Workers opting for Canada

Via the Miami Herald

BY ALFREDO CORCHADO
El Universal


Some Mexicans are bypassing U.S. for Canada´s guest worker program.

SAN MARCOS DE ABAJO, Guanajuato - He´ll miss Dallas - a place he once worked - but not enough to return anytime soon. Migrant worker Reyes Suaste has discovered Canada.

This year he´ll head way north to pick chili and cucumbers. Dallas is much closer to his home in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, but there are other aspects of the U.S. immigrant experience he is happy to do without: "I won´t miss being treated like a criminal and not knowing when I can return home," he said.

Suaste, 27, his brothers, Alejandro, 30, and Eusebio, 25, and more than a dozen other men from Guanajuato are heading to Quebec - not with the help of ruthless, pricey smugglers known as coyotes, but on airplanes with assigned seating and iced drinks. The men will join more than 13,000 other Mexicans in Canada as part of a guest worker program for agricultural workers.

Proposals for a guest worker program have drawn fierce opposition in the United States, but proponents say the Canada program offers some big advantages: workers are treated better, and they return home at the end of their assigned stay.

Alejandro Suaste tries to grab a sick rooster at his home in Mexico. He and his two brothers will be going to Canada for seasonal agricultural jobs as guest workers. As U.S. President George W. Bush´s proposed guest worker program takes center stage in the congressional debate this week, authorities in Mexico insist their 32-year-old pact with Canada could serve as a model for a similar program with the United States.

"This program is about meeting supply and demand," said Miguel Gutiérrez Tinoco of Mexico´s Foreign Relations Secretariat, which helps oversee the program with Canada. In 32 years, Tinoco said, "I know of no one who has violated the agreement and stayed behind. ... We can do the same thing at a larger scale with the United States."

Others disagree, saying it is unrealistic to view the Canada-Mexico agricultural program as a possible model because of vastly different situations. While the Canadian agricultural worker program takes in a few thousand workers a year, the United States has as many as 6 million Mexican illegal immigrants.

Bruce Goldstein, executive director of the Washington-based Farmworker Justice Fund, a farmworker advocacy group, said that any agreement between the U.S. and Mexico must "include an overall comprehensive component," referring to proposed legislation that would offer workers a path toward legal status.

"We´re a nation of immigrants, not a nation of guest workers," he said.

In Ottawa, Mario Rondeau, Canada´s acting director of the foreign worker program, called it "a considerable success."

"It´s hard in the summertime, it´s difficult to find Canadians to do these jobs," Rondeau said. "The program has been a success."

He declined to speculate on whether such a program would work between the United States and Mexico.

Meanwhile, on a bright spring day in San Marcos, Elías Martínez, 33, was telling the Suaste brothers about Canadian hospitality.

"You´ll find that Canadians will actually make you feel welcomed, like you belong there and you have a purpose," he said. "I once had car problems, and a Canadian couple stopped and offered help and even took me out for a sandwich."

Martínez has worked in Quebec for five years, picking cucumbers and melons for GIFAR Co., an agribusiness. He routinely works the planting and harvesting seasons, allowing him to go home to his family five or six months a year with his pockets stuffed with cash.

ONCE IN DALLAS

Before he started working in Canada, he used to pack a small plastic bag with some clothes, a water jug, his wife´s burritos, a baseball cap and comfortable running shoes and head for the yards and roofs of Dallas. He made good money, he said, but he hated the journey, filled with abusive smugglers and days of walking along the banks of the Rio Grande or in the desert, not knowing where he was or when he´d see his wife and three children again.

"As an illegal immigrant, you´re also always vulnerable," he said. "And in Dallas I was always looking over my shoulder to see if the migra [Border Patrol] was behind me. And then all the personal attacks against us."

The Suaste brothers nodded their heads in agreement. These men, at least, said they have no intention of ever abandoning their homeland. The three live on the same plot of family land with their parents, wives and children. Their three homes - built with money earned in Dallas and beyond - are clustered together.

"We don´t want to be anybody´s burden," said Alejandro. "We just want to work, help feed our families back home, and return again without the dangers of crossing the border."

Bush has said matching foreigners with U.S. jobs that Americans won´t do will help "bring people out of the shadows of American society so they don´t have to fear the life they live."

The Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program allows Canadian farms to recruit foreign workers if they can´t find Canadians to harvest their crops. It began in 1974 with only a handful of foreign workers. These days, there were so many Mexican workers in Ontario alone - 7,200 - that last year the Mexican government set up a new consulate office to meet their needs.

In Canada, workers are provided with housing and transportation. Employers pay for the plane ticket and then deduct some of those costs from the employee´s paycheck. The workers return home at the end of the harvest season with a letter from their employer either inviting them to return next season or not. Officials say 75 percent to 80 percent of workers do return.

President Vicente Fox is calling on Canada to expand the program.

"We should move out from agriculture to other services and other kinds of jobs, and we are working on this with the Canadian government," Fox told the Toronto-based Globe and Mail newspaper.

CANADA´S NEEDS

In Toronto, David Rosenblatt, managing director of Rosenblatt & Associates, a recruiting agency, said Canada´s birth rate of 1.5 children per female, an aging population and a brain drain of people leaving for the U.S. means that the country faces pressing challenges.

"We need skilled Mexican workers in the mining, steel, oil and gas exploration industries. We need waiters, nurses, cooks, construction workers, landscapers. Canada needs Mexican workers," he said. "The U.S. loss is our gain,"

Rosenblatt said he´s developing video resumés of Mexican workers to show to prospective employers in Canada.

"If you look at the world, Mexico makes the most sense for Canada," he said. "No. 1, if you´re a Mexican you don´t need a visa to come in. Second, Mexico is in North America. Third, many of the Mexicans we talk to speak English, and more importantly, they are extremely hardworking people."

To be sure, Canada isn´t for everybody. Martínez warns workers of the cold weather, even in April, and the winters that can begin in mid-September. Then there´s the double language barrier, with both French and English spoken, and cultural isolation. "I understand a little English from my days in Dallas," said Martínez. "But when they speak French, I´m lost. Sometimes you wish you were in Texas."

Workers on his crews work seven days a week and earn 650 Canadian dollars, which is worth about 6,250 pesos. On Sundays they work a short day, six hours, so they can wash clothes, buy groceries and maybe write a letter home. The Suaste brothers, two of whom have worked in Atlanta; Homestead, Florida.; and Waxahachie and Ennis, Texas; were unfazed by the demands.

"We´re not scared of hard work," Alejandro said. "We just want some respect for the sweat of our work."



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