By Andrew Rice
The Center Square

Over the years, states across the country have sought to address worker shortages by utilizing nonimmigrant visas to recruit foreign workers. State proposals have raised questions over how to address worker rights violations in its programs.

In June 2008, the Colorado General Assembly passed a bill seeking to establish the Nonimmigrant Agricultural Seasonal Worker Pilot Program that would expedite applications for H-2A visa certifications.

The H-2A visa program is a federally administered visa system that allows agricultural employers to hire immigrant workers for temporary or seasonal jobs when there are not enough U.S. workers available.

According to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, 42% of farmworkers in the United States do not have legal status. There is no cap on the number of H-2A visas that can be issued in a single year.

The pilot program authorized the state to help employers complete H-2A visas and establish offices in foreign countries to assist in recruiting new employees. The offices would offer immigrants medical and travel screening as well as documentation assistance.

The pilot program placed a cap of 1,000 employees each year who could participate. The cap would increase by 1,000 workers each year for the first four years of the program.

“It’s interesting that a state would basically abandon its efforts to help unemployed workers in their own state, and instead go to the expense and trouble to recruit workers from abroad,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Despite being passed in the state legislature, the Colorado pilot program was never implemented and expired in 2009. The pilot program was reintroduced in 2022 but did not become law.

Vaughan criticized the state’s efforts to invest resources toward recruiting foreign workers. She said states like Utah have attempted similar changes.

“It seems like a really dubious use of state resources to help employers bypass unemployed people in the state and bring in workers from abroad,” Vaughan said. “There’s no evidence that there aren’t enough workers in either Utah or Colorado or any other state.”

Vaughan pointed out that many immigrant agricultural workers often face workers’ rights violations including wage theft and poor housing conditions.

In 2023, the Department of Labor debarred a farm labor contract agency in North Carolina for wage violations and charges unrelated to the visa application process. The Department of Justice has also litigated numerous cases against migrant worker recruitment agencies.

“Any state program that were to help employers make more use of guest worker programs is potentially inviting more of this abuse unless these states are willing to be more active in monitoring what is going on at these workplaces,” Vaughan said.

After the pilot program’s failure, the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment instead offers resources about housing rights, wage rights and form processing assistance for employers and employees participating in the H-2A program

Vaughan said states should continue to provide resources but also focus on preventing migrant worker abuses that happen across various programs. She said states could help to set standards for worker protections instead of incentivizing more workers to come from abroad.

“I would like to see states,’” she said, “setting standards, setting expectations, instead of just doing [employers] bidding by helping them find cheap labor from abroad.”

The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment did not respond to the Center Square’s request for comment on H-2A visa assistance programs.