Resisting Precarious Labor

Abstract

This Article presents the first case study of a coalition between migrant legal services and a racial justice advocacy group in the South. At first blush, the strategy at the core of this case study appears to evoke the immigrant threat narrative by claiming that employers discriminated against U.S. workers by instead hiring foreign guest workers. A closer examination, however, reveals just the opposite-advocates instead aligned in a powerful strategy to skillfully resist this framing. In this nascent movement, migrant legal services joined a racial justice advocacy group in a series of cases on behalf of Black U.S. citizens who were unlawfully replaced by white, foreign guest workers. In separate litigation, the racial justice advocates in turn joined migrant legal services as co-counsel to argue that employers violated the labor rights of the noncitizen workers. In each of these cases, the coalition adopted a framing that enforcing the rights of all workers is ultimately better for both U.S. and noncitizen workers. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and a review of court records and legislative history, I argue that these cases are a powerful manifestation of the dual exploitation inherent in the temporary H-2A guest worker program. In essence, this program leads employer to prefer foreign workers because of their intersectional identities-the combination of guest workers' precarious legal status and their racial identities leads employers to assume that workers will tolerate extreme violations of their labor rights. At the same time, the program also exploits a long-marginalized population within American agriculture: Black farmworkers, a group at risk of disappearing altogether. While advocates and scholars have long complained that the H-2A program exploits foreign workers, this work been less attentive to the equally pernicious effect on U.S. workers. The cases in the Mississippi Delta expose this vulnerability-Black workers whose lineage includes decades of farming in the region are vulnerable to being replaced completely by foreign workers. Resisting attempts to further fragment their power by positioning them in opposition to one another, advocates for H-2A workers and low-wage Black U.S. workers aligned in these cases, recognizing the importance of collectively challenging an oppressive system. As I argue, the Delta cases invite a critical conversation within immigration and labor scholarship and can inform efforts to surmount the immigrant threat narrative and build a multiracial labor movement.

Keywords: H-2A guest worker program, dual labor exploitation, black U.S. farmworkers, migrant legal services, racial justice coalition, Immigrant threat narrative, Multiracial labor movement