The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is holding a field briefing in Birmingham, Ala., on the impact of state anti-immigrant laws, like Arizona’s infamous S.B. 1070 and Alabama’s H.B. 56. The commission describes itself “as an independent, bipartisan, fact-finding federal agency, [whose] mission is to inform the development of national civil rights policy and enhance enforcement of federal civil rights laws.” It came as quite a shock to see groups that are not only vehemently anti-immigrant but have been identified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center on the witness list, including Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). 

The H-2B guest worker visa program is plagued by fraud and abuse. Designed to allow employers to hire temporary guest workers for nonagricultural labor, the H-2B program lacks provisions, which would protect workers from wage theft, forced labor, predatory recruitment fees and other forms of exploitation. Guest workers in the United States are legally tied to their employer and are often forced to assume crippling debts for the opportunity to pursue low-wage work.

An Arkansas agriculture company has agreed to pay $1.5 million in back wages to 1,500 guest workers in a settlement with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The group filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the workers in 2007.

The AFL-CIO, together with Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM), the Southern Poverty Law Center and other organizations, filed a complaint today against the United States under the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC) on behalf of immigrant workers brought to the United States under the H-2B visa program.