TIM SWARENS

Migrant workers in Indiana: They harvest our food, but risk labor trafficking

Tim Swarens
IndyStar
Kristin Hoffman, director of the Indiana Migrant Farmworker Law Center, works insider her office in downtown Indianapolis on Tuesday, June 26, 2018.

BICKNELL, Ind. — The migrant workers, still soaked with sweat, lumber off an old school bus an hour before midnight and slowly file toward a cluster of mobile homes set back from the highway that cuts through this Knox County farm town.

It is the peak of harvest season, and days filled with picking cantaloupe and watermelon for 12 hours or more in the August heat are routine.

A young man, his feet bare, limps past me carrying a pair of tattered shoes. He grimaces in pain and fatigue.

"Hola."

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He nods and then gingerly climbs the steps into a trailer and toward his bunk. Another exhausting day in southwest Indiana's melon fields is done.

Each year, thousands of migrant workers follow the harvest from Florida, Georgia and other parts of the South to Northern states such as Indiana, Ohio and Michigan. They pick and pack asparagus, melons, tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables that grace Americans' dinner tables. They settle, sometimes for months, into roadside motels, apartment buildings and mobile home parks in farm towns across the country.

Yet they are largely unseen and often isolated from the communities where they live and work. They're vulnerable to exploitation, including wage theft and labor trafficking. And their health and safety are at times put at risk for the sake of the harvest.

Migrant workers and significance of H-2A visas

The overall number of migrants has declined in recent years as automation continues to erase jobs in the fields and in processing plants and as crackdowns on undocumented workers discourage illegal border crossings. But farmers increasingly rely on the H-2A visa program, which allows for temporary entry into the United States, to find workers for the harvest.

Since 2013, the number of H-2A visa holders has increased 109 percent. And the Department of Labor authorized more than 32,000 migrant farmworkers — the most ever in a single quarter — to enter the U.S. in the first three months of this year.

Citizens of 83 countries are eligible for the visa, but most of the migrants are young men from Mexico. Workers from Haiti, including women, also arrive here to toil in the fields. Outreach workers who assist migrant laborers say they've seen a rising number of South Africans hired on grain farms, where their command of English is seen as a plus in operating expensive machinery.

The rapidly growing H-2A visa program allows migrant workers to enter the U.S. legally to work in farm fields. But advocates say the workers remain vulnerable to exploitation.

Proponents of the H-2A program say that migrants fill jobs that American workers will no longer accept. Employment of legal migrants also reduces the industry's dependence on undocumented workers. Of roughly 2 million migrant workers, it's estimated that more than 50 percent are here illegally. 

"You can't find people (from the U.S.) who want to do it," Bob White, Indiana Farm Bureau's director of national government relations, said. "It's very, very difficult work."

For the migrants, most from desperately poor backgrounds, the promise of higher wages in the United States is a powerful incentive. I talked to workers this summer who sent money home to support wives, children, parents and younger siblings.

Yet, legal advocates warn that the risks of exploitation — wage and hour fraud, unsafe working conditions, substandard housing, required payment of illegal recruitment fees — remain high.

Dependence on employers

In May and August, I traveled to Southern Indiana with teams from the Migrant Farmworker Law Center to meet workers and to review their living conditions.

What I saw ranged from good to alarming. In Vincennes, about 70 migrant workers were housed in a modest but comfortable apartment building in a residential neighborhood about two blocks from Main Street. 

Twenty miles to the south, on the edge of Princeton, I met farm workers assigned to a rancid mobile home park, where windows and doors were missing on several unoccupied trailers. Streets were deeply rutted. Red "danger" tape sealed off one boarded up trailer and was attached to the side of a second mobile home where several migrant workers lived.

What I witnessed most often, even when living conditions were passable, was workers' nearly complete dependence on their employers for food, transportation, housing and health care.  

Most farmers try to treat their workers well; some build lasting relationships with migrants who return year after year. Yet, farm workers' dependency on their employers not only for paychecks but also basic needs increases the risk of exploitation.

“Legal Services Corporation pays specific attention to H-2A workers because of the remoteness of their location," Kristin Hoffman, director of the Indiana Migrant Farmworker Law Center, said. "It is absolutely filled with barriers in terms of them accessing justice.”

Human trafficking a concern for migrant workers

Incidents of human trafficking, fraud and neglect continue to emerge across the nation:

In September in North Carolina, about 40 migrant workers called 911 when waist-high flood waters from Hurricane Florence swamped their camp in a remote area of Jones County. Farmworker advocates also pleaded with authorities to rescue the men. But, as Buzzfeed News reported, the rescue effort was canceled after the farm owner told officials that the workers were "fine." An employee of the North Carolina Growers Association, which contracts with farms to provide migrant workers, finally rescued the men several hours after the 911 calls were made.

In August in California, Efren Alvarez of Fresno was convicted of extortion and human trafficking of three migrant workers recruited from Tijuana, Mexico. The victims said Alvarez took their visas and passports, threatened physical violence, and said he would report them to immigration authorities if they didn't follow his orders. Prosecutor Lynette Gonzales told The Fresno Bee that Alvarez also controlled his victims by determining where they lived, how they got to work, and "when and if" they could return to Mexico.

In September in Ohio, Pablo Duran Ramirez Jr. became the fourth person to plead guilty in a human trafficking conspiracy that forced dozens of migrant workers, including children, to work and live in horrific conditions. The exploitation was uncovered in 2014 when authorities rescued eight Guatemalan teenagers working at Trillium Farms in central Ohio. The boys — who worked 12 hours a day, six days a week — were paid as little as $2 a day to cut off hens' beaks and to clean cages at the egg farm. Trillium, one of the nation's largest egg producers, paid Duran Ramirez's company $6 million to recruit workers. Trillium executives have said they knew nothing about the labor trafficking or the living conditions on the Ohio farm.

Last year in Indiana, two migrant workers contacted the National Human Trafficking Hotline to report possible wage fraud and labor trafficking violations.

The men said they signed documents in Mexico that promised they would be paid $18 an hour to work for a landscaping company in Indiana. 

Based on that agreement, one of the men, in a phone interview with the aid of a translator, told me that he and his brother each gave a recruiter 10,000 pesos (about $528) to secure the jobs. They also paid about $800 to travel from Mexico to Indiana. A loan they took out to pay those expenses cost them another 5,000 pesos (about $264) in interest.

Migrant farmworkers' boots sit outside rooms at a roadside motel in Carlyle, Indiana.

But once in the United States, the men say they were paid $12 an hour for landscaping work and were sent to work three days a week on a farm, where they were paid only $8 an hour.

The men quit and eventually returned to Mexico out of concern for their safety when a fellow worker was killed in an on-the-job accident. 

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That decision came with a high cost. The brothers traveled to the U.S. to help provide financial support for their parents and to pay for their sister to attend nursing school. They returned home after earning enough to cover only their travel expenses. The men are still paying off the loans they took out to migrate here.

“There were a number of laws violated in this case that come with penalties,” Hoffman, who represents the brothers and one other client, said. The case is still under investigation, and no criminal charges or civil violations have been filed.

In addition to possible wage fraud, Hoffman said federal law bans charging migrant workers recruitment fees for jobs. Her clients, she said, also should have been reimbursed for their travel expenses. 

The case raises another key point about migrant labor. It's difficult for workers who are so dependent on their employers and who face language and cultural barriers to speak up to protect themselves.

“This case is not typical in terms of how comfortable the workers are in talking about what happened," Hoffman said. “With the Trafficking Victim Protection Act, there’s a 10-year statute of limitations. One of the reasons why there’s such a long statute of limitations is because it frequently takes survivors so long to recover from the immediate impact of being in a forced labor experience. We want to give every benefit of the doubt to someone who’s survived that kind of experience.”

Silence and exploitation

The pressure on workers to remain silent, even for those here legally, is intense. They have loans to pay off. They have impoverished families at home. They can be replaced by other workers who won't complain.

The bad operators in agriculture and other industries leverage that pressure to exploit their employees.

They also count on the fact that most of us ignore the visitors in our midst.

One evening in August, I rode with Hoffman, labor trafficking attorney Emma Hughes and a now former outreach worker, Esteban Ortiz, as they followed a bus full of migrant workers from a farm near Oaktown, Indiana, to Mount Carmel, Illinois, about 50 miles away.

Hundreds of migrant farmworkers travel to southwestern Indiana's melon farms each summer to harvest cantaloupe and watermelons.

In Mount Carmel, the bus stopped at an old hotel in the quiet downtown. The workers piled out and lined up behind a pickup truck in the hotel parking lot, where each man was handed a paper plate filled with tacos. Some of the men sat on the curb to eat dinner; others took the food to their rooms.

Two blocks away, a dozen of the town's residents lined up for hamburgers and ice cream outside a small restaurant's walk-up window. They ate and chatted at several picnic tables.

On the same night in one small town, two worlds unfolded in close proximity but without intersecting. I saw the same separation — a wall between consumers and the people who harvest their food — play out in communities across Indiana this summer.

Late one night in early May, I rode in a car with Hoffman and Ortiz as we left melon country to return to Indianapolis. A half hour earlier, we had met with three young men who lived in a remote cabin off a dirt road miles from the nearest grocery or convenience store. Their total dependency on others for basic needs raised a warning sign. So did something they'd told Ortiz; the foreman on the strawberry farm where they worked kept track of their hours, not the migrants themselves. 

As the moon hung low in the western sky, Ortiz — who grew up in the fields, working beside his parents — began to talk about what life is like for migrants in America. He spoke about the rigors of the work, but most of all, he talked about the sense of isolation from a society that needs your labor but never accepts you as part of the community.

A scene from one Sunday morning on a farm in Ohio came back to him decades later. "We were picking cucumbers when the farm family came out of their house," Ortiz recalled. "They were dressed for church, and when they drove by, the woman looked right past us. It was like we were ...."

His voice halted, and for a moment, the frustration and pain of that long ago Sunday returned.

"Invisible?" I asked.

"Yes, invisible."

Contact Tim Swarens at tim.swarens@indystar.com; friend him on Facebook at Tim Swarens; follow him on Twitter @tswarens.