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Research: 'Ghost Workers' Common in Migrant Farm Work
USAgNet - 06/30/2016

New research by Sarah Horton, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado Denver, reveals that employers in agricultural industries often take advantage of migrants' inability to work legally by making their employment contingent upon working under the false or borrowed identity documents provided by employers.

Horton's study, published this month in the Anthropology of Work Review, shows that many employers provide employees who do not have legal status with the valid work authorization documents of their friends or family.

Farm workers call this practice, which essentially renders them invisible to the state and federal governments, "working as a ghost."

Horton shows that by providing workers with borrowed documents, many agribusiness companies disguise their employment of undocumented immigrants from authorities, hide the use of child labor, and suppress worker's compensation claims.

This kind of "identity theft" among migrant workers made news recently when a federal appeals court ruled that law enforcement can continue to prosecute undocumented immigrants for working with forged, loaned, or stolen documents. Horton's research highlights the role of employers in this process, as they engage in what she calls "identity masking."

Based on over 10 years of interviews and fieldwork with migrant farm workers in California's Central Valley, Horton has identified three main instances in which identity masking occurs.

Employers often use identity masking to avoid a federal immigration raid or audit. In order to evade federal scrutiny, some labor supervisors furnish undocumented workers with the valid documents of friends and family.

Horton's research shows that labor supervisors also use identity masking to mask the hire of a second group of unauthorized employees - minors. In California, children under 18 are legally ineligible to work more than eight hours a day or 48 hours a week, yet during the summer harvest season, workers routinely work up to 70 hours a week. In order to disguise the violation of state child labor laws, labor supervisors often require that minors work under the valid documents of adults.

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