Agricultural ‘Guest Workers’ in WA Describe Their Lives and Ambitions

The majority of the 400,000 or so agricultural “guest workers” in the United States last year were Mexican men who left the border on chartered buses and rolled, almost nonstop, to American farms and orchards. The first worker I met — in Mattawa, Grant County, — was young and, according to Wendy Lopez, who manages the housing complex where he’d been dropped off a few hours earlier, here on his own. This was supposed to be his first big money-making day in America, but so far, things weren’t going well for him.

Wendy got on her phone to make an appointment for him at a mental health clinic. Away from home for the first time, she told me, he was overwhelmed by anxious thoughts and dark emotions. For now he stood in a hallway, looking at the floor.

Mattawa is in sage steppe desert country. The guest worker housing complex Wendy Lopez manages — built and operated by the Washington Growers League, a nonprofit association — was designed so that contingents of men can live in dormlike units, sharing sleeping quarters, bathrooms, elbow room and kitchens. Wendy led me into one that was empty due to disrepair, turned on the air conditioning and the lights in that order, then went out and soon came back with two men who’d agreed to be interviewed: Odilon, 50, and his son Víctor, 25, from the state of San Luis Potosi in Central Mexico.

We shook hands, then sat. Neither Odilon nor Víctor asked me why I wanted to interview them. I explained myself anyway, thinking I should. “People drive by you every day while you’re working,” I said — or something like that, with Wendy interpreting — “but they don’t know anything about you. Do you think it would be good for them to know some things about you? If you do, tell me what they are and I’ll write them down.”

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“Guest worker” is an oxymoron. Guests don’t work; to the contrary, hosts do. “Guest worker” is an odd way to refer to people who earn wages by crossing a border in two directions annually. Most come into the U.S. in early spring and leave in late fall.

There was a time — the Great Depression — when the United States didn’t need guest workers. There were enough impoverished people inside our own borders to do all the poorly paid agricultural work that needed doing until, in the early 1940s, millions of them left the country in uniform. At that point the U.S. turned to Mexico to meet its wartime farm labor needs, bringing people across the border on short-term work contracts. For several decades this arrangement went forward as the Bracero Program. Today it’s known as H-2A.

“H-2A worker” isn’t any clearer than “guest worker,” though, as a term pointing at a reality. “H-2A” is a visa category, like “B-2” for tourists. The United States offers four different “H” visas, all of which allow holders to work here for set durations. There is, for example, an H-1B visa often used for hiring in academia, medicine and technology, among other fields, and an H-2B for landscapers and construction workers. The people I interviewed hold H-2A visas, which allow them to come here for agricultural work. All were hired by labor contractors in Mexico and live here in housing provided by the orchardists who employ them. Some orchardists pay the Growers League or other contractors to provide housing; others provide it on private land.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, almost 36,000 H-2A positions were certified in Washington state for 2024. Washington accounts for more than 9% of H-2A visas nationally, and Washington employers are among the top 10 in the nation in H-2A hiring.

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Víctor didn’t say much. Every once in a while his father, Odilon, looked at him to see if he agreed about something, or wanted to corroborate, embellish or modify something, but mostly Víctor didn’t. Instead he sat patiently while his father talked.

Odilon is a stocky, broad-faced man whose close cropped black hair stands up like bristles. After we’d spent some time together calculating, I understood that in Mexico he makes about $600 a year doing construction work, and that Víctor makes about $400 doing, as Víctor himself put it while chuckling, a little of everything. Víctor is the oldest of six children, and some of them earn money too, and so does Víctor’s mother. In the end, the family of eight makes about $1,500 a year in Mexico. That didn’t make sense to me at first, because Odilon had said earlier that his family spends $100 a week on food alone, and when I did the math on that it seemed to say they could eat for only 15 weeks every year, assuming they spent all their money on food. I was explicating the financial mystery of this aloud when Víctor cut me off to say, “That’s why we come here.”

Odilon said he and Víctor have been coming to Mattawa as guest workers for the past six years on six-month contracts. He added that he has three daughters legally eligible to be guest workers, but since they were female, he explained, their chances of obtaining visas were slim. Among his family members, only he and Víctor come year after year for half-year stints of earning dollars. Together they bring home $30,000 annually, he said, and who would pass that up? [...]

After the Bracero guest worker program was discontinued in 1964 — largely due to pressure from labor unions — Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz tried to replace the 180,000 Mexican workers who would not be coming back for the 1965 farm season with American high school boys through a program he called the A-TEAM, which was an acronym for Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower.

It didn’t work. Wirtz was only able to recruit 3,300 young athletes. Some quit after a few days; others went on strike. As for the Braceros, a lot of them crossed the border in 1965 and returned to their American jobs. Farm work was done that season mostly by the same people who’d done it before, but now it was illegal for them to be here.

Bad policy often repeats itself. At a news conference last summer in Washington D.C., the federal government’s Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, pledged a 100% American workforce. “There are 34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program,” she said. “There are plenty of workers in America.”

Odilon and Víctor support seven people on the $30,000 they jointly make annually as H-2A workers. If the two of them were among Rollins’ able-bodied Americans on Medicaid, their family would be living far below the federal poverty line, which for them would be $47,340 a year.

You’re looking at a “FARMWORKERS WANTED” ad. Fifteen thousand dollars for six months. Yes or no? Take the job or not? Now pretend you’re Odilon and Víctor in Mexico looking at the same ad.

American food security depends on people who cross its southern border. H-2A visas exist so they don’t stay.

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Odilon and Víctor left, and in came Daniel, 31, a slight and gentle man who, while soft-spoken, isn’t reticent. Daniel, in fact, spoke unilaterally often, and extensively too, as if there were things that needed to be understood that I was failing to ask him about. [...]

We went over the numbers together: in Mexico, Daniel makes about $2,500 working as a lawyer each year. In the U.S., he makes another $8,000 picking fruit. He owns a house, but he and his family moved out after living there for only 15 days because, he said, “someone fired a gun at us.” He rents it out now, so there’s income from that, too.

I told Daniel that Americans would be surprised to hear that a Mexican lawyer comes to the United States every year to pick fruit for six months. It happens, he explained, because good-paying legal jobs in Mexico are hard to come by. Daniel has a degree and some experience but, in his words, “doesn’t know the right people.” He’d been coming to the U.S. to pick fruit for four years, and hoped that, if he did so for a few more, maybe between stints he would impress the right people and land a good paying law job at home.

Daniel said he’d agreed to be interviewed because he wanted to meet someone who had an important job. He wanted to talk about important things, he explained, with important people. What did he mean, I asked, by important people with important jobs? Lawyers, politicians, professors, journalists, people like that, he answered. He wanted to listen to how they spoke and ponder how their minds worked.

Daniel told me I should read his favorite book, “El Hombre Mediocre,” or “The Mediocre Man,” written in 1913 by an Argentine named José Ingenieros. It explained everything, he said ambiguously. Later I found a bad English translation. It’s philosophy of the loosely academic sort, written by a man influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson and by the 19th century English sociologist Herbert Spencer. “El Hombre Mediocre” begins this way: “When your visionary bow aims toward the stars and you unfold your wings toward such unreachable loftiness, eager to perfection and rebellious to mediocrity, you carry deep within, the mysterious spring of an Ideal.”

That was Daniel, it seemed to me — despite the mangled translation — in the throes of his life. [...]

H-2A is controversial. Some critics, advocating for an end to the program, believe there’s no point in tinkering with, modifying or reforming something that, in their opinion, is intractably unjust and inhumane at its core. Farmworker unions and labor advocates have compared it to slavery.

One problem is extortion. Odilon told me he sends home $15,000 during his stints of work in the U.S.; Daniel said he sends home $8,000. Given that there are hundreds of thousands of Mexican men in the United States each year on H-2A visas, it’s safe to assume that billions of dollars leave the American economy annually and end up in Mexico as personal earnings. Bad things can happen when money moves like that. For instance, labor recruiters who arrange for H-2A visas — and are paid for their services by American employers — might demand fees from people like Odilon and Daniel, whose accumulated dollars make them vulnerable generally. (That’s why they’re referred to in this story only by their first names.) [...]

Meanwhile, there’s broad support in government and agribusiness for the H-2 program. Its growth, supporters argue, would allow for the deportation of workers here illegally while insuring a reliable and stable workforce. This, though, is just their short-term solution. “Ultimately,” Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said last July, “the answer on this is automation.”

by David Gutterson, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Images: Ivy Ceballo/The Seattle Times