Can a Guest Worker Program Work?

By Nathan Thornburgh/Vass

Here, in a retrofitted hangar in the heart of tobacco country, is an early glimpse of what life could be like if the recent Senate compromise on immigration passes. Two busloads of tobacco workers, fresh from the Mexican state of Nayarit, are met and ministered to by a cadre of social and health workers, a federal agent from the Department of Labor, even a union organizer. In all, they spend almost four hours filling out paperwork, watching movies about how to avoid pesticide sickness and getting a set of no-nonsense rules (if you fight, you're fired; don't use the fire extinguisher to cool your beer) from the North Carolina Growers Association, the organization that brought them from Mexico. They are then driven to farms scattered across the state, where they will spend the summer months picking tobacco before heading back to Mexico.

The fragile Senate bill rests on three pillars: legalization of illegal residents, tighter border controls and the creation of a new guest-worker program that would grant up to 200,000 two-year visas annually. North Carolina, which imports more legal farmworkers than any other state, offers an idea of how the guest-worker proposal might look in action. During the past growing season, I canvassed the state, from the Christmas-tree farms in the western mountains to the crab plants on the eastern shore, and found a guest-worker program that is orderly, rational, legal--and almost completely unworkable as it currently exists.

"The system is collapsing from within," is how Stan Eury, director of the North Carolina Growers Association, puts it. He had 10,000 workers in 2000 but only 6,400 this year. Employers complain about the spiraling costs of wages, transportation, government fees and housing. Activists worry about exploitation. Economists say guest-worker programs may look like a flexible solution to the nation's seasonal agricultural needs, but they inevitably grow rigid under a tangle of red tape.

By definition, guest workers are tremendously vulnerable. And of all the steps in the process, none is more ripe for abuse than the recruiting of workers back in their home countries. Baldemar Velasquez, whose Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) has been the union representing Eury's workers since 2004, says Eury recruits cleanly. But freelance agents who work with other recruiters and employers are not nearly so scrupulous. Peasants, lured at times by false promises about what they can earn, are being charged as much as $2,000 to get on recruiters' lists for U.S. positions. If the Senate plan does tighten the border and expand the guest-worker program, says Velasquez, then the money that once went to human smugglers at the border will simply be redirected to criminal gangs inside Mexico who prey on the guest-worker-recruiting process.

Those gangs may have already claimed one of Velasquez's own. Santiago Rafael Cruz, 29, who had worked for FLOC in Ohio before getting a job with the union in Mexico, was discovered bound and tortured to death in its Monterrey offices, not far from the U.S. consulate, on April 9. The crime is still unsolved, but the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has recommended increased security measures for all FLOC workers in Mexico.

Back in North Carolina, the tobacco farmers are fighting a very different enemy: U.S. bureaucracy. The Senate plan has some provisions designed to cut through the reams of paperwork. But the U.S. consulates in Mexico, which have to interview and approve each worker before every season, are already swamped. Last June the Department of State, in an effort to speed up visa processing, began to outsource the appointment scheduling to the Computer Sciences Corp., a FORTUNE 500 company that handles everything from IT to fighting wars for the U.S. government around the world. According to Eury, the outsourcing actually made the system worse for his farmers. Their would-be workers were assigned late, says Eury, and sent to interviews at consulates scattered around Mexico, delaying their arrival in the U.S. "We've had to beat on all the people in the process to get things moving," Eury says. "I don't see anything in the Senate bill that fixes that."

Scheduling snafus may seem trifling, but they can devastate farmers. Crops rotted on the vine across the U.S. in a ripple effect from last year's slight uptick in immigration enforcement; imagine what a wholesale move to a perennially backlogged system could bring. David Card, a labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley, says guest-worker programs are simply too stiff to fit with the dynamic U.S. market, both inside and outside agriculture. "Our strength is that our economy is fluid," he says. "If we need labor all of a sudden in New Orleans, the workers just show up. Once you rely on a guest- worker program, you have a huge amount of reliance on government bureaucracy."

Earl Deal's Smokey Holler Tree Farm in western North Carolina won the arboreal equivalent of American Idol in 2005 when one of its Fraser firs was chosen as the White House Christmas tree. Many of Deal's guest workers come back year after year. In turn, they are given decent housing and a legal way to earn a good wage. But when I visited them last year, many were jealous of the one worker at the farm who said he was in the U.S. illegally (like most other employers, Deal is simply unable to tell a good set of forged documents from the real thing). Why would legal workers be jealous of illegals? Because illegals can move freely. He's "like a bird," one of the guest workers told me quite earnestly. "He can move anywhere he wants." Others were also jealous, ironically, of an illegal's ability to set down roots in the U.S. The Senate plan provides the outlines of a path to citizenship for guest workers, but it first requires most of them to navigate a challenging schedule: two years in the U.S., followed by one year back home, then two more years in the U.S., one back home and so on. After eight years, they would get to stand in line for a green card.

The populist wing of the Democratic Party made two vigorous attacks on the guest-worker provision in the Senate bill, succeeding in cutting in half the annual allotment of workers. The anxieties of these Democrats are driven in part by the fact that the main area of expansion in the proposed bill would be for guest workers outside agriculture--in the service sector, in construction, in factories. By law, any guest-worker position has to be offered to Americans first, but the fear is that a flood of guest workers would drive down salaries in those industries, as they already have in farming.

The truth about whether these workers really endanger traditional American jobs is a bit more complicated, though. For many factories, guest workers can do little more than delay the inevitable shutdown that comes from dying demand or global competition. In the quiet shore town of Oriental, N.C., for instance, the Garland Fulcher Seafood Co. turned to guest workers after locals stopped applying for jobs as pickers, who are given the cruelly repetitive task of prying blue-crab meat out of the shell. But the company is now out of the crab-picking business altogether: not even a guest-worker program could save it from the plunging crab market. Even though it's situated near a rich and storied crab fishery, Garland Fulcher's only business now is repackaging and distributing cheaper foreign crabmeat.

Garland Fulcher's experience proves guest-worker programs don't necessarily keep Mexicans from settling here illegally. More than 10% of the company's 2006 workforce took off to live in the U.S. without returning home to Mexico. "If you want to talk about illegals," says Michelle Noevere, who worked in Garland Fulcher's front office last year, "there's the border, and then there's this foot in the door called a guest-worker program."

So what's the solution? One clue can be found in the failed amnesty of 1986, widely viewed as the genesis of the current crisis. The moment newly legalized farmworkers realized they had better options, they left for the cities instead of staying in low-paying agriculture jobs. Their exodus from the fields opened the door to an even larger wave of illegal immigration. And that raises the question, Will American agriculture ever pay enough to attract American citizens rather than just illegals? If it did, the newly legalized millions who are currently working in the fields might be inclined to stay there. But paying living wages for farmwork would, of course, require the rest of us to pay a lot more for food, become much more protectionist or both. If the country isn't ready to take those steps, here's an apostasy being whispered by some economists: get rid of large-scale agriculture altogether. England did it and is content to buy the bulk of its food from foreign producers. Less food security, perhaps, but also less need for guest workers. It's a difficult discussion in the U.S., a country that has become addicted to cheap labor. But one thing is certain in North Carolina: the immigration solution of the future isn't even working today.