Mexican Farmhands Cite Faults In U.S. Guest Worker Program

TULELAKE, Calif. — The ad in his hometown newspaper was enticing, the meeting with a company recruiter even more so.

For six to eight weeks of strawberry work, Ricardo Valle and his wife, Ana Luisa Salinas, would get good pay, free transportation to and from Mexico, three daily meals — even a little "cabanita" with a kitchenette that they would share with another couple.

Like many of the 250 Mexicans on American guest-worker visas who arrived September 22 at this lonely post near the Oregon border, Mr. Valle and Ms. Salinas did the math: In the contract period promised, they could make more than they would in a year and a half in Nogales, Mexico. Mr. Valle quit his maquiladora job where for a dozen years he had assembled electric curtain motors.

As strict immigration enforcement limits the pool of available farmhands, growers are clamoring to expand the American guest-worker program. But the experience of the workers, whose contract ended last week, offers a rare look at the system's pitfalls.

In interviews and legal declarations, dozens of workers have said they went hungry not just on the bus north but in the weeks that followed.

Instead of cabanitas, they got crowded dorms. They were also paid less than they'd been told — and than the law required — for a shorter period than promised.

"From the moment we got on the bus in Nogales, we knew they were feeding us lies," Mr. Valle, 52, said as he tended to his sick wife in a cramped dormitory set up in an exhibition hall on the county fairgrounds here.

On the bus, he said, "they gave us a liquid diet — pure water — for 24 hours. Those who had money could eat. The rest of us, we ate air."

After they arrived in Tulelake, the workers said, they found out their contract term had been cut nearly in half, to just over a month. Furthermore, they were required to trim 1,025 strawberry plants an hour. Without farm experience, meeting the goal proved so grueling that they worked through breaks and lunchtime. Many failed and quit. Others were fired. Soon, only a little over half the original workforce was left.

The employer, Sierra-Cascade Nursery of Susanville, Calif. ornia, is now under investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor, which oversees the guest-worker program. California's Department of Industrial Relations also has ordered the company to correct numerous wage violations, and conduct a self-audit.

And, responding to an emergency request by attorneys for the nonprofit advocacy group California Rural Legal Assistance, a federal judge in October ordered Sierra-Cascade to make meals more nutritious, give workers more living space and heat the fairgrounds' frigid shower rooms.