Professor Mary Hoopes, Resisting Precarious Labor -- Georgia Law Review (forthcoming)

Professor Mary S. Hoopes's article, Resisting Precarious Labor, will be published in the Georgia Law Review., 60 Georgia L. Rev. The article presents the first case study of a coalition between migrant legal services and racial justice advocacy groups based on labor cases filed in the Mississippi Delta. 

Abstract of Resisting Precarious Labor

This Article presents the first case study of a coalition between migrant legal services and racial justice advocacy groups in the South. The conventional “immigrant threat” narrative places U.S. and foreign workers in opposition to one another, claiming that noncitizens take the jobs of vulnerable low-wage U.S. workers. Indeed, this narrative recently took center stage in President Trump’s campaign rhetoric and continues to drive the administration’s approach to labor and immigration policy. At first blush, the strategy at the core of this case study appears to promote this narrative by claiming that employers discriminated against U.S. workers by hiring foreign guest workers. A closer examination, however, reveals just the opposite—advocates instead aligned in a powerful strategy to skillfully resist this framing. In this nascent movement, migrant legal services joined a racial justice advocacy group in a series of cases on behalf of Black U.S. citizens who claim that employers unlawfully replaced them with white, foreign guest workers. In separate litigation, the racial justice advocates in turn joined migrant legal services as co-counsel to argue that employers violated the rights of the noncitizen workers. In each of these cases, the coalition adopted a framing that enforcing the rights of all workers is ultimately better for both U.S. and noncitizen workers. 

Drawing on semi-structured interviews and a review of court records and legislative history, I argue that these cases are a powerful manifestation of the dual exploitation inherent in the temporary H-2A guest worker program. In essence, this program leads employers to prefer foreign workers because of their intersectional identities—the combination of guest workers’ precarious legal status and their racial identities leads employers to assume that they will tolerate extreme violations of their labor rights. At the same time, the program also exploits a long-marginalized population within American agriculture: Black farmworkers, a group at risk of disappearing altogether. While advocates and scholars have long complained that the H-2A program exploits foreign workers, this work been less attentive to the equally pernicious effect on U.S. workers. The cases in the Mississippi Delta expose this vulnerability—Black workers whose lineage includes decades of farming in the region are vulnerable to being replaced completely by foreign workers. 

Resisting attempts to further fragment their power by positioning them in opposition to one another, advocates for H-2A workers and low-wage Black U.S. workers aligned in these cases, realizing the importance of collectively challenging an oppressive system. As I argue, the Delta cases invite a critical conversation within immigration and labor scholarship and reveal an important means of surmounting the immigrant threat narrative and building a multiracial labor movement.