In Mexico, a Bottleneck for Visas

Jesus Rojas wanted no part of the arduous trek across the Sonora desert and no part of life underground in the United States, working in the shadow of the law.

So when a nephew in his central Mexican town of Guanajuato introduced him to a recruiter for an American landscaping company that would sponsor him legally, the 52-year-old handyman jumped at the chance.

"I was one of the lucky ones," said Rojas, who ended up mowing lawns in Delaware every summer for five years. "I had a connection. That's the hardest part."

U.S. lawmakers are demanding that foreign workers who enter the United States do so legally. But they've taken few steps toward opening legal channels to Mexicans like Rojas, whose low-wage labor is in great demand in the United States and for whom the obstacles can be great.

Last year, the State Department issued fewer than 89,000 temporary work visas to low-wage Mexican workers like Rojas. That's a small fraction of the estimated 400,000 to 500,000 of Mexico's poorest who crossed the border illegally to find work.

"It shows the disconnect between the demand for labor here and the supply of legal workers from abroad," said Stuart Anderson, a former Immigration and Naturalization Service official who now heads the National Foundation for American Policy, a Washington-area research center that promotes expanded legal immigration.

Trying to work legally in the United States is a daunting task for people like Rojas. There are two classes of visas available for nonprofessional workers:

• One program, known as H-2B visas -- the category under which Rojas qualified -- is capped at 66,000 worldwide. These visas typically go to workers in industries with short, seasonal spikes, such as construction, hospitality and food service. Last year, 60,259 of them went to Mexicans like Rojas, according to U.S. consular officials.

• The other category, agricultural visas, known as H-2A, isn't capped. But industry experts say these visas are used infrequently because of an array of legal and bureaucratic obstacles. Last year only 31,892 were issued; 28,563 of them went to Mexicans.

Both the farm and seasonal-worker visas require advance arrangements with U.S. sponsors, who typically find laborers through Mexico-based recruiters. They, in turn, can charge prospective workers upward of $1,250, the amount Rojas paid to get his first landscaping job with the Brickman Group, a nationwide landscaping company.

"It requires money and connections," said Rachel Micah Jones, executive director of the Center for Migrant Rights, a law center in central Mexico. "The poorest are not the ones who are getting the jobs."

In Mexico City, the line to apply for visas snakes around the side of the U.S. Embassy most days and ends on palm-lined Paseo de la Reforma. Armed police stand guard at metal barriers where vendors hawk tortillas and sodas.

Most of the well-dressed people who start lining up by 7 a.m. are seeking tourist or business visas, which together numbered almost 800,000 last year.

Many of those looking for the nonprofessional H-2B visas have to travel to the U.S. consulate in Monterrey, hundreds of miles away.

Beyond the reach of most

Immigration advocates argue that an expanded guest-worker program would reduce illegal immigration to the United States, which has climbed since the 1960s, when the government ended a massive agricultural guest-worker initiative known as the Bracero Program.

The White House backs Senate legislation that would reopen the spigot of legal workers, but it faces stiff opposition from House Republicans who want to shore up border security first.

Critics of an expanded guest-worker program say it would do little but overwhelm the low-skill job market in the United States, pushing down wages for U.S. workers with high-school educations or less.

"I don't find any evidence of a labor shortage," said Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based research center devoted to immigration issues. "When I look at the data, it looks like we're letting in a lot of unskilled workers from Mexico."

Ordinary workers like Rojas who manage to find U.S. companies to sponsor them find out that the application process has to go through three departments of the U.S. government: Labor, State and Homeland Security.

The complicated legal procedure is often beyond the reach of all but the most resourceful and educated.

"It's very hard to get all the documents and the visas needed to migrate to work legally," said Karina Arias of Sin Fronteras (Without Borders), a migrant-rights group in Mexico City.