Guestworkers,Enganchadores, and Changing Labor Relations in U.S. Rural Communities

Abstract

IntroductionIn a two-month time span early in 2007, North Carolina's Beaufort County Commission approved two measures directed against the growing Latino population in the county, voting first to remove all non-English language materials from county offices and following with a vote to approve the County Sheriff's cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to locate and deport undocumented immigrants. Around the same time, the New York Times reported on a case of excessive exploitation among two Thai guestworkers in North Carolina and Louisiana, the Southern Poverty Law Center (2007) released a report entitled, Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States, and National Public Radio aired at least two stories addressing immigration issues. In the week between the New York Times article and the release of Close to Slavery, the cooperative extension service of Johnston County, North Carolina, hosted a panel to address agricultural labor issues, inviting representatives of the North Carolina and U.S. Departments of Labor, the Employment Security Commission, North Carolina Department of Labor, the Farm Bureau, and, most notably, the North Carolina Growers Association (NCGA). This last organization is one of the largest labor contracting organizations in the United States, specializing in the placement of H-2 workers; in 2004, the NCGA signed an agreement with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee on the condition that law suits against them be dropped. Farmers from across the North Carolina's coastal plain attended, and the issue of pending immigration reform legislation generated the most heated debate. Not insignificantly, much of this focus on immigration occurred around the time that President Bush toured Latin America and, in Mexico, again raised the issue of immigration reform.These local, regional, and national events and reports illustrate the varied dimensions of immigration and its pervasiveness across the North American social and cultural landscape, underscoring the point that the United States is ripe for immigration reform. Several legislative initiatives include some form of expansion of the current H-2 programs-the nation's current guestworker programs-although these vary according to such things as how guestworkers' wages would be determined, whether or not employers would provide housing, guestworkers' access to the courts, protections workers would receive, and other factors. Much of this legislation has been crafted as if ignorant of the ways the H-2 programs have evolved (or devolved) since the last major immigration reform in 1986, despite widely publicized works like Close to Slavery and other, less widely read work (e.g. North South Institute 2006; Wilkinson 1989; Hahamovich 2003; Griffith 2006; Smart 1997). These works nearly always find that H-2 programs, primarily because of the provision that H-2 workers are bound to one and only one employer, have a tendency to deteriorate over time, approximating highly exploitative labor contracting practices like indentured servitude.In this paper, I examine practices that are common in the nation's current H-2 programs and in labor contracting generally, relating them to other developments in immigration taking place in the rural U.S. South.1 Drawing on research conducted in rural North Carolina regions from 2001 to the present, as well as case studies of immigration into Georgia, Iowa, and Minnesota, I suggest that, as labor relations in guestworker programs deteriorate, people participating in H-2 programs have been able to resist the excessive labor control that has been structured into the program. They accomplish this, usually, by working outside of their contracts, in jobs that they are not legally contracted to accept. At times they access these jobs with the assistance of their legal employers and at times against their employers' wishes or without their employers' knowledge. The maturing of Latino communities in new destinations across the United States, a process bolstered by several public and private U. …