Guest Workers on Farms Stand in the Eye of the Covid Storm

Abstract

32 | International Union Rights | 27/1-27/2 FOCUS | UNIONS, WORKERS’ RIGHTS, AND THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC Guest Workers on Farms Stand in the Eye of the Covid Storm On April 21 President Trump announced in a tweet that, while stopping almost all kinds of legal immigration for at least two months, he was placing no limits on the continued recruitment of H-2A guest workers by growers. Trump claimed the spreading COVID-19 pandemic made his order necessary, but he cited no evidence to show that a ban covering all forms of family-based migration would stop the virus’ spread, while leaving employer-based migration unchanged would not exacerbate the pandemic. Trump has repeatedly declared his support for the guest worker program. In a 2018 Michigan speech he told a grower audience, “we’re going to let your guest workers come in, because we have to have strong borders, but we have to let your workers in ... They’re going to work on your farms ... but then they have to go out. But we’re gonna let them in because you need them ... We have to have them”. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue explained the apparent contradiction. He wants Trump “to separate immigration, which is people wanting to become citizens, [from] a temporary, legal guestworker program. That’s what agriculture needs, and that’s what we want. It doesn’t offend people who are anti-immigrant because they don’t want more immigrant citizens here. We need people who can help US agriculture meet the production”. This promise is more than election-year politics. It is a big step towards creating a captive workforce in agriculture, based on a program notorious for abuse of the workers in it, and for placing them into low-wage competition with farmworkers already living in the US. It is also a step into the past. Family preference migration, in which immigrants can get residence visas (green cards) based on their family relationships, was won by the civil rights movement. Bert Corona, Cesar Chavez and others convinced Congress to end the bracero program in 1964. They fought for an immigration policy based on family unification, instead of one based on growers’ desire for a low-wage labour supply. Especially for immigrants coming from Asia, Africa and Latin America, this new system made it possible to unite families in the US, settle down and become part of communities. Before that watershed step, people could come from Mexico to work as braceros, but not to stay, and not with families. Immigration quotas favouring white migration from Europe made it very hard for families in general to come from non-European countries. When President Trump said, in a 2018 meeting with Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), “why do we want these people from all these shithole countries here? We should have more people from places like Norway”, he was voicing his nostalgia for that precivil rights past. Trump has now suspended the family preference system. Whether it will be reinstated at some point is anyone’s guess. And the H-2A program, which is growing rapidly, is a direct descendant of the old bracero regime. It will continue, given its support in a Congress that is much more conservative than the one in 1964, which abolished the bracero program and established the family migration system. Even Democrats in the current Congress have introduced legislation that would greatly expand H-2A. Although growers have claimed the coronavirus has created a labour shortage making the H-2A program vital, the program was mushrooming long before the pandemic hit. Last year the US Department of Labor gave agribusiness permission to fill 257,667 jobs with workers brought almost entirely from Mexico, with H-2A visas. That amounted to 10 percent of all the jobs in US agriculture. The program is five times bigger than the 48,336 jobs certified under George W Bush in 2005. In some states H-2A certifications now make up more than 10 percent of farmworker jobs. In Georgia growers fill a quarter of all farm labour jobs with H-2A workers. An agricultural system in which half the workforce would eventually consist of H2-A workers...