Agricultural Personnel Management Program
University of California

8/26/99 News Report -- Los Angeles Times

VASS, N.C. -- Stan Eury deals in Mexicans.

He's not apologizing for the vast trade he runs out of an ersatz hacienda
in the middle of North Carolina's tobacco fields. He doesn't need to.
Courtesy of an obscure wrinkle in U.S. immigration law, the 16,000 Mexican
workers he recruits to work on U.S. farms each year don't have to cross the
border illegally in the dead of night.

They ride over in chartered buses. Legally, with stamps on their passports
to prove it.

Some end up mistreated by recruiters, who pluck them out of their hometowns
to work for growers who pay Eury for the service. And once here, they work
at stoop labor no one else wants to do. But most go back to Mexico with
their pockets stuffed with far more money than they could make at home.

Eury says that makes him a farm worker advocate. The civil rights lawyers
trying to check his sprawling business empire might disagree.

One thing is certain: Stan Eury has parlayed a federal program that permits
hiring foreign workers on temporary visas for jobs on U.S. farms into a
personal gold mine. The trade has made him the largest farm labor
contractor in the country--and, not coincidentally, a multimillionaire.

Today, Eury's North Carolina Growers Assn. and two other businesses he runs
out of his 6,000-square-foot hacienda count more than 1,100 growers as
clients. Of the 30,000 foreign farm workers brought into the United States
legally this year, more than half entered under Eury's auspices. In North
Carolina, which brings in more workers through the program than any other
state, every one of 10,000 this year is working for Eury.

The program is little used in California, where illegal workers are as
plentiful as strawberries in spring. But that may soon change. A powerful
coalition of agriculture industry lobbyists, including Eury as well as the
California Farm Bureau Federation and the Western Growers Assn., is pushing
federal legislation that would expand the visa program on which Eury's
business relies. If they succeed, tens of thousands of additional foreign
laborers could work in the United States on temporary visas.

The expanded program also could transform the immigration debate by driving
down the numbers of the 600,000 to 900,000 Mexicans who, by Labor
Department estimates, cross the border illegally each year.

"I have long seen this as a win, win, win," said Eury, tapping long fingers
on a massive, carved Mexican table in his office, a fountain burbling in
the background and his latest crop of workers sweltering outside.

"It's a win for the growers because they get a reliable work force, a win
for the workers because they get good jobs and a win for the American
public because it helps cure our illegal alien problem." And for Stan Eury?
"Well, I get a job out of it," Eury said. "So I guess that's another win."

California growers are fighting particularly hard to expand the temporary
worker program, called H-2A after the section of the 1952 law that created
it, even though they have rarely used it. For decades, the state's growers
preferred to draw on the vast number of illegal immigrant workers, but
agricultural industry leaders say that a crackdown at the border and a
tight labor market have dried up the supply.

"We see an expanded H-2A program as a way to lessen the problems farmers
are having getting their crops harvested on time," said Bob Krauter,
spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation. "We have to do
something. These are perishable commodities."

Worker Advocates Oppose Program

Unlike Eury, farm worker advocates and civil rights lawyers do not believe
everybody wins with the federal program. They are fighting the proposed
expansion, just as they have fought Eury for years with lawsuits charging
that growers who got their workers from him failed to provide such basics
as water, adequate housing and protection from dangerous pesticide residue.
Eury has quietly paid settlements in each of the suits, without admitting
guilt.

The Mexican government has expressed concern for several years about
treatment of the workers. But senior Mexican officials say that they
hesitate to complain because many more Mexicans who work in the U.S.
illegally are treated considerably worse. Both Mexican and American
officials say they recognize that an expanded, streamlined form of the
program has the potential to help close the gap between the two governments
over immigration.

"The public policy issue is whether we would rather have a legal or an
illegal agricultural work force and which group is most vulnerable to the
most extreme kinds of abuse and exploitation in the workplace," said John
Fraser, deputy administrator of the Labor Department's wage and hour division.

The H-2A program permits American farmers to hire foreign workers if they
can prove that no domestic workers want the jobs. It is an offspring of the
"bracero" program, which brought tens of thousands of Mexican laborers into
the United States legally to ease labor shortages during World War II.

The bracero program became infamous for exploiting farm workers. Domestic
laborers complained that it created competition from low-paid foreigners.
The opposition, led by the nascent United Farm Workers movement, helped
scuttle the program in 1964.

The H-2A program allows growers to seek foreign workers only after they
have tried and failed to find Americans to work their fields. Foreign
workers pay their own way from Mexico to the U.S., but the farmers who
employ them are required to reimburse them a reasonable sum for the
fare--and to pay their way back if they stay for the full length of their
contracts.

The growers must provide workers with housing that meets minimum standards
and accord them the same health and safety protections American workers
get. Growers must pay a wage that the government deems about equal to what
domestic workers would earn.

But as with the bracero program, enforcement of H-2A's safeguards has
became lax. Workers, who regard the worst the United States has to offer as
better than a jobless life at home, are reluctant to complain about
violations or abuse.

"The fundamental problem underlying the program is the degree of control
that the employer has over the workers, which is greater even than over
undocumented workers," said Mary Lee Hall, an attorney at the federally
funded Legal Services of North Carolina. "If you are undocumented and you
don't like your job, you can walk away. These workers are coming out of
economic necessity and place a premium on returning [to the United States]
and being able to bring back that money again."

The U.S. officials who oversee the program say that it is rife with
problems. "We see way too many violations, way too many instances of farm
workers not being afforded minimally decent standards and wages in the
workplace," the Labor Department's Fraser said.

For decades the program was used almost exclusively in Florida, where sugar
cane growers recruited Jamaicans for the excruciating job of cutting cane,
and in the Northeast, where apple growers had trouble finding help. In the
1980s, a series of lawsuits filed against sugar cane growers by farm worker
advocates contended that the Jamaican workers were subjected to
extraordinarily harsh conditions.

Partly in response to the pressure, the growers began to mechanize the
process of cutting cane and they stopped looking to Jamaica for their work
force. The few who persisted in bringing in H-2A workers were suddenly
subjected to considerably more government scrutiny. Most found that
navigating the growing maze of regulations did not pay.

That is when Eury got the idea that playing the middleman in the temporary
visa program could make him a fortune.

Using Knowledge of Rules to His Advantage

A wiry man who grew up in North Carolina's tobacco country, Eury had been a
state employee for years, representing farmers' interests at the North
Carolina Employment Security Commission. But in 1989, he and a friend were
arrested and charged with growing marijuana for sale. Eury paid a fine and
did community service. And he was fired.

At the time, a series of raids by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service at farms around the state had made North Carolina growers nervous
about hiring illegal immigrants. And they found that domestic workers were
not only in short supply but also had a tendency to quit in mid-season to
work for someone who paid more.

Eury, looking for work himself, saw his chance. Although he spoke no
Spanish and had never farmed an acre, he knew the convoluted H-2A
regulations inside out. He convinced 40 growers to pay him $500 per worker
to recruit 300 Mexicans under the H-2A program.

Eury's business has grown explosively. Several years ago, in a field within
view of his expansive home and gardens, he built the warehouse and the
hacienda-style offices where the operation is now based. He hired
Spanish-speaking staff to communicate with the workers. He began to
contribute extensively to local political campaigns and the Republican
National Committee and he built bridges to growers' associations with
lobbyists in Washington. Growers love Eury's business because they get
workers when they want them, for as long as they want them, without the
hassles of having to recruit them themselves. And they do not have to worry
that the INS will come knocking on their door.

'They're Standing Out There Waiting for Me'

"In this business, when you're priming tobacco, you need to know your
workers are gonna be there tomorrow. With local help, you just don't know,"
said Chester Pilson, who farms tobacco and sweet potatoes on 59 acres in
Cameron, N.C.

"These guys are here. They're in my camp. I get ready to go to work in the
morning, they're standing out there waiting for me. They're waiting to go.
They want to work. That's the great difference."

Eury remains anonymous to the workers, who refer to his operation only as
"La Asociacion." Among themselves, they exchange rumors of a "blacklist" of
workers who complain, workers who are not invited back. Few speak out
publicly.

Lorenzo Uscanga Campos, from a small town in the Mexican state of Veracruz,
was recruited to work for Eury by a man who charged them about $300 for the
privilege.

He paid another several hundred dollars for his transportation to North
Carolina. He took the job because the $6.54 an hour it pays is far more
than he could make at home.

He was promised travel money back home, although he has yet to receive it,
and he had to borrow the $300 from a loan shark who charged 20% interest.
Most of what he has earned so far has gone toward paying back the loan.

Meanwhile, he is lonely living with 30 other men in a rundown house with
holes in the wooden walls. The work in the tobacco fields is long and hard.
The pungent leaves sting his skin and sometimes the pesticide fumes and the
heat make him woozy.

Nevertheless, Uscanga has no doubts about his decision to come. "It's basic
economics," he said. "They told me how hard the work would be. I knew that
I'd be far away from my family and living with a lot of other men. But we
are soldiers. We are here to complete a mission. I am fighting for my family."

If Eury gets his way, it will soon get easier for growers to hire workers
like Uscanga. The draft of legislation that growers' lobbyists are
circulating would replace the housing requirement with a voucher system. It
would ease the requirement that growers first seek domestic workers for the
jobs.

No such legislation has been formally introduced in Congress this year,
although the Senate passed similar legislation last year. It was defeated
in the House.

Regardless of the legislative outcome, Eury's business shows no signs of
slowing.

Early one recent Friday morning, 200 Mexicans, exhausted and bedraggled
from three days on buses from deep in Mexico, were ushered inside the
warehouse in Vass by Eury's men. In front of them stood the imitation
stucco hacienda.

On a balcony hung with a Mexican tapestry emerged one of Eury's
supervisors, looking like a Mexican landowner of centuries ago. The workers
gazed up at him.

"Bienvenidos a Carolina del Norte," he boomed.

Inside, Eury smiled and gestured at what he had built.

"It's really the feeling of old Mexico, don't you think?" he said.

"I just wanted to make the workers feel at home."