Mary Bauer (right) director of the Center’s Immigrant Justice Project, announces the new report, Close to Slavery. Sarah Reynolds, who did much of the research for it, interpreted for former guestworker Hugo Martin Recinos-Recinos.

President Bush and his corporate allies have urged Congress to expand the guestworker system as part of immigration reform, and legislation introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in March calls for hundreds of thousands of new guestworkers.

"Congress should reform our broken immigration system, but reform should not rely on creating a vast new guestworker program," said Mary Bauer, director of the Center’s Immigrant Justice Project and author of the report. "The current program is shamefully abusive in practice, and there is almost no enforcement of worker rights."

The Center's report — Close to Slavery: Guestworker Programs in the United States — was released at a March 12 press conference here and distributed to journalists and members of Congress. It received widespread media coverage throughout the nation.

The report describes in detail how guestworkers who come to the United States are routinely cheated out of wages; forced to mortgage their futures to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs; held virtually captive by employers who seize their documents; forced to live in squalid conditions; and denied medical benefits for injuries.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote in his March 12 column, "A must-read for anyone who favors an expansion of guest worker programs in the U.S. is a stunning new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center that details the widespread abuse of highly vulnerable, poverty-stricken workers in programs that already exist."

The 48-page report, based on interviews with thousands of guestworkers and dozens of legal cases, describes the systematic abuse of workers under what is known as the H-2 system administered by the U.S. Department of Labor. The program was created in 1943 to allow the sugar cane industry to bring in temporary workers and was revised by Congress in 1986 to include non-agricultural workers.

Employers in 2005 "imported" more than 121,000 temporary H-2 guestworkers – 32,000 for agricultural work and 89,000 for jobs in forestry, seafood "Guestworkers are usually poor people who are lured here by the promise of decent jobs," Bauer said. "But all too often, their dreams are based on lies, their hopes shattered by the reality of a system that treats them as commodities. They're the disposable workers of the global economy."

Hugo Martin Recinos-Recinos, a former guestworker from Guatemala whose story is told in the report, borrowed thousands of dollars to pay recruiting fees for a forestry job in the United States. "I had to leave the deed to my home," he said. "When I got to the U.S., I was always underpaid, living in small hotel rooms and working 10-hour days. The debt from my recruitment and travel to the States made the low pay even harder to bear. When I filed a lawsuit about the conditions, my family and I were threatened."

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.

Many workers are required to pay fees ranging from $500 to more than $15,000 to obtain low-wage, temporary jobs in the United States. Typically, these workers incur debt that makes them unable to assert their rights for fear of financial ruin. "If guestworkers complain about abuses, they face deportation, blacklisting or other retaliation," the report says.

"Guestworkers don't enjoy the most basic protections of a free labor market – the ability to change jobs if they are cheated or abused by their employer," Bauer said.

The rights that H-2 workers do have exist mostly on paper. The federal government has failed to protect them from unscrupulous employers, and most cannot obtain private legal assistance to enforce their rights through the courts.

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.

"The mistreatment of temporary foreign workers in America today is one of the major civil rights issues of our time," Center President Richard Cohen said.

"For too long, we’ve reaped the economic benefits of their labor but have ignored the incredible degree of abuse and exploitation they endure. Congress now has an opportunity to right this terrible wrong. Congress should eliminate the current H-2 system entirely or commit to making it a fair program with strong worker protections that are vigorously enforced."

SPLC Report
Spring 2007