SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE May 30, 2006
Ex-braceros leery of guest worker plan
Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer
Picking beets, cherries and cotton and shoveling manure on farms across the United States as a Mexican guest worker in the 1940s and 1950s, Cecilio Santillana was glad to earn a few dollars a day. He didn't complain about living in horse stalls without bathrooms or doing stoop work for 12 hours a day without breaks for fear he would be sent back to Chihuahua and lose the steady work that allowed him to support his family in Mexico. But the 78-year-old San Jose man opposes a temporary worker proposal in the immigration bill the Senate passed last week. "I'm against it, because they may do to the new workers what they did to us," he said. "We suffered a lot." Some immigrant advocates say the new plan remedies shortcomings of the old Bracero Program, through which the United States recruited Mexican workers to toil at 4.5 million mostly agricultural jobs from 1942 to 1964. And they say it's a crucial alternative to the current state of affairs where migrant workers risk their lives crossing the border illegally. But others say the new arrangement probably will replicate the pitfalls of the Bracero Program and two present-day guest worker programs. They also fear new worker protections in the Senate bill will vanish when lawmakers seek to reconcile the legislation with the enforcement-only bill the House passed in December. Immigration foes, meanwhile, criticize the guest worker plan more broadly. They say the United States already has enough people to fill its low-skilled jobs and warn that a guest worker program will only draw new waves of immigration. The Bracero Program -- named for men who work with their arms, brazos in Spanish -- was this country's first large-scale guest worker arrangement and is the prototype to which others are compared. In spite of the low pay, poor living conditions and often bullying crew bosses, Santillana said the Bracero Program was good for him. He's proud, too, that after 15 years he became a permanent U.S. resident with the help of an employer who agreed to fill out the papers. He has since become a citizen. But he shakes his head in consternation when he talks about the long struggle waged by aging braceros like him to recoup wages the government withheld more than half a century ago. In the early years of the Bracero Program, 10 percent of workers' wages was withheld to be deposited in savings accounts they could claim when they returned to Mexico. Somewhere between the payroll deductions and bank transfers, the money vanished. In the United States, a class-action lawsuit filed four years ago on behalf of defrauded braceros is inching through the federal courts; last year, the Mexican government announced it would pay roughly $3,800 to former braceros who could prove their claim to the deducted pay. Former braceros dismiss the one-time payments as inadequate. From the standpoint of growers and consumers, the program was a success, said Philip Martin, an agricultural economist at UC Davis. "It's how California got to replace New Jersey as the 'Garden State,' " said Martin. "Crops got picked. Wages didn't rise and choke off expansion. It helped parts of the California economy to expand without costs and prices rising rapidly." But Martin and others said a surplus of braceros depressed wages for everyone, and braceros were sometimes used to break strikes by U.S. laborers. On paper, the program protected both Mexican and U.S. workers, requiring employers to certify that domestic labor could not be found and assuring that guest workers be paid the prevailing wage. In reality, immigration and labor analysts said, enforcement was minimal and the guest workers became dependent on sometimes abusive employers. "It's important to have protections written into the law, but ... having them in law is not a guarantee that they will be implemented and enforced," said Deborah Meyers, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute who has studied temporary worker programs. "Historically, enforcement has been very weak." The temporary worker program the Senate approved Thursday would admit up to 200,000 foreign workers a year to take low-skilled jobs for up to six years that U.S. employers attest they cannot fill. Unlike the existing "H2A" and "H2B" programs for low-skilled workers, the new bill would allow temporary workers to change jobs and apply to become legal permanent U.S. residents, two provisions labor advocates said were key. Eliseo Medina, international executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, listened as a child to his father describe his sense of powerlessness in the face of hard-driving bracero bosses. And as a young labor organizer in the 1970s, Medina saw similar treatment of Jamaican sugar cane cutters in Florida; men who spoke up for themselves were summarily shipped home. But Medina supports the guest worker program in the Senate bill -- dubbed H2C. He's convinced that the new provisions and an expanded right to organize will protect workers in a way the old system did not. He said reform that allows foreign workers to come to the United States legally and legalizes workers already here will improve conditions for all workers. "What undermines worker standards is having different sets of workers, one with rights and one without," he said. "That's the current situation with undocumented workers now." Other labor advocates are not sure. Bruce Goldstein, director of Farmworker Justice, said the United States should allow more immigrants to work here permanently. "We do need a legal avenue for people to enter the country to work, to reduce the illegal flow and people dying in the desert," he said. "The question is, what kind of legal status?" As an example of present day abuses, Goldstein cited the case of Los Angeles-based Global Horizons, which was recently fined $230,000 by the state of Washington for mistreating temporary laborers brought in on H2A visas from Thailand. Subcontractors, said Goldstein, often charge high fees to match workers with jobs so that, by the time they reach the United States, the guest workers are deeply in debt and desperate. Goldstein worries that members of Congress negotiating a compromise between the two pending bills will eliminate measures such as the option of applying for a green card and eventual citizenship. Even in the Senate, some members preferred a program that would bar guest workers from getting on a path to U.S. citizenship. "Temporary must mean temporary," Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., emphasized in an unsuccessful push earlier this month for an amendment to prevent guest workers from applying for legal permanent residence. "We must think ahead to a day when the economy might not be as strong and robust as it is today, and we're left with millions of what will be unemployed foreign workers. Our first responsibility is to the American people and the American economy." Others oppose all guest worker plans on the theory that any version will attract too many more immigrants. "A guest implies someone who's here temporarily, and they never are," said John Keeley, a spokesman for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., a think tank that favors restricting both legal and illegal immigration. The vast majority of braceros actually did return to Mexico when their jobs here ended, said Meyers, of the Migration Policy Institute, though a handful, like Santillana and his friend Ernesto Aguilar, 71, put down roots. Aguilar said he never would have been able to educate all of his seven children in Mexico if he hadn't worked as a bracero. But he thinks any new program needs to ensure that workers receive decent food and housing and are paid fairly. Although he grew up a peasant in Oaxaca, he was taken aback by the living conditions he encountered picking cotton in Texas in the 1950s, where workers were crammed into claustrophobic bunkrooms and had to cook their tortillas over outdoor fire pits. "I was used to living in poverty, but it was worse than I thought," he said. "We were afraid to speak up. They threatened us that if we complained, they would take our working papers and send us home." Harvesting melons in Arizona a couple of years later, Aguilar noticed that his weekly earnings never added up given the number of hours he worked. The problem was remedied when a federal inspector made a rare visit. Years later, as a construction laborer in San Jose with a green card, he learned from his union that workers are entitled to a 15-minute break each morning and afternoon, and to overtime pay when they put in long hours. Juan Valentin, a bracero who returned and settled in Richmond, said he didn't know money was deducted from his paycheck during the years he picked cotton and oranges in California's Imperial Valley and in Arizona. "I never received any money when I went back to Mexico," he told The Chronicle in 2003. "No one did." Valentin died last year at age 81, without collecting any of the wages he realized must have been withheld from his pay, said his daughter-in-law, Yolanda Valentin. Goldstein said the mistakes of half a century ago should serve as a lesson. "The U.S. government needs to start enforcing the labor rights of guest workers," he said. "It didn't under the Bracero Program, and it doesn't today. As long as these people hold this nonimmigrant temporary status, the government doesn't have the political will to enforce the law vigorously."
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