The Outsourcing of Migrant Labor Recruitment and Management at the State Level

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 19. Immigrant organizations

Abstract

Each year, hundreds of thousands of temporary foreign workers come to the United States through programs like H-2A, which brings agricultural laborers to work on American farms. These workers navigate a complex system of intermediaries—recruiters, labor contractors, documentation services, and transportation companies—each adding requirements and paperwork to the process. This system has emerged from a policy choice: U.S. states have increasingly outsourced the recruitment and management of temporary migrant workers to private companies, justified by claims of efficiency and reduced government bureaucracy.
This study examines whether outsourcing temporary migrant labor recruitment and management to private actors reduces bureaucratic burden and increases efficiency, as policymakers claim, or produces different effects. Drawing on U.S. Department of Labor Foreign Labor Certification Data from 2008 to 2023, we analyze the H-2A temporary agricultural worker program across four states—California, Colorado, Florida, and North Carolina—selected for their significant agricultural production, substantial reliance on H-2A workers, and variations in market structure and program implementation.
Our preliminary findings challenge assumptions about efficiency and public-private boundaries, and set the stage for a theoretical argument we term bureaucratic rentierism: the extraction of fees for access to paperwork and red tape. We propose that bureaucratization and extraction are mutually compounding processes. More bureaucratic requirements generate opportunities for brokers and facilitators to insert themselves into the process, while these intermediaries create additional hurdles to justify their presence. Our DOL data documents the structural proliferation of intermediaries across all four states; subsequent analyses linking fee schedules, legal cases, and worker surveys will test whether this structural complexity translates into systematic extraction. We argue that these processes have likely contributed to greater worker vulnerability and precarity by shifting risks and costs from states and employers to workers.

Authors

• David A. Cook-Martín, University of North Carolina

• Valentina Serrano Salomon, University of Colorado-Boulder

• Katharina Klaunig, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill