FLOC works on guest worker recruitment, education, and training issues on the Mexican side of the border—but it doesn’t address the impact of the H-2A program on the Mexican communities that send these workers. In fact, this is one of the most under-analyzed parts of the H-2A program. It is rare for anyone, including the Mexican government, to raise the concerns of sending communities.
The reasons Mexicans leave home to become farm workers in the United States are often not part of this or most other discussions of immigration reform.
But there are the beginnings of a framework that envisions the H-2A program as a way to benefit both growers in the United States and sending communities in Mexico. The bi-national Independent Agricultural Workers’ Center (CITA by its Spanish acronym) is pioneering such a model; it plans to integrate the H-2A program with Mexican rural development efforts.
Farm worker advocate Chuck Barrett founded CITA along the Arizona-Mexico border in 2007 to serve as a “matchmaker” between prospective Mexican guest workers and U.S. growers. For the past several years, CITA has been focused on helping workers on both sides of the border: in Mexico with the recruitment process, and in the United States with disputes between workers and growers.
Net migration is the net total of migrants during the period, that is, the total number of immigrants less the annual number of emigrants, including both citizens and noncitizens. Source: World Bank
CITA helps growers recruit workers in Mexico and assists in getting growers’ H-2A applications—which Barrett says are notoriously onerous—through the Department of Labor and other agencies. It also provides services to Mexican guest workers, including financial literacy information, low-interest loans to pay for guest worker visas, psychological counseling, and education on the guest worker system.
In addition to the fees it earns from growers, CITA is supported by organizations such as Catholic Relief Services and the Howard Buffett Foundation.
Barrett is hoping to expand the CITA model to become self-sustaining in rural communities throughout Mexico, saying that this expansion would help Mexican migrant-sending communities obtain “some beginning of control over migration, replacing illegal out-migration with legal migration.” According to this model, communities would be trained to facilitate employer petitions, prescreen workers, and expedite the visa process—all tasks for which U.S. growers now pay CITA a fee. “Because they would be doing the training and passport process … they [Mexican rural areas] will get a portion to be used by the community to fulfill their own development objectives,” Barrett said.
While Barrett—like almost everyone else—said that the H-2A program is dysfunctional, he also believes that its use will increase. “Whether people like it or not … H-2A is going to be a growing process,” he said. “Every version of AgJOBS includes an expansion of H-2A. I see the next couple of years as a window of opportunity to find alternatives … that are fairer for the workers and more effective for the employers, and also lend themselves … to connecting the migration process to the development process.”
CITA’s concept of connecting its H-2A employer services to rural development in migrant-sending Mexican rural communities is still on the drawing board. But based on the relationships they’ve forged through their outreach to growers and services to workers, Barrett and CITA executive director Janine Duron said that the program can be extended to the source of the immigrant farm worker issue—the poor Mexican communities that provide U.S. growers with both unauthorized and H-2A farm workers. “It’s an amazing relationship that can be built if you have reconciliation rather than adversity,” said Duron.
Reducing migration pressures will require development and job creation throughout Mexico, but poverty and migration are particularly concentrated in the countryside. Although about a quarter of all Mexicans live in rural areas, 60 percent of Mexico’s extremely poor people are rural, and 44 percent of Mexican immigrants come from rural communities. (See Figure 3.5) Immigration reform and development assistance need to be linked, particularly for rural Mexico.
After decades of declining support, agriculture and rural development is now re-emerging as a vital development focus.
The World Bank’s 2008 World Development Report, Agriculture for Development, states, “Agriculture continues to be a fundamental instrument for sustainable development and poverty reduction.”63
Research has also found that agriculture is one of the best returns on investment in poverty-reduction spending.64 Each 1 percent increase in crop productivity in Asia reduces the number of poor people by half a percent. This correlation also holds for middle-income countries such as Mexico.65
Issues
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