Briefing Papers Number 12, December 2011 | Page 12

it doesn’t address the impact of the H-2A program on the
Mexican communities that send these workers. It is rare for
anyone, including the Mexican government, to raise the concerns of sending communities.
One of the most under-analyzed parts of the H-2A guest
worker program is its impact on immigrant-sending communities in Mexico. The reasons Mexicans leave home to
become farm workers in the United States are often not part
of this or 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 on integrating 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.
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

Figure 6
Rural versus Urban Immigration from
Mexico
80

Rural
Urban

75%

70

56%

60
50

44%

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 recruitment, pre-screen 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 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.
Although about a quarter of all Mexicans live in rural
areas, 60 percent of Mexico’s extreme poor are rural and
44 percent of all of Mexico’s migration to the United States
originates in rural communities (see Figure 6). Immigration
reform and development assistance need to be linked, particularly with rural Mexico in mind.53

40
30

Recommendations

25%

20
10
0

Percentage of Total
Mexican Population

Percentage of Mexican
Migrants to the U.S.

Source: Mexico-Uniuted States Migration: Regional and State Overview, Mexico
City: Consejo Nacional de Población, 2006.

12 Briefing Paper, December 2011

Legalize immigrant farm workers: Any improvement to our
farm labor system should include legalization of unauthorized farm workers currently in the United States. Many of
these workers have been in the United States for decades and
are skilled at farm work. The constant threat of deportation
creates a precarious situation for farm worker families. U.S.
farmers need to know that they will have long-term access to
a legal workforce.