California legislator seeks to extend protections for temporary migrant workers

California legislators will examine a bill intended to extend protections for migrant workers who come to California through temporary work visa programs for jobs in agriculture, nursing, domestic care and other sectors.

Legislation, Bill 1362 of the Assembly, would oblige that all foreign work recruiters under contract register with the State and followed the rules aimed at preventing them from exploiting migrant workers. This would prohibit them, for example, to charge workers with recruitment costs and to create legal appeals for work violations.

The bill, also called “law on the prevention and protection of human trafficking for temporary immigrant workers”, was recently presented by the Ash Kalra assembly (D-San José).

“For too long, the vast majority of temporary foreign workers have remained unprotected and subject to the documented abuse of unscrupulous foreign work recruiters. Companies are also likely to prey to operations (recruiters) that use predatory recruitment processes, “Kalra said on a press release on Monday.

Defenders of anti-human trafficking say that due to the lack of federal surveillance, temporary visa programs are frequently exploited, workers subject to the trafficking of human beings due to false promises and illegal regimes by third-party recruiters.

To remedy these questions, California adopted legislation in 2014, the Senate bill 477, forcing foreign labor recruiters to register with the State and to respect certain workers’ protections. It also obliges that workers receive fair and clear contractual conditions, as well as recruiters pay obligations to cover funds for any potential violation and prohibits reprisals for workers exercising their labor rights.

However, only a ribbon of foreign labor recruiters attracting migrant workers are subject to these rules, said Stephanie Richard, director of Sunita Jain Anti-Trafficking Initiative, an organization at the Loyola Law School which supports new legislation.

During the regulatory process to explain how SB 477 would be applied, the law was narrowly interpreted as applied only to H-2B visas, she said.

Of about 350,000 migrant workers who come to California employed through temporary work visa programs, only about 5,000 are provided by H-2B visas, according to the Kalra office.

AB 1362 would extend existing protections to foreign work entrepreneurs by recruiting for all other temporary work visa programs, with two exceptions: recruiters for visa for visitors to J -1 exchange – generally used by researchers and students – and recruiters of the Talent Agency.

Richard said she thought it is crucial that legislators adopt these protections, given the imminent threat of immigration implementation measures by the Trump administration.

“We know that business will require more temporary workers if part of our workforce is expelled and there will be less monitoring of the federal government that will lead to greater exploitation,” she said.

Previous efforts to modify the language to extend protections to other workers on temporary work visas have been opposed by the Western Growers Assn. The group of companies, which represents farmers who cultivate products in California, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, is generally opposed to changes which, according to them, could slow the process or increase the cost of the migrant agricultural workers in California thanks to the Visa H-2A program.

The president of the Western Growers Assn., Dave Puglia, said in recent weeks that the crucial aspects of American food production are increasingly tense by a lack of workers.

In a recent element of opinion for a commercial publication, he wrote that the foreign visa program which helps to bring workers here should be extended to better meet the needs of farmers, and that any obstacle – whether threats of immigration application in the workplace or bureaucratic strangulation – should be removed as much as possible.

Western producers Assn. did not immediately respond to a request for comments on the new bill.