THE DESERT SUN (California)

May 9, 2006

Guest worker programs have checkered history

Nearly 65 years ago, the Emergency Labor Program created a guest worker agreement between the U.S. and Mexican governments to fill the worker shortage World War II created in the agriculture and railroad industries.

The guest worker program the Senate has proposed is a bad sequel to what was dubbed the bracero program, a local immigration expert says.

"It's a bracero program II; that's what it is," said Armando Navarro, a political science professor at the University of California, Riverside.

"The economy of this country has always been based on having exploitable labor," he said. "The guest worker program is not a solution in itself."

Riverside County has about 233,000 undocumented residents. While it's unknown how many live in the Coachella Valley, the region's agriculture and tourism industries depend on the labor - legal or not.

"The bracero program was because of the war," said Navarro, coordinator of the National Allicance of Human Rights, the group that orchestrated the 500,000-person protest in Los Angeles in March. "Now it's because of pure avarice."

'A foot in the door'

While some immigration experts argue legislators should abandon a bracero-esque guest worker program, some braceros say otherwise.

Francisco Corral-Herrera performed back-breaking work in California fields, loading tomatoes for 70 cents an hour in 1957.

Now a U.S. citizen, he's been on disability for more than 20 years.

"It worked very good," the 67-year-old Desert Hot Springs resident said of the bracero program.

But the work, he added, was "mucho hard."

The bracero program gave Honorio Chavez Ramos - who died in 1989 - the opportunity to own his own home and put his children through school, his wife, Constancia, said.

"He came for a better life," Ramos' son, Calli, said.

"He came, not for the money, but for a foot in the door."

Constancia Ramos favors a guest worker program, even though the couple endured freezing and hungry nights without heat and with little food in the years her husband worked as a bracero.

Re-creating a guest worker program now, she said in Spanish, would be better than undocumented immigrants risking the uncertain dangers of crossing the river or desert illegally.

Exploitable labor

Working in the U.S. legally doesn't mean the braceros were treated fairly - then or now.

Historically, abuses riddled the bracero program - from poor and unsafe working conditions to exploitable low wages. But growers embraced the program, successfully lobbying Congress to extend the program for 22 years.

Legislators failed to renew the program in 1963 under pressure from labor unions such as the United Farm Workers, who viewed immigrant workers as strike breakers.

"The program started out well-intended, but it became something else," said Juan Luján, a Mexican historian.

"For better or for worse, it became a dependable form of exploitable labor for the agribusiness.

"The growers loved it; they made out like bandits."

Luján is the dean of off-campus programs for College of the Desert and an adjunct Mexican history professor at California State University, San Bernardino.

More than 5 million braceros labored in the fields and railroads during the years of the program.

Luz Maria Ayala, whose nonprofit organization Todec Legal Center in Perris works with braceros, estimated that about 25,000 braceros live in Riverside County today.

Some argue the braceros continue to be exploited, this time at the hands of the Mexican government, which can't find savings from braceros' paychecks that it deposited in its government-run banks.

The U.S. withheld 10 percent of all earnings to encourage the more than 5 million braceros to return to Mexico when the program ended.

Corral-Herrera hasn't seen a dime from his mandatory savings account - he doubts he ever will.

A 2001 lawsuit on appeal in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals seeks an undisclosed amount.

"If the case is tried and won, Mexico could be ordered to pay the amounts owed to the braceros," said Bill Lee, a San Francisco attorney representing the braceros in the lawsuit.

Those amounts, Lee said, will be determined in the discovery phase of the lawsuit. Lee, however, told the San Francisco Chronicle two years ago that a Mexican government commission estimated the amount owed, including interest, at $500 million.

"I'm very hurt with the government because they have the list of all the braceros," Garcia said.

Building roots

Navarro calls the immigration reform proposals "a safety valve."

While others want a guest worker program or amnesty or both, Navarro hopes Congress won't reach an agreement. He wants something more.

"The solution is systemic structure change in the U.S. and Latin America," he said.

Congressional proposals, Navarro said, address the immediacy of the problem, not the root. The U.S. needs cheap labor. Mexico needs jobs. Immigration experts call it "the push-pull factor." Until both countries address this, immigration will remain problematic.