Many seasonal, migrant farmworkers have an H-2A visa. The Temporary Agricultural Guest Worker Program (H-2A) is part of the Immigration and Nationality Act. It allows agricultural employers who anticipate a shortage of U.S. workers to bring nonimmigrant foreign workers to the U.S. for a short period of time. The major agencies involved with the program are the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division and the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Immigration law is very complicated. The resources below focus on the H-2A program, immigration law generally, issues of migration and belonging and immigration history.
U. S. Immigration Made Easy by
Want to live, work, or travel in the United States? U.S. Immigration Made Easy has helped tens of thousands of people get a visa, green card, or other immigration status. You'll learn: whether you and your family qualify for a short-term visa, permanent U.S. residence, or protection from deportation how to obtain, fill out, and submit the necessary forms and documents insider tips on dealing with bureaucratic officials, delays, and denials strategies for overcoming low income and other immigration barriers, and how to select the right attorney. U.S. Immigration Made Easy provides detailed descriptions of application processes and helps you avoid traps that might destroy your chances. There's also an immigration eligibility self-quiz, which helps you match your background and skills to a likely category of visa or green card. The 19th edition is completely updated to cover recent legal and fee changes including Trump administration efforts to end TPS for various countries and end DACA. NOTE: Does not cover naturalization.
Race, Criminal Justice, and Migration Control: Enforcing the Boundaries of Belonging by
The criminalization of migration is heavily patterned by race. By placing race at the centre of its analysis, this volume examines, questions, and explains the growing intersection between criminal justice and migration control. Through the lens of race, we see how criminal justice and migration enmesh in order to exclude, stop, and excise racialized citizens and non-citizens from societies across the world within, beyond, and along borders. Race and the meaning of race in relation to citizenship and belonging is excavated through the chapters presented in the book, and the book as a whole, thereby transforming the way we think about migration. Neatly organized in four sections, the book begins with chapters that present a conceptual analysis of race, borders, and social control, moving to the institutions that make up and shape the criminal justice and migration complex. The remaining chapters are convened around the key sites where criminal justice and migration control intersect: policing, courts, and punishment. Together the volume presents a critical and timely analysis of how race shapes and complicates mobility and how racism is enabled and reanimated when criminal justice and migration control coalesce.
Beyond the Borderlands: Migration and Belonging in the United States and Mexico by
Over the last three decades, migration from Mexico to the United States has moved beyond the borderlands to diverse communities across the country, with the most striking transformations in American suburbs and small towns. This study explores the challenges encountered by Mexican families as they endeavor to find their place in the U.S. by focusing on Kennett Square, a small farming village in Pennsylvania known as the "Mushroom Capital of the World." In a highly readable account based on extensive fieldwork among Mexican migrants and their American neighbors, Debra Lattanzi Shutika explores the issues of belonging and displacement that are central concerns for residents in communities that have become new destinations for Mexican settlement. Beyond the Borderlands also completes the circle of migration by following migrant families as they return to their hometown in Mexico, providing an illuminating perspective of the tenuous lives of Mexicans residing in, but not fully part of, two worlds.
Immigration Stories by
This publication includes cases that depict the Supreme Court's broad deference to the political branches in the immigration realm, the so-called "plenary power doctrine." Selected cases are presented in chronological order, beginning with the Supreme Court's consideration of the Chinese Exclusion Acts of the 1880s and 1890s. The book then examines how the Cold War tested the constitutional limits of the government's plenary power over immigration, and how "phantom constitutional norms" were later used to defeat the government's broadest claims. Other cases explore the immigration enforcement system and the difficulty of balancing the demands of enforcement against other societal goals.
Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600-2000 by
This book reconceptualizes the history of US immigration and citizenship law from the colonial period to the beginning of the twenty-first century by joining the histories of immigrants to those of Native Americans, African Americans, women, Asian Americans, Latino/a Americans and the poor. Parker argues that during the earliest stages of American history, being legally constructed as a foreigner, along with being subjected to restrictions on presence and movement, was not confined to those who sought to enter the country from the outside, but was also used against those on the inside. Insiders thus shared important legal disabilities with outsiders. It is only over the course of four centuries, with the spread of formal and substantive citizenship among the domestic population, a hardening distinction between citizen and alien, and the rise of a powerful centralized state, that the uniquely disabled legal subject we recognize today as the immigrant has emerged.
Started in 1977 by veteran Chicano movement activists Cipriano Ferrel, Ramón Ramírez, Juan Mendoza, and Larry Kleinman, who among them collectively had experience including work with the UFW and the Colegio César Chávez, the Willamette Valley Immigration Project provided free legal aid to Latinx workers throughout the Willamette Valley, especially in the Woodburn area. Responding to mass deportations happening in farms, factories, and communities across the state, the WVIP provided aid to all facing immigration troubles regardless of their official immigration status and organized political action in support of comprehensive immigration reform. Responding to the need for action defending Latinx laborers beyond legal aid, the WVIP began looking to expand its horizons into labor, housing, and political action by the mid-1980s.
Learn more by visiting UO Libraries Special Collection & Archives and check out digitized primary materials:
The major laws protecting farm workers are the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Safety laws include the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. Individual states may have laws that protect agricultural workers that participate in organizations that attempt to collectively bargain, and states may have worker's compensation laws that cover agricultural workers.
Of Forests and Fields: Mexican labor in the Pacific Northwest by
2016 Choice Oustanding Academic Title Just looking at the Pacific Northwest's many verdant forests and fields, it may be hard to imagine the intense work it took to transform the region into the agricultural powerhouse it is today. Much of this labor was provided by Mexican guest workers, Tejano migrants, and undocumented immigrants, who converged on the region beginning in the mid-1940s. Of Forests and Fields tells the story of these workers, who toiled in the fields, canneries, packing sheds, and forests, turning the Pacific Northwest into one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country. Employing an innovative approach that traces the intersections between Chicana/o labor and environmental history, Mario Sifuentez shows how ethnic Mexican workers responded to white communities that only welcomed them when they were economically useful, then quickly shunned them. He vividly renders the feelings of isolation and desperation that led to the formation of ethnic Mexican labor organizations like the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos Noroeste (PCUN) farm workers union, which fought back against discrimination and exploitation. Of Forests and Fields not only extends the scope of Mexican labor history beyond the Southwest, it offers valuable historical precedents for understanding the struggles of immigrant and migrant laborers in our own era. Sifuentez supplements his extensive archival research with a unique set of first-hand interviews, offering new perspectives on events covered in the printed historical record. A descendent of ethnic Mexican immigrant laborers in Oregon, Sifuentez also poignantly demonstrates the links between the personal and political, as his research leads him to amazing discoveries about his own family history... www.mariosifuentez.com
Farmworker advocacy organizations can offer a lot of information on issues affecting agricultural workers. Be aware that because they are advocacy groups, they may be biased towards their cause. Two major U.S. farmworker groups that focus on legal issues are
Oregon organizations:
1501 Kincaid Street
Eugene, OR 97403
P: 541-346-3053
F: 541-346-3485