Mary Bauer, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project, presented her report Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States at a forum sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington yesterday.
The eye-opening report, based on interviews with thousands of guestworkers and dozens of legal cases, describes the systematic abuse of workers under the Department of Labor-administered H-2 visa program.
The most fundamental problem with the H-2 system is that employers hold all the cards. They decide which workers can come to the United States and which cannot. They decide whether a worker can stay in this country. They usually decide where and under what conditions workers live and how they travel.
In one example, forestry worker and H-2B visa holder Otto Rafael Boton-Gonzalez, saw first-hand how this works. “When the supervisor would see that a person was ready to leave the job because the pay was so bad, he would take our papers from us. He would rip up our visa and say, ‘You don’t want to work? Get out of here then. You don’t want to work? Right now I will call immigration to take your papers and deport you.’”
The report concludes that the H-2 guestworker program should not serve as a model for immigration reform, but in fact should be overhauled if allowed to continue. It offers specific recommendations to remedy the worst abuses.
