My primary problem with the “guest worker” component of the proposed immigration bill was the expectation that people simply return to their birth countries after building lives in this one. It’s also worth noting, though, that the current guest worker program is far from a smashing success. A recent report from the Seattle Weekly is only the latest in a number of stories of guest workers who follow the promise of decent work only to find abusive conditions.
Sarah Stuteville and Alex Stonehill relate the story of Wisit Kampilo, one of 194 Thai workers who are now suing the contractor, Global Horizons.
Like 120,000 other "unskilled" laborers temporarily brought into this country under H-2A (for agriculture) and H-2B (for other jobs) visas each year, Kampilo was romanced by the guest worker program, which provides a flexible, legalized foreign workforce to fill tough jobs that domestic workers don't seem to want. The program has proved popular: A recent New York Times/CBS News poll reported that 66 percent of the population supports an expanded national guest worker program.
"The recruiter said if you work hard, you can make $8.50 an hour. They told us we would have 28 months of work in America," says Kampilo, recalling the promises made by a Thai recruiter who visited the village of Lampang in 2004 on behalf of a California-based labor contracting company called Global Horizons. Kampilo, who at the time was making about $50 a month farming rice, did the math and decided to go to the U.S.
But there was a catch: The recruiter, working for a Thai company contracted by Global Horizons, demanded an $11,000 fee from Kampilo, saying that the money would in part be put toward transportation and housing in the U.S. once he arrived there. The workers would also be expected to pay an additional $3,000 fee when they began their second year of work.
It was a daunting sum to a Thai farmer, but Kampilo figured he would gross almost $40,000 over the course of the contract. To raise the fee, he and his family decided to mortgage his father's land and home. With the money he thought would eventually come to him, Kampilo hoped to pay back the loan, buy some land, and send his two sons to school.
Three years later, that land is still in hock, with monthly interest payments of $150 bearing down on his family back in Lampang. While in the States, Kampilo claims he was paid only $7 an hour and lived in substandard conditions, with his documents confiscated and movements strictly controlled.
Kampilo says that after just four months—at which point he had earned $4,500—Global Horizons representatives announced that the apple work had dried up and that he and his fellow guest workers would be sent to Hawaii, where there was purportedly another harvest. But the Thai workers were only ferried 15 miles up the interstate to a Yakima motel room before the news was broken that some of them, including Kampilo, would be sent back to Thailand for what was referred to as "a visit."
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While many supporters of temporary visa programs hope that a legal way to bring foreigners into the country will prevent the abuses commonly experienced by undocumented laborers, others argue that, in a climate where even legal workers such as Garcia are unprotected, guest workers will be even more defenseless.
Laws protecting H-2A workers in the current program do exist, and amount to a relatively progressive bill of rights (especially compared to slack protections for nonagricultural H-2B workers). H-2A workers are guaranteed at least three-fourths of a 40-hour week, free housing, workers' comp, reimbursement of travel costs, and protection under the same health and safety regulations as other workers. But the problem, according to many advocates, isn't what exists on paper—but that it only exists on paper.
Much of what Kampilo and his fellow Thai workers allegedly suffered was illegal, such as inadequate housing, forced isolation, insufficient hours of work, and unlawful deduction of income tax. But there were no realistic means for workers to report the abuses and have them investigated without fleeing the situation entirely, as Kampilo did. Were it not for an informational card given to him by a legal-aid firm soon after his arrival in the U.S., he may have never realized he had any means by which to lodge a complaint at all.
"The protections that do exist under H-2A aren't enforced and are unenforceable," says the Southern Poverty Law Center's Bauer, who worries that the imbalance of power between workers and employers in the H-2A program ensures abuse. "The situation now requires that someone make a complaint about how guest workers are being treated before anyone investigates. It is completely unreasonable to expect workers in these situations to know their rights and assert them. There are enormous obstacles to keep workers from doing that."
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Some of the worst abuses Kampilo suffered were due not to explicit violations of the law but instead to exploitation of the foggy expanses outside and between the laws. For instance, the recruiting fee that continues to financially squeeze Kampilo's family was imposed by a Thai company named AACO International Recruitment Company Ltd., which is beholden only to Thai law. Global Horizons, which subcontracted its guest worker recruiting in Thailand to AACO, says the company had a clean bill of health from both the U.S. and Thai governments, and claims it had no knowledge of such a fee and cannot be held responsible for corruption in other countries.
Kampilo also complains of having been promised a number of things verbally by recruiters and then signing contracts that were not in Thai. Global Horizons denies this, saying that all contracts were in Thai as well as English. But here again emerges a shadowy corner of the law, where it becomes difficult to prove that workers fully understand the contracts they are signing. What is more, Kampilo claims that upon his arrival in the United States, all of his paperwork and documents, including his passport, were taken by people working for Global Horizons.
"They said they would take care of them for me so I wouldn't lose them," says Kampilo, who relinquished the documents because he'd been asked to do so in past tours as a guest worker in Saudi Arabia and Taiwan and assumed that it was legal. Holding workers' documents is not illegal, as long as they can request them back at any time, but guest workers like Kampilo typically are not aware of such laws.
Some say that whether or not guest workers are admitted into the program should be contingent upon their understanding the nuances of certain regulations. But even if they are aware of the laws, labor advocates worry that guest workers may hesitate to speak up about violations to employers, upon whom they depend for their legal status in this country and who influence their prospects for future employment.
Absolute control over workers gets to the heart of the issue for many of the program's critics, a dynamic that can lead to extreme situations such as those allegedly experienced by Kampilo, who claims that his movements were surveyed and limited by people hired by Global Horizons—even outside of working hours. Kampilo says they were strongly discouraged from leaving their cramped house in Buena, a neglected community where abandoned, graffiti-laden buildings outnumber services. Occasionally they visited a lake directly across from their house to fish for food, but Kampilo says he and fellow workers felt they would get in trouble or jeopardize their employment if they disobeyed Global's request that they stay on the property.
"We weren't supposed to leave the house," says Kampilo. "We could go outside, but we had to stay nearby. They had other workers come and check on us, and they called all the time to make sure that we were there. If we stayed away too long, they said they would send us back. I think they were afraid we would find better work at other companies."
Accounts of disturbing practices crop up again and again in the guest worker testimonies compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, from Mexican tomato harvesters who were locked inside their trailer parks in Florida to Thais brought to New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina on cleanup crews, many of whom were housed in dilapidated hotels without potable water, guarded by a man with a gun, and not paid for their work.
The Associated Press tells the story of Kenny Jesus Zavala, one of several migrant workers brought from Mexico to Florida to pick organges. In the International Herald Tribune, the focus is on Worawut Khansamrit, another Thai worker who spent a month doing agricultural work in North Carolina before being moved to New Orleans to do debris removal for which he was never paid.
This is not the kind of system worth expanding.
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