The exploitation of H-2A and H-2B guestworkers commences long before they arrive in the United States. It begins, in fact, with the initial recruitment in their home country — a process that often leaves them in a precarious economic state and therefore extremely vulnerable to abuse by unscrupulous employers in this country.

U.S. employers almost universally rely on private agencies to find and recruit guestworkers in their home countries, mostly in Mexico and Central America.

These labor recruiters usually charge fees to the worker — sometimes thousands of dollars — to cover travel, visas and other costs, including profit for the recruiters. The workers, most of whom live in poverty, frequently must obtain high-interest loans to come up with the money to pay the fees. In addition, recruiters sometimes require them to leave collateral, such as the deed to their house or car, to ensure that they fulfill the terms of their individual labor contract.

The entirely unregulated recruiting business can be quite lucrative. With more than 121,000 such workers recruited in 2005 alone, tens of millions of dollars in recruiting fees are at stake. This financial bonanza provides a powerful incentive for recruiters and agencies to import as many workers as possible — with little or no regard to the impact on individual workers and their families.

Workers Start Off Deeply in Debt
Typically, guestworkers arriving in the United States face a fee-related debt ranging from $500 to well over $10,000. Many pay exorbitant interest rates on that debt. When that's the case, they have virtually no possibility of repaying the debt by performing the work offered by the employer during the term of the contract.

Overwhelming debt is a chronic problem for guestworkers. Although U.S. laws do provide some obligation for employers to reimburse workers for their travel and visa costs, in practice it is rare that guestworkers are fully reimbursed. Most struggle to repay their debt, while interest accrues. These obstacles are compounded when employers fail to offer as many hours of work as promised — a common occurrence.

Guatemalan guestworkers represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center paid an average of $2,000 in travel, visa and hiring fees to obtain forestry jobs in the United States. Guatemalans are recruited largely from Huehuetenango, an extremely poor region where many indigenous people live. Often illiterate, many speak Spanish as their second language, with varying degrees of proficiency. They generally work as subsistence farmers and have virtually no opportunity to earn wages in rural Guatemala. Thus, their only realistic option for raising the funds needed to secure H-2B jobs in the United States is to visit a loan shark, who will likely charge exorbitant interest rates. Many of these workers report having been charged 20 percent interest each month. Given that the pine tree planting season is three months long and workers often earn less than $1,000 per month, they have little hope of repaying the debt doing the work for which they were hired.

The fees paid by these Guatemalan workers amount to far more than the actual cost of travel and visas. Roundtrip airline tickets can be bought for $500 to $600. A visa typically costs $100. Assorted other fees may add several hundred. The remainder is often pocketed by the recruiter or the agency for which he works.

In addition, the majority of Guatemalan forestry workers interviewed by the Southern Poverty Law Center were required to leave some form of collateral, generally a property deed, with an agent in Guatemala to ensure that the worker will "comply" with the terms of his contract. If a worker violates the contract — as determined by the recruiter — that worker will be fined. Some workers have been required to pay as much as $1,000 to secure the return of their deed. This tactic is enormously effective at suppressing complaints about pay, working conditions or housing. U.S.-based companies deny knowledge of the abuse, but there is little doubt that they derive substantial benefit from their agents' actions. It is almost inconceivable that a worker would complain in any substantial way while a company agent holds the deed to the home where his wife and children reside.

The story told by Alvaro Hernandez-Lopez is typical of guestworkers recruited from Guatemala. In 2001, at age 45, he came to the United States to work for Express Forestry Inc. in the Southeast. He continued coming for two more planting seasons. "What I earned planting trees in the States was hardly enough to pay my debt," he said. "It was really hard for us to fight to get to the States legally and then not earn any money. We were told we had to leave our deeds to get the job. On a blank paper we had to sign our names and hand over our deeds. They said that if we didn't sign this paper they wouldn't bring us to the States to work."

Forestry worker Nelson Ramirez, also from Guatemala, describes a similar experience when he signed up to work for Eller and Sons Trees Inc. in 2001. A labor recruiter required that his wife sign a paper agreeing to be responsible if he were to break his contract. "I didn't understand exactly what this threat meant but knew that my wife would have to sign if I was going to get the visa," Ramirez said. "The work was very hard, but I worried about leaving because my wife signed this form to get me the job and I worried about her."

These tactics are not limited to any particular industry or country. Recruits in some parts of the world are required to pay even greater sums of money to obtain guestworker visas. Some Thai and Indonesian workers imported to North Carolina on H-2A visas, for example, each paid $5,000 to $10,000 or more for the right to be employed in short-term agricultural jobs at less than $10 per hour. In practice, they were not paid even that.