Mexicans trafficked to the US in forced labor
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Due to weak US labor laws, Mexicans, among many immigrants, are brought into the US in search for a good-paying job only to find themselves troubled into a case of modern slavery.
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Farmworkers, under weak US labor laws, are easily exploited by contractors.
Slavery is still alive in the United States, seeping through the cracks and loopholes of US labor laws that barely ever hold authorities accountable, leaving room for human rights abuses, exploitation, rape, and harassment.
A report by The Guardian exposes this harrowing reality.
In June 2021, a farmworker from Mexico, who demanded that he remain anonymous in fear of retaliation from the abusers, revealed that he was trafficked through a 'labor' network from Mexico to Georgia, USA.
The victims paid around $950 to the traffickers - money that they borrowed from their mothers - and took trips back and forth between Mexico and the US before the traffickers told them that it'd be finally safe to leave Mexico and work in the US.
Told that he was going to be picking blueberries for 12$ an hour, he was dragged onto a corn farm where he made $225 for 15 days of work and was made to sleep in a house with extremely poor conditions. He described that the bed was full of lice, the toilets were clogged and dirty, there was no air conditioning and the house was full of cockroaches and spiders.
As for the working hours, the worker would start work between 3 or 4 AM, and ended their 'shifts around the same time in the afternoon, with not more than 15 minutes a lunch break a day.
After working for some 20 days on the corn farm, the worker was transferred to a cucumber warehouse where trafficked laborers were not paid anything, then was finally trafficked to Texas before running away back to Mexico in July 2021.
“There was a lot of abuse for little pay,” the worker said. “It was a total fraud.” He also heard that it was not only Mexicans who were trafficked, but also Haitians.
Farmworkers working in the US have very little protection by US labor laws. Farmworkers, notably immigrants among them, are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Because of this, they are repeatedly subject to human rights abuses, wage theft and safety precautions which result in injuries, deaths and exposure to harmful chemicals.
The worker named his contractor: JC Longoria Castro, who was one of some 24 defendants who were indicted on human smuggling and labor trafficking charges in October 2021. After investigating his case for a number of years, Castro was found complicit in a "massive human smuggling and labor trafficking operation based in southern Georgia that extended to Florida and Texas."
Operation Blooming Onion - the name of the investigation - uncovered that the contractors forced the workers to pay fees for transportation, food and housing through the H2-A visa program. The laborer's travel and identification documents were withheld unreleased, while the contractors made $200 million through money laundering. The investigation concluded with over 100 workers being freed.
The article explains that the visa program is frequently used to exploit migrant workers looking to work in the US, since the immigration status is connected to employment, and only temporarily, which enables contractors to exploit workers' legal status.
“It’s really the structure of the program that facilitates this kind of stuff happening, often with impunity,” said Daniel Costa, director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute.
“If you’re an agricultural employer, there’s only around a 1% chance that you’ll be investigated for anything in any given year, so they can pretty much get away with not treating your workers the way they should,” added Costa.
