This summer, I spent nine weeks in Mexico City working with Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM), a binational organization that provides free legal services to migrant workers in the United States. I was honored to support CDM’s mission of advancing dignified working conditions for migrant laborers across the U.S., in line with UN Sustainable Development Goal 8, which aims to “protect labor rights and promote safe and secure working environments for all workers, including migrant workers.” This incredible experience was made possible by the generous support of the Laidlaw Foundation, Colleen Dougherty at Georgetown’s Center for Research and Fellowships, and the migrant workers, lawyers, paralegals, and organizers I worked with at CDM. I am particularly grateful for the opportunity to contribute to CDM’s work protecting the rights and safety of migrant workers given the increasingly extreme violence that they face from the U.S. federal government. Moreover, my time speaking with migrant workers and experienced lawyers taught me about the expanding temporary work visa programs. Understanding these programs is crucial for grasping the cruelty of current immigration policies and how we can confront them.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of people receive H-2 visas from employers in the United States that legally permit them to work for a temporary period of time for one specified U.S. employer. Since migrant workers most commonly work in the agricultural industry, the H-2 visa program is divided into agricultural visas (H-2A) and non-agricultural visas (H-2B). Most H-2B visa recipients work in industries like landscaping, hotel facilities, seafood processing, and fair and carnival work. Across the wide range of industries, H-2 visa workers, and especially undocumented workers, face an extreme level of exploitation and abuse. This is by design, as the H-2 visa program initially developed as an east coast counterpart to the massive Bracero Program that brought millions of Mexican workers into the US during the middle of the 20th century. Specifically, the H-2 program began as a response to Florida sugar plantation owners’ fears that the New Deal government would regulate their structures of sharecropping and debt peonage that trapped and exploited Black workers. These plantation owners found that recruiting foreign workers allowed them to continue squeezing high profits from their workers while preventing them from organizing or even making complaints. To this day, the H-2 visa program leaves workers’ immigration statuses in the hands of their employers. When employers tell their workers that they will have them deported, it is both a threat and an honest explanation of the legal reality of their visas. For this reason, one of my supervisors at CDM described the current policies restricting legal immigration avenues while expanding temporary work programs as accelerating the “privatization of the immigration system.”
CDM confronts this systematic exploitation and abuse of migrant workers from many different angles, and I was able to assist almost all of their separate teams over the course of the summer. For the legal team’s ongoing cases, I helped with tasks like filing documents, writing memos regarding upcoming policy changes, and drafting FOIA requests. I also published articles on CDM’s website “Contratados” informing migrant workers about updates to their visas and offering a guide for bringing cases against their employers in small claims court. One of my favorite projects was creating and presenting two know your rights trainings regarding agricultural minimum wages and ending child farm labor during the monthly meetings of an amazing organization of migrant women farmworkers called La Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. I also participated in direct outreach in Mexico and even went to the U.S. consulate in Monterrey to give out legal resources and information while speaking with more than three hundred migrant workers waiting for their visas to be processed. Along with these projects, I spent the most time answering calls from migrant workers on the CDM phone lines.
Learning from and working with migrant workers during my time in Mexico this summer challenged me in many ways, especially since my supervisors gave me leadership over my projects aside from those related to their legal cases. Naturally, living in another country and working completely in Spanish was a very new experience. Despite the difficulties, my time with CDM left me motivated and dedicated to advancing worker power. I am proud of the work that I was able to do and especially the vital resources that I was able to spread, but I owe a great amount more to all of the people who bravely shared their life experiences with me and taught me so much that is beyond what I am capable of describing.