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The U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) H-2A guest worker program plays a critical role in supporting agricultural employment and production in the United States. Under Executive Order 13985, President Joe Biden has provided an opportunity for federal agencies to assess equity challenges under their purview. In this report, the researchers investigate equity issues related to legal oversight of the H-2A program. Currently there are two potential avenues for legal oversight of the H-2A program: (1) oversight at the stage when employers submit a job clearance order seeking workers and (2) oversight after DOL has approved employers for H-2A visas. Focusing on the latter stage, there are three ways that the DOL Wage and Hour Division (WHD) does or can conduct oversight: (1) rely on workers and advocates to submit complaints about issues, (2) randomly target high-risk employers, and (3) strategic targeting, or using data to try to identify high-risk employers and subject them to heightened oversight. In the paper the researchers outline how all forms of enforcement beyond random targeting rely on workers and advocates to submit complaints, but also show how past research has identified barriers employees face in escalating complaints to federal authorities. Due to these barriers, they investigate whether local “trusted messengers”—or organizations that conduct proactive outreach to workers—can uncover issues that are not reported to agencies. They partner with a legal service provider, Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid (TRLA), which delivers legal services to H-2A workers and conducts extensive outreach to workers. Their research investigates whether TRLA outreach uncovers issues that are not reported federally. If they do, partnership with such organizations could improve both complaint-driven enforcement by supplementing complaints to federal authorities with complaints to local organizations and strategic targeting by providing an additional “high risk” label for models to predict.

The researchers three main findings are (1) that WHD investigations and TRLA intake records investigate different employers; (2) predictive modeling is useful at the nationwide scale for predicting WHD investigations, but less useful when restricted to states within TRLA’s catchment area or when investigating differences between federal and local enforcement; and (3) the text addendum for employers who applied for H-2A certification suggest that criminal history-focused requirements can predict later investigation. Limitations in research include the unit of analysis as employer-job dyad rather than employers. This method averts aggregation bias, but it can mask some high-risk employers. In addition, while their models analyze demographics of the surrounding Census tract, they do not have the demographic information of each employer’s workforce, an important component of equity. Finally, pooling data over time can mask important year-to-year variation; this could be remedied with a larger sample size.

Citation

Johnson, R. A., Shackney, E., Davis, C., Anapolle, G., Ma, Y., Liu, Y.-C., Guage, C. (2021). Can we Use Local Outreach to Improve Equity in Federal Oversight? A Case Study with the H-2A Visa Program. Chief Evaluation Office, U.S. Department of Labor.

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This study was part of CEO’s Summer Data Challenge on Equity and Underserved Communities, and was produced outside of CEO’s standard research development process.