Alex Stonehill
Yakima Valley workers
tend to an asparagus field.
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Wisit Kampilo's sparse black hair ruffles in a gust of March wind. Standing in a patch of dry yellow grass off a remote road in the Yakima Valley, he pulls a secondhand Oakland Raiders bomber jacket around his thin frame and looks back at the dingy three-bedroom manufactured home where he and 32 other Thai guest workers were housed together in the fall of 2004.
A few last moments of the day's patchy sun glint off the rusted chrome of a now-faded orange school bus that was used to transport him and his fellow workers to and from the surrounding apple orchards—the same orchards where Kampilo once believed he'd earn enough in two years of hard work and steady American wages to help lift his family, left back home in the rice paddies of northern Thailand, out of subsistence farming.
Like 120,000 other "unskilled" laborers temporarily brought into this country under H-2A (for agriculture) and H-2B (for other jobs) visas each year, Kampilo was romanced by the guest worker program, which provides a flexible, legalized foreign workforce to fill tough jobs that domestic workers don't seem to want. The program has proved popular: A recent New York Times/CBS News poll reported that 66 percent of the population supports an expanded national guest worker program.
"The recruiter said if you work hard, you can make $8.50 an hour. They told us we would have 28 months of work in America," says Kampilo, recalling the promises made by a Thai recruiter who visited the village of Lampang in 2004 on behalf of a California-based labor contracting company called Global Horizons. Kampilo, who at the time was making about $50 a month farming rice, did the math and decided to go to the U.S.
But there was a catch: The recruiter, working for a Thai company contracted by Global Horizons, demanded an $11,000 fee from Kampilo, saying that the money would in part be put toward transportation and housing in the U.S. once he arrived there. The workers would also be expected to pay an additional $3,000 fee when they began their second year of work.
It was a daunting sum to a Thai farmer, but Kampilo figured he would gross almost $40,000 over the course of the contract. To raise the fee, he and his family decided to mortgage his father's land and home. With the money he thought would eventually come to him, Kampilo hoped to pay back the loan, buy some land, and send his two sons to school.
Three years later, that land is still in hock, with monthly interest payments of $150 bearing down on his family back in Lampang. While in the States, Kampilo claims he was paid only $7 an hour and lived in substandard conditions, with his documents confiscated and movements strictly controlled.
Kampilo says that after just four months—at which point he had earned $4,500—Global Horizons representatives announced that the apple work had dried up and that he and his fellow guest workers would be sent to Hawaii, where there was purportedly another harvest. But the Thai workers were only ferried 15 miles up the interstate to a Yakima motel room before the news was broken that some of them, including Kampilo, would be sent back to Thailand for what was referred to as "a visit."
"Everybody was sad, and nobody knew what to do," says Kampilo. "We were all too scared to leave, and some of us thought that maybe what Global Horizons was telling us was true and we would come back in one or two months and keep working."
But that wouldn't be the case. Over the next nine months, Kampilo and fellow workers repeatedly called the recruiting offices in Bangkok, only to be told, "Just one more week, then there will be work."
Finally, in the fall of 2005, Global Horizons flew Kampilo back to Washington state and put him up at a motel in Moses Lake, where the waiting continued. After another week without work, Kampilo says he feared he would suddenly be sent back to Thailand again and fled, penniless and paperless, to the only people within a hundred miles who spoke his language: a Southeast Asian community in Eastern Washington where he hoped someone could help him find the work he desperately needed.
To some, this may sound like the hard-luck story of a naive foreigner. But variations of Kampilo's experience were allegedly shared by 193 other Thai workers who have joined in a federal class-action lawsuit against Global Horizons and the orchards that contracted with the company. Kampilo's story is also echoed in accounts of abuse of guest workers across the nation, from the seafood processing plants of Virginia to the perilous forests of Northern California.
While 75 percent of guest workers are Mexican, Asian workers, like the Thais brought to Eastern Washington by Global Horizons, are recruited for the guest worker program as well. Coming from countries with little economic opportunity, they are drawn to the comparatively high U.S. wages; a stint in America can potentially catapult a poor farmer in Central Mexico or Northern Thailand into a new economic class back home.
