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Guestworker Programs for
the 21st Century
April 2000
by Philip Martin
The U.S. unemployment rate is at a 30-year low
of 4.1 percent, and there are more vacant jobs
than unemployed workers in many U.S. states
and metro areas. As Mexican and other migrants cross
the border illegally seeking U.S. jobs, there is a call both
in the United States and Mexico for a guest worker program
to make the employment of migrants in the United
States legal and manageable, either in agriculture alone
or in both agriculture and the non-farm economy.
Should the United States launch another guest
worker program? The Commission on Immigration
Reform in 1995 concluded that: "a large scale agricultural
guest worker program...is not in the national
interest...such a program would be a grievous mistake."
President Clinton agreed in a June 1995 statement,
which asserted that a guest worker program would increase
illegal immigration, displace U.S. workers, and
depress wages and working conditions.
Lessons of History
Despite these strong statements against a new guest
worker program, U.S. farmers and their congressional
allies, some governors and immigrant advocates, and
the Mexican government would like to launch a new
guest worker program. In July 1998, the U.S. Senate
approved on a 68-31 vote the Agricultural Job Opportunity
Benefits and Security Act of 1998 or AgJOBS
program, which would have created a new guest worker
program for farm workers. The House did not act, but
AgJOBS remains on the Congressional agenda.
The United States has had two agricultural
guest worker or Bracero programs with Mexico, and
one program, H-2 and H-2A, that permits U.S. farmers
to recruit foreign farmworkers in any country, although
most come from the Caribbean and Mexico. None of
these programs fulfilled their stated purpose: to add
workers temporarily to the U.S. work force without adding
permanent residents to the population, and to do
so in a manner that does not adversely affect U.S. workers.
Instead, the Bracero programs laid the groundwork
for one of the world's great mass migrations
— that
from Mexico to the United States — and the H-2A
program has been wracked by costly disputes.
The first Bracero program was an exception
to U.S. immigration law. The 1917 Immigration Act prohibited
the entry of immigrants who were "induced ...to
migrate to this country by offers or promises of employment,"
imposed a head tax, and excluded immigrants over 16 who could
not read in any language.
However, with "Food to Win the War" as a motto, farmers and
railroads persuaded the U.S. Department of
Labor (DOL) to suspend until 1921 the head tax and
the literacy test for Mexican workers coming to the
United States with contracts for up to 12 months. Many
of these first Braceros did not return as scheduled
—
there was no Border Patrol to regulate crossings until
1924 — and some U.S. employers did not pay Braceros
the wages promised.
The second Bracero program was a series of
agreements between Mexico and the United States under which
some 4.6 million Mexicans were admitted to
work on U.S. farms between 1942 and 1964. It is often
argued that a legal guest worker program reduces illegal
entries, but 4.9 million Mexicans were apprehended during the
Bracero years (both Bracero entries and apprehensions double
count individuals admitted or caught several times). The Bracero
program was small during
World War II — admissions peaked at 62,000 in 1944
— and rose to 445,000 in 1956, primarily to harvest
cotton and other commodities in surplus.
The Mexican and U.S. governments recognized
that the Bracero program also facilitated illegal immigration.
Mexico pressed the United States to adopt employer sanctions to
discourage illegal emigration, and
the 1951 Bracero program was approved for only six
months in order to put pressure on Congress to approve
sanctions. The "Texas Proviso" in the 1952 Immigration and
Nationality Act, however, specifically exempted
the knowing employment of unauthorized workers.
The H-2 program operated alongside the
Bracero program, allowing farmers along the eastern seaboard to
import Jamaican and other workers to hand cut
sugar cane in Florida and pick apples in the Northeast.
Like the Bracero program, farm employers who wanted
to employ H-2 workers had to convince the U.S. Department of
Labor that U.S. workers were unavailable at government-set
wages and to provide the foreign workers
with free housing and contracts that spelled out their
rights and responsibilities.
The U.S. experience with foreign farm workers
leads to three major lessons:
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There is nothing more permanent than temporary
workers. After farm employers and foreign workers become
dependent on each other, the farmers do not think
about alternatives to Bracero or H-2 workers, and the
migrants need U.S. earnings to maintain their families.
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The availability of foreign workers distorts the
economy. Farmers take into account many factors when
they decide whether to plant apples in remote areas of
Washington or West Virginia, especially likely revenues
and costs in four or five years when there are apples to
pick. But they do not have to worry about the availability
of pickers if there is a guest worker program. An auto
executive might be fired for putting a plant in a remote
area without workers; a farmer feels entitled to foreign
workers to make the investment profitable.
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Employers invest in lobbying to maintain the program, not
in labor-saving or back-saving alternatives.
Legislation authorizing farmers to hire guest workers has
usually been considered a temporary bridge, a
way for farmers to get crops harvested until soldiers returned
from war or mechanization eliminated the need
for hand workers. However, once a guest worker program is in
place, farmers invest in lobbying to maintain
the program, not in labor-saving and productivity-increasing
alternatives.
AgJOBS
Farm employers have been pressing for an alternative
guest worker program since 1964, when the Bracero program was
ended in the midst of the Civil Rights movement. In the early
1980s, as the Grand Bargain of legalization and employer sanctions
was moving through Congress, farmers persuaded the House in 1984 and
the Senate in 1985 to approve alternatives to the H-2 program,
which required employers to prove that U.S. workers were
not available and to provide both U.S. and foreign workers with free housing.
Unions, churches, and immigrant advocates joined those interested in
controlling illegal immigration to block the farmers' proposal. The compromise
was the Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) legalization
program — any unauthorized worker who performed least 90 days of farm work
in the preceding year could
become a U.S. immigrant. Some 1.2 million foreigners
became SAWs, and the estimated 558,000 SAWs doing
farm work in 1989-90 comprised 31 percent of the farm
work force.
SAWs did not suddenly abandon farm work in
the 1990s — their lack of English and the recession kept
most in farm work. Instead, the explanation for only half
of the SAWs doing farm work in the early 1990s lies
with fraud — at least half of those who became immigrants
through the SAW program did not satisfy the requirement that
they performed at least 90 days of farm
work in 1985-86.
The exit of SAWs from the farm workforce since
the early 1990s reflects a different phenomenon
— falling real wages
and shrinking benefits encouraged SAWs
to seek non-farm jobs as the economy improved in the
1990s. The SAWs who left farm work were replaced by
newly arrived unauthorized migrants. By 1997-98, it was
estimated that SAWs were about 16 percent of crop workers, and
that half of the farm workers on crop farms
were unauthorized.
Farm labor lobbyists raised the alarm that farmers
were vulnerable to the loss of their work force. What if, they
speculated, the INS were to develop effective border and interior
enforcement strategies? INS enforcement actions in Georgia onions,
Midwestern meatpacking,
and Washington apple picking were widely reported in
the farm press. Even though there were no financial losses
to employers in these cases, they highlighted the fact that
a significant share of the work force was unauthorized
and could be removed with effective enforcement.
Farmers who want to maintain the labor status
quo face a dilemma. They do not want to apply for H-
2A guest workers because that would require them to
prove that U.S. workers are not available and also to provide housing.
They do not want to simply legalize currently illegal workers,
because the experience with SAWs
demonstrates that legalized farm workers soon leave for
nonfarm jobs in a booming economy. The solution proposed in
AgJOBS has two major parts:
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Quasi-legalization. Unauthorized workers who could
prove that they did at least 150 days of farm work in the
previous year could apply for a new probationary non-immigrant
status. These workers could become U.S. immigrants if they
performed at least 180 days of farm
work each year for five of the next seven years.
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Registries. Each state employment service (ES) would
be required to create a farmworker registry that would
screen workers seeking farm jobs for legal status and accept
job offers from employers. If an employer requested
more workers than were available in the registry, the ES
would be required to issue the employer a certification to
import foreign workers to make up the shortfall.
The surprise about AgJOBS is that it has divided
immigrant advocates, who are normally united against
guest worker proposals. Some of those who have embraced all or
part of AgJOBS believe that almost anything is better than the status quo.
What Should be Done
Guest worker programs have failed wherever and whenever they have
been tried. The indicators of failure are
that some migrants settled, illegal migrants accompanied
legal migrants, and the programs lasted longer and got
larger than anticipated.
Some level of failure can be expected when governments
attempt to regulate a relationship in which migrants and
employers have different goals than regulators. Experience
with guest workers suggests that three
principles should guide any new policies:
Illegal immigration must be under control. Migrants
may prefer to be unauthorized if they have to pay fees to
get visas, or if they are tied to one employer. Employers
can avoid wage and housing regulations, as well as the
scrutiny of government agents, if they hire unauthorized
workers outside the program.
Employers must have a continued incentive to seek
alternatives. Under the current H-2A program, once an
employer satisfies program requirements, he or she pays
only administrative fees. Employers who have adapted
to guest worker rules do not actively seek U.S. workers or
labor-saving alternatives. For example, the Florida sugar
cane industry began importing Caribbean workers to hand
cut cane in 1943 and maintained that cane harvesting
could not be mechanized because unique muck soils
would bog down machines. But after a lawsuit was filed
in the early 1990s alleging that workers guaranteed $5.30
an hour and required to cut one ton of cane per hour
should be paid $5.30 a ton, rather than the $3.70 a ton
they were paid, cane companies mechanized the harvest
within three years.
Bilateral agreements should govern recruitment, remittances,
and returns. The H-2A program gives U.S.
employers complete discretion in where and how to recruit workers --
employers can and do select the "best
and brawniest" of foreign work forces; migrants often
pay hundreds of dollars to get selected for U.S. farm jobs.
The workers' home country should be involved in the
guest worker program so that recruitment can be regulated,
remittances used to foster job-creating growth, and
worker returns facilitated.
The AgJOBS proposal does not satisfy any of
these criteria. Instead, it hands a major new task to state
ES offices that they are unlikely to be able to fulfill; the
ES failure to register and have available to farmers legal
workers will help to divert blame for "labor shortatges"
from farmers to the government. The complex legalization program,
with its requirements for continued farm
work, is likely to foster both exploitation and fraud. Workers
wanting to satisfy the five-year requirement to become immigrants
are not likely to complain and risk firing. Farm labor contractors,
on the other hand, can develop a lucrative sideline issuing real
and false letters of
employment to probationary AgJOBS workers.
Labor-intensive agriculture continues to expand
under the assumption that government will make farm
workers available when and where they are needed. Farm
workers remain among the poorest U.S. workers, with
most employed seasonally and earning $5,000 to $10,000
a year. Farm labor contractors are expanding their roles,
serving as shock absorbers in a labor market rife with
labor and immigration law violations.
But the solution to farm worker problems is not
a guest worker program that leaves the farm labor system unchanged.
Even most farmers concede that history would likely repeat itself
if illegal immigration were
to be controlled and there were no new guest worker
program. Wages would rise, there would be a rapid adoption of
labor-saving machinery and better ways to manage now more
expensive workers, and some crops might
migrate to lower-wage countries.
Government policy should push agriculture toward a sustainable
21st century future, not permit it to
revert to a 20th century "Harvest of Shame" past.
Philip Martin is a professor of agricultural and
resource economics at the University of California, Davis.
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