Agricultural Personnel Management Program
University of California

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 29 (Reuters) - Lawyers representing hundreds of thousands of Mexican laborers who say they were never fully paid for their work in the United States in the 1940s vowed Thursday to press legal efforts to secure payment despite a U.S. judge's ruling against them.

It's shameful that the defendants have escaped their financial responsibilities to these men and their families for 60 years, and that they continue to hide behind legal technicalities," said attorney Jonathan Rothstein, one of the lawyers representing the workers in their suit.

The workers, dubbed "braceros," have charged Wells Fargo Bank, several Mexican banks and both the U.S. and Mexican governments with failing to pay out money deducted from the paychecks of about 400,000 Mexican laborers recruited to work on American farms and railroads during World War Two.

The suit does not specify damages, but lawyers for the plaintiffs say braceros and their heirs could be owed $500 million to $1 billion or more, including interest.

On Wednesday, the braceros were dealt a major legal setback by U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, who said that, while he was sympathetic with their plight, they were not entitled to any relief from the Mexican or American governments, or Wells Fargo, in a U.S. court.

While Breyer dismissed the case outright, lawyers for the plaintiffs said his ruling gave them the choice of filing an amended complaint against the U.S. government -- an option they plan to pursue.

"If we want to proceed with the current case in the district court, that is our option. And there's always the possibility of appealing the decision with respect to all of the parties," Rothstein said.

International battles in U.S. courts

The class action suit, filed in 2001, is one of a series of efforts to use U.S. courts to obtain financial redress for alleged injustices which crossed international borders.

Patterned on the legal drive to secure reparations for Holocaust survivors that has netted billions of dollars in settlements, similar cases have also been lodged on behalf of Asian women accusing the Japanese government of forcing them to be sex slaves for soldiers, and by Chinese workers accusing Japanese companies of using them as slave labor.

Under the "Bracero" program, as many as five million Mexican guest workers came to the United States to work from 1942 to 1964, often at extremely low wages.

Under the agreement between the United States and Mexico in place between 1942 and 1949, 10 percent of each workers' paycheck was to be deducted and repaid once the men returned to Mexico -- deductions which affected some 400,000 workers.

But the braceros say that most never received the deducted wages back, depriving them of money which could have helped them to establish better lives for themselves and their families.

With the youngest of the braceros now in their early 60's, lawyers say time is running short to achieve justice.

Both The U.S. government and Mexican governments have argued that the case should be dismissed, saying that the statute of limitations on the braceros claims had passed and that U.S. courts had no jurisdiction over Mexican banks.

The plaintiffs concede that bank records are muddled, although they cite at least one study by the Mexican government that showed $6 million had not been paid back to the workers.

A spokeswoman for Wells Fargo said the San Francisco bank had completely fulfilled its responsibility to return the braceros' money to Mexico.

"We never had savings accounts or the checks of the individual braceros. We basically were just the transfer point," Donna Uchida said.

"In our research to date, we have not found a complaint from any source, which includes the U.S., Mexico, and the braceros themselves, which says that Wells Fargo did anything but transfer the funds."