This week, I arrived in Mexico City and began working with el Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM). CDM is a binational organization that provides free legal services to migrant workers in the United States, focusing mostly on labor protections. 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 US employer. More than 80% of these H-2 visa recipients are from Mexico and significantly more non-US residents work in the United States without these temporary work visas. Although CDM has become the most prominent legal service and advocacy group for H-2 visa workers, it serves all migrant workers regardless of legal documents and nationality. CDM has offices in both Mexico and the United States in order to effectively reach as many workers both where they are working and where they live. 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. Despite the wide range of work, H-2 visa workers, and especially undocumented workers, face an extreme level of exploitation and abuse. My first week with CDM taught me not only about what can be done to reduce this abuse, but also that it is an inherent and key component of the current migrant work system and the US economy by extension. 

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 fearing 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 raking in profits while preventing their workers from organizing or even making complaints against them. To this day, the H-2 visa program leaves workers’ legal statuses in the US in the hands of their employers. When employers tell their workers that they will have them deported, it is both a threat and the most clear explanation of the legal reality of their visas. CDM does not shy away from the fact that the H-2 visa program continues the legacy of American slavery and debt peonage. 

Over this first week, I received multiple crash courses in employment law, agricultural regulation, immigration law, and more. I was also able to shadow the CDM attorneys as they responded to the intake lines and spent a lot of time working with the outreach team to prepare for upcoming know your rights trainings that they are hosting with migrant workers.