How This Legal Worker Visa Became a Human Trafficking Scheme
“Our agricultural production has depended on workers who are in some ways not fully free.”
by Katie Nixdorf and Paul Blest, More Perfect Union
In recent years, a massive scheme to traffic and exploit vulnerable agricultural workers has taken shape in the US.
Corporations are bringing in hundreds of thousands of temporary workers via a legally obtained, temporary H-2A visa. But those workers have few rights and little recourse when their employers break the law, and those same employers are increasingly turning to the H-2A program instead of local workers, including U.S. citizens, who’ve fought for fair wages and dignity on the job.
“We have a problem in this country,” Antonio De Loera-Brust, the communications director for the United Farm Workers, told More Perfect Union. “Our agricultural production has depended on workers who are in some ways not fully free.”
The program is largely made up of workers from Mexico, who are seeking to provide for their families with higher wages than they can make at home. But in some cases, workers like Frank Javier Zavala Martinez have found rampant exploitation and violations of the law.
Zavala worked for three years as an H-2A worker at a farm in Connecticut. To do that, he needed to take out a high-interest loan to cover his travel costs — which should have been provided by his employer — and was later charged fees in order to be recruited back the following season. Once in the U.S., he was forced to live in substandard housing and work long hours with no holidays and no paid time off.
“I didn't look for someone [to talk to] because we're kind of forbidden from approaching people to talk about our situation,” he told More Perfect Union.
Nearly 3,000 miles away in Sunnyside, Washington, Crisanto Serrano worked for 40 years as a farmworker in the Yakima Valley. Serrano obtained his citizenship and built a family in Washington, but after the mushroom farm where he worked, Ostrom, began bringing in H-2A workers and paying them more than local workers, Serrano and his coworkers began organizing with the United Farm Workers.
Ostrom, which was later sold to a Canadian private equity firm and renamed Windmill Farms, eventually agreed to a $3.4 million settlement with the state for unfair and discriminatory practices. But Serrano has struggled to find agricultural work.
“If it rains or it's too cold or too hot, we have to stop at certain times, but not for [contracted workers],” Serrano told More Perfect Union. “[Companies] want to bring slaves.”
And as the Trump administration ramps up deportations and continues to gut labor enforcement, the farm lobby is pushing to expand the H-2A program even further.
“Many growers have come to the conclusion that they would like their entire workforce to be H-2A,” De-Loera Brust said. “They don't wanna have to deal with the messiness that comes with having to treat their workers as human beings.”
We talked to workers, experts, and activists about the exploitation in the H-2A program, who’s behind the push to expand it, and what all of this means for the future of agricultural labor and both local and guest workers alike. Watch our video below to learn more: