Are Work Visas Facilitating Anti-Black Discrimination in the Mississippi Delta?

There’s a rural employer within the Mississippi Delta, one of the poverty-stricken components of the U.S. The employer (a catfish farm) had a alternative between two workforces with the next traits:

An off-the-cuff viewer would conclude, rapidly, that it could be extra pricey when it comes to journey and wages and extra tedious (the paperwork) to rent Group B. The journey within the Group B case features a journey that’s each from one facet of the Atlantic to a different, and it crosses the equator; most overseas agricultural staff within the U.S., are from this facet of each the ocean and the equator, coming from comparatively close by locations like Mexico and Jamaica.

There’s a sixth variable, not proven within the desk above: The 5 individuals who obtained the roles in query are white; they’re H-2As introduced in from South Africa. Doing the hiring was Harris Russell Farms, a presumably white-owned agency positioned in Sunflower County.

So the questions come up:

1. Can an H-2A employer use that program to rent white staff, even at appreciable expense, as an alternative of Black ones?
2. Ought to the employer have that possibility?

The reply to the primary query is a ringing sure, the South Africans are right here at Harris Russell Farms. The reply to the second question — a coverage query — ought to be no.

I fault the Labor Division — the place I used to be as soon as the assistant to the secretary for Farm Labor — for letting this occur within the first place. Some journeyman adjudicator, within the midst of coping with numerous purposes, didn’t discover the odd tilt of Harris Russell Farms, and stamped his approval together with the remaining.

However that was then.

Now, given the information protection that this difficulty has acquired, in Law360 columns amongst others, the division ought to shake itself, and switch down any future purposes alongside these traces.

Will the division achieve this? Will the native congressman, Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the near-regal chairman of each the January 6 Committee and the Homeland Safety Committee, elevate hell with the secretary of Labor? He ought to.

How the Story Broke. All of this got here to public consideration when 5 former staff on the catfish farm filed a federal lawsuit saying that they not solely weren’t employed, due to the South African 5, however that that they had been paid $8.50 an hour, whereas the newly arrived aliens have been paid $11.88 an hour in 2021.

In response to the Law360 piece, the employees and the employer have agreed to a monetary settlement whose phrases will not be public. The employees have been represented by each the Mississippi Middle for Justice and Southern Migrant Authorized Providers. The case is 4:22-cv-00066 within the PACER recordsdata.

Sunflower County. Sunflower County is precisely the type of place the place there isn’t any want for overseas staff. It’s within the Mississippi Delta, within the flat nation east of that river. The 2020 census discovered that 73.8 p.c of the inhabitants is Black. The p.c of individuals in poverty was 34.8 p.c, or greater than 3 times the proportion within the nation.

Equally the median worth of an owner-occupied home was $93,000 in that yr, a fraction of the median of the nation as entire, which was $230,000.

If you happen to want staff there, they’re clearly accessible.

A few of my older readers might recall that this was the house county of the late, unlamented segregationist Sen. James Eastland, (a nominal D) who was for a lot of, a few years each chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and its immigration subcommittee (which not often met).