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Even as President Donald Trump wages an unprecedented deportation campaign against immigrant workers, he remains committed to exploiting their labor under an oppressive work visa program.
During an April 10 Cabinet meeting, Trump said that he is open to allowing undocumented workers to return to the United States for short periods of time to work seasonal jobs in the hospitality and agriculture industries.
“We’re going to work with people so that if they go out in a nice way, go back to their country, we’re going to work with them right from the beginning on trying to get them back in legally,” Trump said, according to a Bloomberg report.
Trump was referring to the H-2A and H-2B visa "guestworker" programs. In reality, we don't treat these workers like guests, we treat them more like indentured servants.
Here is a quick explainer.
The H-2 visa program was established in the 1950s, and then in 1986 it was split into two: The H-2A visa for agricultural workers and the H-2B visa for non-agricultural workers, such as housekeepers and landscapers.
In theory, this program allowed for workers to temporarily come into the United States to fill jobs that otherwise would remain vacant and make better wages than they otherwise would in their home country.
In practice, the indentured worker programs drive down wages and working conditions of U.S. workers and can deprive foreign workers of economic bargaining power and the power to enforce any labor law against their employer. Since the visa is tied to their specific employer, any complaint or insistence on their right to wages or working conditions can -- and often does -- result in the employer sending the worker back.
In some instances, it leads to workers being forced to work in “slavery-like conditions.”
A 2021 federal investigation in Georgia found that H-2A workers were being forced to “dig onions with their bare hands while being severely underpaid and threatened with violence and deportation,” according to a NPR report.
These programs also allow employers to actually displace U.S. workers by misclassifying jobs in order to pay drastically lower H-2B wages in lieu of better-paying prevailing wage rates.
What Trump is proposing is nothing less than a path to further exploitation of undocumented immigrant workers and a further attack on working Americans at the behest of the president’s billionaire oligarch allies.
It cannot be allowed to stand. All workers deserve better. |
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In Solidarity, Lorena Gonzalez |
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