One way to discourage the use of nonimmigrant workers (aka guest workers) is to make sure that these workers can sue employers that abuse them. That runs up the costs of the workers to the employers, and thus makes them think twice about hiring them in the future.
One of the problems with getting economic justice for nonimmigrant workers is that they are not — quite appropriately — in the United States all the time; they may well be back in their homeland when they become aware that there are ways that they can seek justice from their U.S.-based employers, but there they are in Mexico or Central America, and the employer is in the United States.
Needless to say, a probably monolingual rural Mexican national, who thinks he was short-changed by his tobacco-growing employer in, say, North Carolina, is severely handicapped if he wants to file a wage claim.
A relatively new organization, Global Workers Justice Alliance, wants to help in such cases and is currently building links among former nonimmigrant workers back in their home countries, labor rights organizations in those countries, and public and pro-bono organizations in the United States seeking to protect workers generally, such as the various migrant legal action programs.
Global Workers is creating a bilingual website (much of it under construction) to tell current and former nonimmigrant workers about their labor market rights and to lead them to organizations than can help them should they have a dispute with an employer. The network has already made about 300 connections between aggrieved current and former nonimmigrant workers and helping organizations.
I had a chance the other day to talk with the organization's hard-charging executive director, Cathleen Caron, when she was in DC, partially on a mission related to S.744. While she and I disagree on the question of legalizing the illegals, I do agree with her efforts to get a "data provision" inserted in the nearly endless text of the Gang of Eight's bill. It would simply demand that the government provide in the future the same kind of data on the applications, approvals, and denials of petitions for all the various nonimmigrant worker programs that it does now for the H-1B program.
Her organization is also interested in finding out how many of these nonimmigrant visas go to men and to women, suspecting, as I do, that these programs are heavily (and secretly) tipped to men, and to young ones at that. For all practical purposes, federal laws against labor market discrimination go out the window when nonimmigrants are recruited — a practice that needs much more public scrutiny. (The H-1B program is said, for example, to hire males in something like 80 percent of the cases.)
A reader might well ask "Why don't the sending countries, such as those in Central America, go to bat for their own citizens under such circumstances?"
It is a good question, but one that both Ms. Caron and I agreed warrants the same grim answer: The home countries are deeply conflicted in all but the most extreme cases of worker exploitation. While the home government may have some sympathies for the workers in question, it is much more interested in preserving the flow of nonimmigrant workers than in ruining relations with U.S. employers by pressing an individual case.
If an employer has been using workers from Jamaica and feels the Jamaican government is too vigorous in its defense of its own nationals, for instance, the government in Jamaica knows that the employer can easily turn to another source country for its next recruitment.
It is a given, of course, that our federal government currently does little to protect the rights of the nonimmigrant workers, which (in my eyes) lessens the pressure on their employers to meet their needs the old-fashioned way, by hiring Americans. This situation, pretty bad under present laws, would only become worse if and when the new, more relaxed rules come into play — along with a large increase nonimmigrant admissions — under S.744.
Ms. Caron's organization is not a restrictionist one, but what it is trying to do — to prevent economic injustice to nonimmigrant workers — is a good thing under all circumstances and is, indirectly, a plus in the immigration policy equation.
