California lawmaker seeks to expand protections for temporary migrant workers
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California lawmakers will consider a bill intended to expand protections for migrant workers who come to California through temporary work visa programs for jobs in agriculture, nursing, domestic care and other industries.
The legislation, Assembly Bill 1362, would require that all contracted foreign labor recruiters register with the state and follow rules aimed at preventing them from exploiting migrant workers. It would prohibit them, for example, from charging workers recruitment fees and create legal remedies for labor violations.
The bill, also called the “Human Trafficking Prevention and Protection Act for Temporary Immigrant Workers,” was recently introduced by Assemblymember Ash Kalra (D-San José).
“For too long, the vast majority of temporary foreign workers have remained unprotected and subject to the documented abuses of unscrupulous foreign labor recruiters. Businesses also risk falling prey to exploitative [recruiters] who use predatory recruitment processes,” Kalra said Monday in a statement about the bill.
Anti-human trafficking advocates say that due to a lack of federal oversight, temporary visa programs are frequently exploited, with workers subject to human trafficking because of false promises and illegal schemes by third-party labor recruiters.
To remedy these issues, California passed legislation in 2014, Senate Bill 477, requiring foreign labor recruiters to register with the state and abide by certain worker protections. It also mandates that workers receive fair and clear contractual terms, as well as that recruiters pay bonds to cover funds for any potential violations and prohibits retaliation against workers exercising their labor rights.
However, only a sliver of foreign labor recruiters who bring in those migrant workers are subject to these rules, said Stephanie Richard, director at the Sunita Jain Anti-Trafficking Initiative, an organization at Loyola Law School that is backing the newly introduced legislation.
Advocates on the scene said the Border Patrol raid in Kern County last month indiscriminately targeted Latino farmworkers commuting from the fields and day laborers soliciting work in the parking lots of big box stores.
During the regulatory process to hash out how SB 477 would be enforced, the law was narrowly interpreted to apply only to H-2B visas, she said.
Out of the roughly 350,000 migrant workers who come to California employed through temporary work visa programs, only about 5,000 are brought through H-2B visas, according to Kalra’s office.
AB 1362 would extend existing protections to foreign labor contractors recruiting for all other temporary work visa programs, with two exceptions: recruiters for J-1 exchange visitor visas — typically used by researchers and students — and talent agency recruiters.
Richard said she believes its crucial that lawmakers pass these protections, given the looming threat of immigration enforcement actions by the Trump administration.
“We know that business will demand more temporary workers if some of our workforce is deported, and that there will be less oversight from the federal government that will lead to more exploitation,” she said.
Previous efforts to amend language to expand protections to other workers on temporary work visas have been opposed by the Western Growers Assn. The business group, which represents farmers growing produce in California, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, generally opposes changes that it has said could slow down the process or increase the cost of bringing migrant agricultural workers to California through the H-2A visa program.
The president of the Western Growers Assn., Dave Puglia, has said in recent weeks that crucial aspects of America’s food production are increasingly strained by a lack of workers.
In a recent opinion piece for a trade publication, he wrote that the foreign visa program that helps bring workers here should be expanded to better fill the needs of farmers, and that any obstacles — whether they be threats of workplace immigration enforcement raids or bureaucratic bottlenecks — should be removed as much as possible.
The Western Growers Assn. did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the new bill.
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