Posted on 06/25/2007 7:38:40 AM PDT by Froufrou
Landscapers in the United States often have two choices when it comes to labor: a difficult search for locals to do the job — or hiring ready, willing and undocumented immigrants.
When former San Antonio City Councilman Richard Perez hires for his family-owned business, he prefers a lesser-known but legal and sometimes viable third option: guest workers from Mexico.
As the U.S. Senate stalemated over comprehensive immigration reform this month, it was immigration policy as usual for Perez, on his third trip this year to the U.S. Consulate here to help five applicants get H-2 visas to work for Fairway Landscape & Nursery.
After months of paperwork and planning, they had to get through an interview with a consular official who would decide where they would spend the rest of the year. Only two of them got visas — and $7.43-an-hour jobs, good through December. The other three returned to hometowns where they would be lucky to make that much per day.
"It's frustrating," Perez said earlier of the prospect of having an applicant rejected. "There's no appeal process."
The current U.S. guest worker program is a labor market matchmaker, hooking up opportunity-hungry foreign workers with labor-hungry employers. But it falls well short of an alternative to the vast undocumented labor force that keeps many U.S. service industries and farms in business.
In San Antonio on a nine-month guest worker permit, Jorge Castillo of Tampico, Mexico, spreads mulch at a hospital.
Visa applicants complain about corrupt recruiters in Mexico who sometimes charge "processing fees" similar to rates charged by human smugglers.
American employers love and hate the program. Those who can afford it are happy to have an above-board labor force, but many say it is a bureaucratic, expensive headache.
Perez said it's worth the effort.
"It's really been a godsend," he said. "Probably every nursery and landscaper in San Antonio uses H-2s."
The guest worker program faced fresh scrutiny with the April slaying of union activist Santiago Cruz in the offices of an AFL-CIO affiliate in Monterrey called the Farm Labor Organizing Committee.
His killing, FLOC leaders suggested, was in retaliation for the organization's mission of protecting workers from crooked recruiters.
But investigators said Cruz was killed over a $4,500 debt he incurred for promising H-2 guest worker visas to a man police identified as a convicted human smuggler.
If true, Cruz's sad tale illustrates the possibilities for corruption when too many laborers jostle for too few visas.
Because the H-2 visa program depends largely on recruiters in far-flung rural hamlets, a multimillion-dollar industry — poorly regulated and almost unsupervised — has sprung up around it.
In Mexico, paying a middleman is an accepted way of obtaining government permits. And recruiters stand accused of doing what businesses everywhere do: using the laws of supply and demand to determine the value of their services.
So what is a legal and guaranteed U.S. job worth to a poor man in Mexico? Tales abound of $1,000 to $2,000 recruiter fees, but numerous interviews outside two U.S. consulates suggest workers are paying recruiters considerably less than that. Consular fees add another $100 for each application and each visa issued.
Alejandro Pérez, 23, was among two dozen workers from Durango who paid a recruiter as much as $600 each before a 12-hour bus ride to Nuevo Laredo for an interview. Holding a form letter explaining his rejection, he sadly contemplated a summer in the cornfields.
"There are a lot of cheats," said a fellow visa applicant who did not want his name published. "There are many recruiters who charge lots of money and are complete pirates."
Recruiters in Mexico are theoretically governed by the Labor Ministry, or STPS, which has sanctioned a number of recruiting companies under Mexican law, according to a U.S. consular official in Monterrey.
But an STPS spokesman denied knowledge of the agency's supervisory role in the program.
U.S. authorities have been criticized for not taking greater responsibility to prevent abuse by recruiters. But Mark Perry, the H-2 program director in Monterrey, said officials report irregularities to Mexican authorities and have revoked visas for recruiters who are gaming the system.
"It is problematic for us for a number of reasons," Perry said of abusive recruiters. "If the worker has paid a lot of money for a visa, there's a chance that he's going to stay and work longer than the contract specifies."
"The amount that should theoretically be charged to the worker is zero," Perry said.
The biggest recruiter in Mexico disagrees.
With fees, transportation and administrative costs, getting a guest worker to the United States from Mexico costs about $1,000, said Michael Bell, whose company, Manpower of the Americas, processes as many as 15,000 H-2 visas per year.
"What other people don't understand is that somebody has to do what I do, and it's not easy," said Bell, adding that his company charges $150 per person for processing, a fee covered by either workers or their employers.
"People don't want to accept that we can (charge for the service) because the opportunity for corruption is there," he said. "But I have a clear record ... of getting rid of individuals that I discovered were doing things wrong."
San Antonio's Perez knows firsthand the time and money that goes into recruiting workers. Each year he makes about five two-day trips to process workers. Dela Gonzalez, his sister, puts about 40 hours into the application process, which steeps through three government agencies over a four-month span.
It might cost Fairway about $300 per worker, including the $100 visa fee — with workers covering their own $100 application fee.
Gonzalez said recruiting agencies charge as much as $1,500 per worker, including all fees and transportation and a replacement guarantee if the worker doesn't last the season.
But Fairway, a company started by Perez's father in 1969 that specializes in contract work at government facilities, has the advantage of being less than a three-hour drive from the border.
Language isn't a barrier, and, because Perez hires in small batches, he gets candidates through referrals from other workers and doesn't need to trek deep into Mexico to find them.
The North Carolina Growers Association doesn't have these advantages. It is probably the single largest contractor of guest workers, with about 7,000 H-2A — temporary farmworker — visa holders on its payroll this year.
The association also is subject to stringent regulations regarding guest workers, due to a court settlement that prohibits its workers from being charged by recruiters.
"It's increased the cost of a program that was already prohibitively expensive," said the association's executive director, Stan Eury. "The program itself is very bureaucratically cumbersome ... It really puts growers at a competitive disadvantage."
That probably explains why there are so few guest workers on American farms. Even though there is no cap on farmworker visas, fewer than 40,000 were issued last year.
There needs "to be a financial incentive to do it the right way," Eury said. "Right now there is a financial disincentive."
Employers find it difficult to get workers when they need them. Due to a paperwork mix-up, San Antonio's Fairway almost didn't get approval for workers earlier this year, which would have jeopardized its spring operations.
Farmers need workers at specific times or risk the loss of profits in an already difficult business, and the system isn't geared for that, Bell said.
About 80 percent of candidates are approved for visas. But that doesn't stop the 20 percent from wondering why they paid $100 for a two-minute interview over a fuzzy microphone with someone whose Spanish they didn't grasp.
"I didn't understand him," said Ángel Abraham Montoya, 19, one of the recently rejected Fairway candidates.
Broadly, candidates are rejected because the interviewer believes they pose a risk of overstaying their visa. But Montoya has a young wife and a 5-month-old son in the Coahuila mining town of Nueva Rosita.
"It was so my son could grow up well," he said. "It's a given. I must go back."
Sooner than he had hoped.
Under current rules, the number of guest workers is increasing rapidly. In fiscal 2004, only 108,000 H-2 visas were issued. In 2006, the number was nearly 160,000. But the increases are being driven by extensions of nonagricultural H-2 visas under a program set to expire in October 2008.
With immigration reform still uncertain in Washington, an easier-to-use H-2 program might be a solution to the demand for foreign labor in the United States.
"This is an alternative that ought to be looked at instead of some of these huge new programs that have been talked about," said Jessica Vaughan, senior policy analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank in favor of a low immigration rate.
I believe our landscaper here in WA, the State, is using this program.....or so they told me last year.
ping
Call Senators toll-free to ask them to vote against cloture:
1-800-417-7666. (English number)
1-800-882-2005. (Spanish number)
I lived in Tri-Cities and even in the late 70s there was no shortage of migrant farm laborers.
What’s the Spanish number for?
This would be good jobs for teenagers. I know many have the attitude that this kind of labor is beneath them but not. I did a restaurant job when I was in H.S. It sucked but I learned some things though.
My first job was below minimum wage. Candy girl in a mall theater wasn’t any more glamorous than your H.S. job!
“all the snow I could eat”
I remember something about yellow snow...
Just say NO to Illegal Alien Amnesty!! Keep calling!! It’s NOT OVER!!
U.S. Senate switchboard: (202) 224-3121
U.S. House switchboard: (202) 225-3121
White House comments: (202) 456-1111
Find your House Rep.: http://www.house.gov/writerep
Find your US Senators: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
MY first job was picking beans with my mother when I was in 4th grade.....after that I picked berries and beans on my own from age 13-17....then I graduated to babysitting and eventually to waitressing.....but, today....who is doing ALL of those jobs? Except maybe the babysitting?
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