A new report from BuzzFeed found some employers “go to extraordinary lengths” to avoid hiring U.S. workers so they qualify for foreign workers through the H-2A and H-2B guest worker programs. It also said some state and federal officials allowed companies to disobey “not only the spirit, but the letter, of the law.”
The landscape industry is one of the largest users of the H-2B guest worker visa program. The report noted that the landscape industry received 30,000 H-2 visas in the 2014 fiscal year.
One landscape company, Pro Landscape of Hillsboro, Ore., was cited for wrongdoings in the report:
When American workers showed up to apply for a job at Pro Landscape, in Hillsboro, Ore., they were told they would have to dig a trench four feet long, a foot and a half wide, and a foot and a half deep within five minutes to be considered for the position, according to Labor Department records.
Manuel Castaneda, the company’s owner, called the task a “fair way” to see who was up to the job. But the Labor Department said the tests appeared “to not be normal” for the industry and to “be restrictive to U.S. workers.” Indeed, Labor Department records show that only five of the 18 applicants who attempted the tests passed. “The employer’s tests,” the department found, appear to have “discouraged U.S. workers.”
The report said companies skirting the law take the following steps to get away with not hiring Americans, qualifying the companies for H-2 workers:
- Step one: don’t let U.S. workers know job exists—job opening listings were placed in newspapers hundreds of miles away from the jobsite to deter applicants;
- Step two: make the job sound awful so no one applies—job listings would emphasize and exaggerate the work by using terms like “pipe mover” instead of “ranch hand;”
- Step three: convince job seekers they shouldn’t bother applying—companies set stringent (years of experience, clean drug tests, high school diplomas, multiple references, commercial driver’s permits) or racially coded (non-baggy pants, removal of hair extensions) requirements for menial, entry-level jobs like picking melons;
- Step four: make applicants perform extraordinary feats—applicants were forced to pass exams like a mental alertness test, given to computer programmers and accountants, or perform nearly impossible tasks (see Pro Landscape below);
- Step five: when the perfectly qualified U.S. worker does present herself, ignore her—the report cited an anecdote of a young lady denied interviews from a dozen horse stables with job openings, many of which cited a lack of available U.S. workers when requesting H-2 workers;
- Step six: if compelled to interview qualified American workers, lie—a U.S. Labor Department investigation found a worker with 25 years of housekeeping experience was denied a job at an Arizona resort, which requested H-2 workers due to an inability to find workers that met its one-month experience requirement; and
- Step seven: when forced to hire Americans, get rid of them as soon as possible—if the first six steps did not work, companies fired employees en masse, opening spots for H-2 workers.
The U.S. Department of Labor acknowledged that laws authorizing the program and funds to police it are inadequate, but the agency “actively pursues measures to strengthen protections for foreign and U.S. workers.” The number of U.S. visas issued by the State Department under the H-2 program increased by 50 percent over the past five years.
Many of the accused companies deny these accusations claiming any firings were justified, employees quit and accusations are a ploy to get settlement money.
In July, BuzzFeed also reported thousands of abuse cases where foreign workers were “deprived of their fair pay, imprisoned, starved, beaten, raped, and threatened with deportation if they dare complain.”
