(Mt. Vernon, WA) An unexpected turn of events surprised activists protesting an open house at a newly-remodeled farmworker housing facility in downtown Mt. Vernon on Aug. 9.
WAFLA, a non-profit farm labor organization, is renovating the Casa Grande building to provide quality housing for local farmworkers as well as foreign workers here on guest worker visas, and was welcoming local leaders and the public to visit the recently-updated apartments.
The protesters, falsely claiming the guest worker visa program is harmful for farmworkers, were surprised when WAFLA’s leader, Enrique Gastelum, came out to speak directly to them.
“They had signs up saying, you know, ‘We don’t want WAFLA,’ ‘H-2A is slave labor,’ ‘H-2A steals domestic worker jobs,’” Gastelum told host Dillon Honcoop on the Save Family Farming Show.
“It was clear from them showing up, and their signage, they have either not researched how the actual program works themselves, they have not researched all of the state and federal regulations that go into this and all the oversight, and they’ve been fed some narratives that were just quite frankly not true,” said Gastelum.
But, rather than sparking a confrontation, Gastelum did something unexpected: he invited them in for a tour of the facility, shocking the demonstrators. Seeing the remodeled space allowed the protestors to visualize the care and intentionality that goes into providing for farm labor.
“There was at least one person that said, ‘Wow, this place looks nicer than where I live!’” Gastelum told Honcoop. “Another one said, ‘I had no clue this was the type of farmworker housing that was available.’”
Gastelum said the protesters had many questions about the federal H-2A guest worker program, demonstrating the lack of knowledge about the program that was behind the false accusations of their protest.
“A majority of them left, I think, with their eyes opened up,” said Gastelum.
The H-2A program helps fill the gap created by Washington state agriculture’s labor shortage, allowing guest workers from foreign countries the opportunity to come here for a set contract term and earn exponentially more income than they can typically receive in their home countries.
The program requires farms employing guest workers to fully cover their transportation and housing costs, in addition to making sure no domestic workers’ opportunities are harmed.