http://nctimes.com/articles/2006/06/..._146_10_06.txt

Visas offer businesses a legal labor force

By: EDWARD SIFUENTES - Staff Writer

NORTH COUNTY ---- Under the blazing rays of the midday sun, 24-year-old Miguel Angel Perez Hernandez shovels mulch from the bed of a trailer into plastic buckets.

Other workers pick up the pails and pour the mulch under trees in the neatly manicured lawns of a suburban northern San Diego neighborhood. Within minutes, the 15-foot trailer bed is half-empty, and Perez has hardly broken a sweat.

It's the kind of backbreaking labor President Bush may have been referring to when he spoke of the "jobs Americans are not doing" in his speech on immigration reform last month.


Perez, a Mexican immigrant, is one of thousands of workers toiling in forests, fields and fisheries throughout the country under little-known guest-worker programs called H2A and H2B by the federal government.

As the leaders in Congress hammer out a compromise immigration reform plan, the H2A and H2B visas could provide a template for a new guest-worker program for millions of people.

The programs allow workers to come to the country temporarily to work in seasonal, low-skill jobs that employers can't fill with American workers. Employers say some jobs become unprofitable for them at wages high enough for American workers to take them.

Under the visa programs, however, employers are required to advertise the jobs and the Department of Labor must agree that there is a shortage of willing workers.

Companies are also required to follow state and federal labor protections. Wages are set by the Department of Labor based on industry averages.

Some local employers said having a legal, motivated and reliable work force is the key attraction of the programs. Recent immigration enforcement inspections, including one in Oceanside, are also nudging more companies into compliance, employers said.

Willing workers


The programs are far from perfect and have critics among employers and immigrant-rights advocates alike. They are slow, cumbersome and expensive to companies. There is little oversight to make sure employers are following labor laws and there is no path to permanent residency, immigrant-rights advocates say.

Perez, who arrived from Mexico with a group of nine other men two weeks ago, said he likes the opportunity to work legally in the country. A father of two girls, ages 3 and 1 years old, Perez said the money he earned making tortillas back home was hardly enough to buy food.

In his native Tepic, Mexico, Perez earned less than $60 a week. Working for Benchmark Landscape Cos., the Poway-based firm that sponsored him for a visa, he earns more than $8 an hour, more than five time his salary in Mexico.

"My wife didn't like the idea very much, but there are many people who would love to have this opportunity," Perez said. "Many times, friends invited me to come illegally, but it's not the same coming with permission. It's much better."

John Mohns, president of Benchmark Landscape, said his company has hired 20 of its 300 workers under the H2B visa program since December.

The H2B visa allows foreign workers to stay in the country up to 10 months. They must return to their country of origin before they can reapply. They may repeat the process three times, but they are not allowed to apply for permanent residency.

"The H2B is not a perfect guest-worker program because it is temporary," Mohns said. "But it provides a practical, legal avenue and a reasonable opportunity for employers to access essential foreign laborers."

Immigration attorney Kevin M. Tracy, whose office in Del Mar helped process the visas for Benchmark, said the programs have become popular among employers since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when more stringent immigration laws and immigration enforcement efforts were implemented.

Each year, the federal government caps the number of H2B visas at about 66,000 a year. The government rarely granted that many until recent years.

Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, who is a leading voice for tougher immigration laws, said in a recent visit to San Diego that the abundance of cheap illegal immigrant labor made it unnecessary for companies to use the visa programs.

Why pay visa fees and a higher federally mandated wages when they can hire illegal immigrant workers cheaply off the street, he asked?

But enforcement efforts are on the rise and so is the demand for the visas, Tracy said. His office has processed about 200 H2B visas this year.

Changing landscape


The H2A visa program, which is tailored to the agricultural industry, brings in 40,000 more guest workers each year. The workers are allowed to stay in the U.S. up to a year but must return home at the end of the season. Companies sponsoring them must provide housing, meals, transportation and pay up to $1,000 in visa fees for each worker.

The workers labor in fields from North Carolina to California, including some in North County where Oceanside-based Harry Singh & Sons grows pole-ripened tomatoes.

Luawanna Hallstrom, chief operating officer with Harry Singh & Sons, said the company, which grows some of its crop inside Camp Pendleton, lost 75 percent of its workers when immigration inspectors checked employees' work permits three years ago during the critical harvesting season.

The company lost $2.5 million worth of crops while it waited 45 days for visas to replace its work force, Hallstrom said.

"It was devastating," she said. "It took us two weeks to clean up the rotted fruit."

Hiring illegal immigrants became a crime 20 years ago under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. It required companies to screen potential employees, but authorities rarely enforced the provision.

Hallstrom said the inspection, and other similar efforts throughout the country, were a wake-up call to farmers everywhere. She has since become an advocate for immigration reform. She serves as chair of the California Farm Bureau Labor Advisory Committee, and is co-chair of the Agricultural Council for Immigration Reform, which lobbies Congress on immigration issues.

Hallstrom said she has seen several large growers move their operations in recent years to foreign countries where labor costs are much lower. She said that means job losses not just for the agriculture industry in this country but a loss of high-paying jobs for agriculture industry suppliers.

"My feeling is that foreign labor is going to do the work, it's just a matter of where," Hallstrom said.

Employers, including Hallstrom, said they favor a less cumbersome, less restrictive and more flexible guest-worker program then the current programs. One that loosens housing and wage requirements set by the Department of Labor.

No perfect program


On the other hand, immigrant-rights advocates say they want a guest-worker program that provides people with a path to permanent residency. Advocates say guest workers are little more than indentured servants who are reluctant to report abuse for fear of not being rehired and are who seldom well informed of their rights in the country.

Jose Gonzalez, a spokesman for Frente Indigena Binacional Oaxaqueno, an advocacy group for Oaxacan immigrants, said a guest-worker program that does not allow people to apply for residency is destined for failure, as was the Bracero Program of the 1940s and 1960s.

"There has to be a legal process, but that process has to respect workers as human beings," Gonzalez said. "They deserve access to legalization, and that is not included in the president's (guest-worker) plan."

The principal difference between the guest worker program proposed by the president and the H2A/B programs is that the president's plan would allow workers to stay in the country up to three years at a time. Under the president's program, visas would be available to employers regardless of industry.

Perez, the landscape worker, said he hopes to someday bring his family to the United States. He said the small Mexican town where he is from offers few jobs and too little pay.

In the meantime, he wakes up at 3 a.m. to share a ride with his cousin, who is also an employee at Landmark, from Tijuana across the border to Poway. The company looks for workers through a network of family and friends of its employees ---- in large part because the H2B visa program does not require employers to provide housing.

Watching over Perez, supervisor Jesus Alonso said he wishes there would have been a guest-worker program when he crossed the border illegally 26 years ago. Alonso, who became a resident under the 1986 amnesty, said the country needs people willing to do the hard work they do.

"It's not that we're taking jobs away from other people, the truth is that they don't want to do these jobs that we're doing," Alonso said. "This is hard work, under the sun and it doesn't pay what they want."

Contact staff writer Edward Sifuentes at (760) 740-3511 or esifuentes@nctimes.com.