St. Louis CofCC Blog

St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

La Esperanza, MEXICO — Surrounded by strawberry fields and rows of corn, the small town of La Esperanza is a postcard from rural Mexico. There is the plaza, the church. There are the tile-roofed homes, the bougainvillea flowers spilling over walls, the teenage boys on horseback.

And there is the landscaping recruiter from St. Louis.

He comes in February. For years now, an American with a buzz cut — an employee of Fenton-based Top Care Lawn Service Inc. — has stopped in La Esperanza to fill out his employee roster and help men here get visas to work legally for Top Care.

If the black man in the above photo is the said “American with a buzz cut,” then there is something starkly ironic about this picture.

The landscaping industry in St. Louis is rapidly being staffed by foreign laborers who enter the United States on a temporary visa for nonagricultural workers, known as the “H-2B” visa. Many of those six- to nine-month jobs start at $8 an hour — slightly above minimum wage in Missouri, but a ticket out of poverty in Mexico, at least for the season.

Before this point, the article refers to them as “guest workers.” Remember, when President Bush was pressing to pass “Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” he told us that we needed a “guest worker program” in order to blah blah blah. The point here is that we already have a guest worker program in the H-2B visa system.

Over the past nine years, as U.S. employers’ appetite for H-2B workers has grown, La Esperanza has become a town of guest workers. It’s difficult to find a woman here whose husband, son or father isn’t working “on contract” somewhere in the United States. And each year, it seems, there’s another company importing workers from La Esperanza.

About 80 men from La Esperanza, a town of 1,129 people, work as St. Louis landscapers; others are guest workers in Nevada and Indiana, and on a separate program in Canada. But the primary destination is “San Luis,” a fact made clear by the Missouri-plated pickups rolling slowly over La Esperanza’s stone roads.

La Esperanza: St. Louis’s (or is that San Luis’s?) newest suburb. Or maybe it’s the opposite: St. Louis, Mexico’s Newest Colony.

In La Esperanza, it’s hard to say which is growing faster — workers’ interest in obtaining the visas or companies’ appetite for workers. Each year, St. Louis-area lawn care companies have petitioned for more workers. In addition to Top Care and Loyet, Brake Landscaping and Lawncare hired guest workers from La Esperanza this year.

Loyet’s work force is composed primarily of guest workers, according to Delgado. The only employees who live permanently in the U.S. are “the people who enter things into the computers — the superintendents and the secretaries,” he says.

To qualify to bring in guest workers, employers must demonstrate annually that they cannot find qualified workers residing in the U.S.

And “demonstrate” is a malleable concept here. Of course, Top Care and similar firms wouldn’t be able to find “qualified workers residing in the U.S.,” if they can establish a lower wage for said workers because of the known and pending supply of cheaper labor from Mexico — they can “demonstrate” that they need H-2B jobbers. And considering the xenophile cheap labor lobby that has run at least the last two Presidential administrations, the public immigration authorities wouldn’t exactly knit-pick with firms that “demonstrate” such a need so slyly. That said, I highly doubt that there are no native-born Americans that can cut grass, rake leaves and plant tulips — it’s just that Americans still hold on to this disturbing concept that they should get living, sustainable pay for full-time work, enough to live in a single-family mortgage payer-occupied domicile, own a car or two, and somewhat more.

If they had any forewarning at all, “the workers would just stay in the U.S.,” guesses Fernando.

And when that eventually happens, the U.S. economy will be just like the Mexico they’re fleeing.