The following story first appeared in the Autumn 2004 Glenmary Challenge.
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How to Treat Guest Workers
By Father John S. Rausch

MUSHROOM WORKERS: Mushroom plants are one of the many areas of U.S. agriculture that depends on guest workers—both official and unofficial—from south of the border.

In January 2004 President Bush proposed immigration reform to ‘legalize’ many of the estimated 8–14 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. Until this new guest-worker proposal is drafted into law, its pros and cons cannot be assessed. But Glenmary’s ministry to guest workers, official and unofficial, provides a context for the coming debate.

Scott Farm, the largest tomato producer in East Tennessee, employs 125 “guest workers” from late April till early November. Numerous workers return annually because Wayne Scott, the owner, treats his workers with dignity and provides adequate lodging and facilities. He pays their transportation to and from Mexico, and most workers make well over 50 percent above minimum wage.

A few years ago Wayne, a devout Christian, built a Catholic chapel near the dormitories. Mass is celebrated there every Sunday during the growing season by a priest from St. Mary Church in nearby Johnson City. For Scott Farm the current guest-worker program appears to satisfy both employer and workers.

But in southeastern Arkansas one incident years ago shows that guest workers can be treated more like unwanted strangers. Fifty guest workers found themselves with no food, no transportation and without pay when their employer near Hermitage, Ark., declared bankruptcy under Chapter 11 of the IRS Code. And since guest workers are under contract to a sole employer, they could not legally seek employment on another farm because of their visas. Yet they had no money for bus fare home.

Somehow, half of the workers dispersed to other farms or got back home. Glenmary Father Frank Schenk helped raise over $500 from the nearby Glenmary mission in Warren to provide transportation for the remaining 25. Eventually a federal agency recouped the back wages, but because of faulty record keeping not everyone got paid.

American agriculture depends on guest workers. The official agricultural guest-worker program, designated “H-2A” after the section and paragraph in the Immigration and Nationality Act, offers temporary, non-immigrant agricultural visas. These visas require some detailed paperwork, but allow foreign nationals to work in the United States on a temporary or seasonal basis. They tie the workers to one employer, such as Wayne Scott, and stipulate that workers can work only for the employer that sponsored their entry, after which they must return to their country of origin upon completing their contract. Estimates claim that 70,000 agricultural workers are currently employed in the United States under this program.

While the law mandates that employers provide transportation, a minimum hourly wage and adequate housing, H-2A workers lack the right to organize, strike, bargain collectively, change employers or quit their job. The balance of power resides with the employer, making worker justice dependent on the employer’s integrity.

As Patricia Houlahan, director of Catholic Charities Immigration Service in the Diocese of Little Rock (Arkansas), says, “The law may be written one way; the reality may be different.”

Glenmary Father Vic Subb offers another caveat about the H-2A program. Many times Mexican workers are recruited by the promise of a work visa in the United States. “The workers don’t know who they are working for. But at least people don’t have to walk across the desert and die there.”

He refers to the U.S. border-blockade enforcement strategy, a policy for the past 10 years that forces economically desperate Mexicans to consider a life-threatening desert crossing into the United States. Since 1995 more than 2,300 migrants have died in their attempt. Those who survive do not come away unscathed.

In a migrant camp near Stillmore, Ga., Father Vic recalls meeting Francisco who had just arrived from Mexico. In his mid-40s, he hobbled painfully before removing his shoe to expose a raw blister the size of the palm of his leathery hand. He had walked for five days through the southwestern desert to enter the United States after paying his smuggler and guide (his “coyote”) $2,000.

In Phoenix he was packed into a truck and then, to avoid detection by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, driven for two days with no food, water or bathroom breaks. When he finally arrived in South Georgia to work the onion and tobacco fields, he was hurting. Father Vic fetched some clean gauze for the wound to stave off infection, and the next week Francisco was working alongside other undocumented workers tending the tobacco crop.

Unfortunately, more than half of the 1.6 million agricultural field workers carry this “undocumented” status. These are the unofficial—but very real—guest workers that are hardly treated like “guests.”

Miguel, 57 and one of Father Vic’s parishioners, is like many undocumented workers. He intends to stay in the United States only one year to earn enough in agriculture to fix his house and replace his roof in Mexico. Yet he only earns $160 to $200 per week from his 10-hour days in the fields while paying $50 weekly for food and $100 weekly until his coyote is paid off.

“Regardless of their legal status, migrants, like all persons, possess inherent human dignity that should be respected,” write the Catholic bishops of the United States and Mexico in their joint 2003 pastoral letter, Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope. They recognize that migration is a human right and that “migration between our two nations is necessary and beneficial.” Addressing the situation of undocumented workers, they advocate a program of amnesty and legalization.

Bishop Thomas G. Wenski, coadjutor of Orlando and chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Migration, summarized the components of a just guest-worker policy as a “comprehensive immigration reform that will provide opportunities for legalization of the undocumented currently living in the United States; temporary worker programs with full worker protections and a path to permanency; as well as a reform of our family immigration system that will allow immigrant families to reunite in a timely fashion.”

Miguel, before coming to work in Georgia, had earned a modest living in Mexico where he raised nine children. He owns seven acres of orange and coffee trees. When global forces dramatically depressed produce prices, however, he contracted with a coyote to cross the border, becoming another unofficial U.S. guest worker.

When the Bush proposal for immigration reform is finally drafted into law, it must take seriously the points outlined by Bishop Wenski as well as the reality of workers like Miguel.