Class Action Alleges Forced Labor Through the H-2A Program
Jared Culver's Picture
PUBLISHED: Mon, APR 10th 2023 @ 10:14 am EDT by Jared Culver
Another day, another story of slavery in the American immigration system. Here, MBR Farms is alleged by class plaintiffs to have been using the legal H-2A program for agricultural workers as their personal trafficking pipeline. MBR Farms owners and operators have been indicted for labor trafficking and an assortment of other crimes, as well. The criminal indictment charges MBR Farms with being run by a transnational criminal organization (TCO) that, at least from 2015, petitioned the US government for roughly 71,000 foreign workers. All those petitions by a TCO for all those years, and the H-2A administrators were none the wiser and, instead, approved many of the petitions. A skeptic might think TCOs running a slavery operation within the H-2A program means it needs some drastic overhauls, but not our Congress which has been trying to legalize indentured servitude in H-2A and complains the government is not permissive enough in approving petitions.
The H-2A program, on paper, is one of the most regulated temporary work visa programs in the immigration system. In fact, one can find many examples of farm employers and their defenders complaining about how hard it is to use the program. And, again, on paper, this certainly seems like a defensible critique. There are four Federal departments with some degree of oversight within the H-2A process and tons of regulations concerning pay and treatment of agricultural workers on the books. But life is lived in the world, not on paper. Here in the real world, one must ask how complex and overregulated the program is, when slavery seems to keep popping up on a grand scale? If TCOs can successfully use the program for years and evade detection from four Federal departments, then how complex is it really?
https://www.numbersusa.com/blog/class-action-alleges-forced-labor-through-h-2a-program
