H.R. 1603, which is better known as the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, passed the House in March 2021 with overwhelming Democratic support and a handful of Republican votes. It stalled in the Senate, however, amid rancor over its provision to create a path to legal permanent residency — and eventually citizenship — for undocumented farmworkers already in this country. In the final weeks of 2022, many are hopeful that the bill will finally make its way to the Senate.
The American Farm Bureau opposes a provision of the bill that allows farmworkers to sue employers when conditions of employment are not met. Still, the desperation of farm owners, especially those in livestock and dairy agriculture in the West and Midwest, has pushed the Bureau toward neutrality to achieve passage of the bill.
Surprisingly, the United Farm Workers (UFW) — the legendary farm labor union started by Cesar Chavez — is the most vocal supporter of the bill. Its position is a stunning reversal of the UFW’s historic opposition to guest worker programs, which the union previously saw as exploitative of workers. Indeed, the UFW’s position today threatens to undo many of the advances the labor union fought hard to win decades ago.
When Chavez began organizing farm laborers in the 1960s, he understood that the Bracero Program (1942-1964), which was the largest guest worker program in U.S. history, had created an unequal playing field for workers vis-a-vis their employers. Like his labor organizing predecessor, Ernesto Galarza, Chavez made it a priority to eliminate the program before starting a union — something Chavez and his followers achieved in 1962. During the 22-year history of the program, farm owners often held threats of deportation or nonrenewal of contracts over the braceros’ heads if they dared to question the conditions of their employment.
For example, in a 2004 interview, a Mexican farmworker who had worked under the program shared a tale of sacrifice and discrimination. His experience of inadequate living facilities and unreliable and insufficient pay contrasted sharply with official claims on both sides of the border that workers had been treated like heroes who “saved the crops” during a time of war.
In his opinion, “Era abuso mas bien de derechos humanos,” or “it was more an abuse of human rights.” His account confirmed what many Americans eventually saw on their televisions in Edward R. Murrow’s CBS documentary, “Harvest of Shame,” in 1960, an exposé that helped lead the way to the Bracero program’s demise less than four years later. By 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson found it so distasteful to a conscientious public that he could no longer defend it.
But even after the Bracero program was terminated, guest workers continued to trickle in through a little-known visa program, H-2, born in 1952 as a part of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The original program limited guest workers to seasonal harvests of sugar cane in Florida and apples in New England.
By 1986, Congress divided the program into H-2B (nonagricultural) and H-2A (agricultural) workers as part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). IRCA expanded the potential for more seasonal agricultural labor contracts without an enforcement mechanism, leading to a black market for visa documents and conditions that Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) called “the closest thing [he’s] ever seen to slavery.”
Meanwhile, undocumented immigration kept farm owners’ dependence on H-2A workers low over the next two decades, while eroding the strength of unions like the UFW that prioritized citizen workers or abandoned organizing altogether for appeals to donors.
The collapse of the U.S. economy in 2008 slowed undocumented migration and remade the agricultural political landscape without most Americans noticing. The scarcity of workers stoked farm owners’ anxiety, and they increasingly turned to H-2A workers, tripling their numbers over the past decade, especially during the pandemic.
Today, H-2A workers constitute about 11 percent of the seasonal labor, but if the pending legislation is passed by the Senate during the current lame-duck session, their numbers could grow to levels not seen since the height of the Bracero Program in 1956 when 445,197 Mexican men entered this country to harvest crops.
The UFW has adjusted its tactics and message over the past decade as well. A union once committed to reaching 100,000 members in the 1970s has now dwindled to 4,332 active members concentrated in California. This total is a far cry from the estimated 2.5 million farmworkers in our nation today. It is far less, too, than the 300,000 guest workers among them.
In 2016, the UFW spearheaded the creation of the nonprofit farm labor recruitment agency Cierto to arrange for the importation of workers from Mexico. The union cites its participation in the Equitable Food Initiative — a collaboration with businesses such as Costco to bring “social responsibility” to the global food chain — as a motivation for its shift in focus. With former UFW president Arturo Rodriguez serving as its treasurer, current UFW President Teresa Romero as secretary and former UFW-board member Erik Nicholson as its president, Cierto promised to “remedy abuses of guest workers.”
In the years since its creation, Cierto arguably has done more than any organization to lay the groundwork for the proposed expansion of the guest worker program now pending under the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. Since relinquishing the presidency of the UFW, Rodriguez has drawn on the its credibility with the Democratic Party and influence within President Biden’s administration through his daughter, Julia Chavez Rodriguez, to shape agricultural policy and secure grants from the USDA and USAID to increase the number of H-2A farmworkers from Mexico and Guatemala. In 2021, Cierto received $800,000 from the Walmart Foundation to expand the guest worker program in Washington state, promising to create a scalable model for the nation’s agricultural workforce.
Neither Romero nor Rodriguez seems to be troubled by what the increase of guest workers portends for the bargaining power of current farmworkers. Romero told David Bacon in 2018 that the future of the UFW lies in working with former nemeses like lettuce grower D’Arrigo Brothers in Salinas, Calif. Such work, she admits, includes giving D’Arrigo the ability to hire 200 H-2A visa holders even though the presence of guest workers “scares” the 1,500 resident farmworkers working alongside of them. As she sees it, guest workers will be here anyway, so why not facilitate their “clean recruitment?”
While the UFW has focused more of its power to recruiting workers from abroad, many other farmworker organizations have offered an alternative vision for farmworker empowerment and continue to place stock in organizing them regardless of their legal status. Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), Migrant Justice, Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA), Poder Campesina and Familias Unidas por la Justicia (FUJ) have lined up against the expansion of H-2A — even with the promise of citizenship present in the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. As many organizers have observed, farmworkers are likely to toil for 10 years before achieving the elusive goal of U.S. citizenship in our broken immigration system.
These organizations have already witnessed the consequences to their bargaining power by having guest workers among the farm workforce now. During the pandemic, President Donald Trump declared all farmworkers “essential workers,” forced them back to the fields and bunkhouses and froze their wages to hold down food prices. Labor organizations had no say over these conditions, even though they tried. The Biden administration has also supported the right of the government to set wages for farmworkers to suppress rising labor costs for farm owners. Such provisions are not tolerated in other industries and will almost certainly disempower workers and the unions that represent them.
The debate around today’s Farm Workforce Modernization Act cannot be short-circuited by the politics of the moment or the promise of a newly opened, yet still winding road to citizenship for immigrants. It certainly should not be had without a keen understanding of the past, or without listening to farm labor organizers who speak to workers, remain committed to adding members and offer creative options for achieving justice in our food system. Without them, we run the risk of reinstituting a kind of indentured servitude we haven’t seen since the early 1960s.