Immigration Reform News: Lawyers Helping Mexican Migrants Sue Abusive Employers In The US

Lawyers on both sides of the border are helping immigrant workers who have suffered from abuses from their abusive employers, ranging from withheld wages, exploitation and trafficking.“For decades attorneys have seen these kinds of abuses against workers,” Staci Jonas, a managing attorney of the human trafficking team at Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid, “what’s changed in recent years is the realization that this is more than just a wage violation or a human rights complaint. It’s something that there’s a name for: modern day slavery.”

According to csmonitor, more lawyers, NGOs, migrant advocates and other groups on Mexico and in U.S. have worked together to short circuit a guest-worker system that relies on laborers not knowing that they are entitled to legal opportunities.These advocacy group constantly help farm workers to pursue legal action and to educate workers them about their human rights while working in land of opportunity.

The investigative report tells the story of how some of these workers feared they would be blacklisted by recruiters or that the government wouldn’t issue them future work visas. “The message needs to be clear to US employers that workers aren’t disposable," Cathleen Caron, executive director of the Global Workers Justice Alliance, which provides “portable justice” to migrant laborers said to the website," if you don’t have people working in the country of origin to empower workers to access justice at home, [US] employers assume they can send them home and silence them."