited congressional testimony by former Labor Department official John Hancock, who called the system "cumbersome and litigation-prone."
Some of the litigation stems from complaints of workplace abuse brought by migrant workers, who are tied to their employers under the system of nonportable work visas. Rights advocates such as Micah Jones say this makes them vulnerable to abuse.
One lawsuit filed last year involves a dispute between the Brickman Group, which hired Rojas, and a U.S. legal-rights group called Friends of Farmworkers Inc. At issue: whether Brickman or its foreign workers must pay for transportation and other costs of getting the workers from Mexico.
The history of guest-worker programs is also rife with complaints of fraud and abuse on the part of would-be workers. A 1986 amnesty law aimed at agricultural workers produced some 1.3 million applications, far more than the number of illegals thought to have been in farm work at the time.
But for those trying to stay on the right side of the law, scamming the system seems almost as great a danger as trying to cross the border illegally.
"If I got caught," Rojas said, "I'd probably never get my papers again." |
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