Importing Farm Workers: From Bracero to H-2A

Importing Farm Workers: From Bracero to H-2A

As World War II intensified, the need to produce food for the troops helped overcome public opposition to Mexican agricultural guest workers. The Mexican government was also initially reluctant to allow its citizens to work in U.S. agriculture, but the Mexican Labor Program—commonly known as the “Bracero Program”—became the official Mexican contribution to the war effort.⁴

The Bracero Program operated from 1942 to 1964. Between 1 million and 2 million Mexican agricultural workers participated in the program, some going back and forth across the border several times for a total of 4.5 million admissions of workers to the United States. During the war years, the program required the U.S. Department of Agriculture to provide the Mexican workers with the same safety and health protections as U.S. agricultural workers. Employers had to pay migrant workers the prevailing wage so as not to undercut domestic farm worker wages. Other worker protections were also included. But the U.S. and Mexican governments failed to comply with key parts of the agreement—at the expense of Mexican workers.⁵ During the 1950s, the effect of the Bracero Program was to suppress farm worker wages.

Importing Farm Workers: From Bracero to H-2A

Although the program was initially slated to end after World War II, U.S. growers used their political clout to advocate for the program’s continuation, claiming that eliminating it would cause labor shortages and end in disaster for U.S. agriculture.⁶ The program eventually ended in 1964, after 22 years, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and under pressure from organized labor, the U.S. Catholic Church, and Mexican-American organizations that denounced exploitation and abuse within the program.⁷

Growers’ predictions of catastrophe did not come to pass. The end of the Bracero Program brought changes that increased efficiency and improved working conditions. Agricultural economist Philip Martin explains that in lieu of cheap and abundant labor, growers began to use modern human resource methods to ensure that farm workers were deployed more efficiently. The most effective workers on each crop were identified and assigned to work in their areas of expertise, which led to more consistent production. Both workers and growers benefited financially from the increase in productivity.⁸ Martin describes the post-Bracero era as the “golden age” for farm workers.

The end of the Bracero Program also meant increased mechanization. An industry that relied on immigrant labor had to adapt when the flow of legal immigrant workers stopped. Martin explains what happened using the example of tomatoes produced for sauces and other processed foods. These process-grade tomatoes were harvested by Bracero workers during the early 1960s. Within a few years of the program’s end, harvesting was mechanized, the industry expanded, and tomato prices decreased.⁹

Farm workers became increasingly unionized in the late 1960s and the 1970s, since growers could no longer prevent labor strikes by threatening to replace striking workers with Mexican participants in the Bracero Program. From the end of the program in the mid-1960s through the 1970s, most farm workers were U.S. citizens. In 1965, farm labor leaders such as César Chávez organized boycotts of goods produced by growers that did not cooperate with farm worker organizations.  Most growers were not directly affected by farm worker unions, but many raised their wage rates to discourage unionization; during the 1970s, farm worker pay was raised well above the federal minimum wage.¹⁰

But the golden age didn’t last. Beginning in the early 1980s, economic crises in Mexico caused a surge in immigrant farm workers in the United States. The H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program was created in 1986, partly as a response to the increasing numbers of unauthorized farm workers. Today, H-2A remains the only legal means of employing foreign agricultural workers. But it is unpopular with both growers and farm worker advocates. Growers say it is too cumbersome to meet the needs of seasonal agriculture, while advocates say that its worker-protection provisions are not enforced effectively.

In theory, the H-2A program places no numerical limit on guest workers. In practice, about 100,000 long-season farm jobs—10 percent of all such jobs—are filled through the program.¹¹ H-2A has been growing in recent years; more growers are using this legal channel in response to the pressure created by more aggressive immigration enforcement.