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Without Visas, Carnival Workers Are Trapped at Home in Mexico

By Paulina Villegas and Victoria Burnett, NY Times, July 22, 2017

TLAPACOYAN, Mexico--Francisco Trujillo heads north each summer to do a job that few Americans want: a four-month stint operating carnival rides, mopping up vomit and sleeping in a cramped trailer with other workers.

His annual journey to the United States was a routine shared by many in the shabby city of Tlapacoyan, about 190 miles east of Mexico City in the hills of Veracruz state, which supplies two-thirds or more of the 7,000 foreign workers hired by America’s amusement sector each year.

This year, however, Mr. Trujillo, 32, is not selling tickets for the Super Shot vertical drop or doling out funnel cakes. Caught in a debate over how many visas the United States government should issue to seasonal workers, he is among thousands of Mexicans who are stuck at home, unable to get permission to work across the border.

“They say we are taking jobs from the Americans,” said Mr. Trujillo, who has worked the last four carnival seasons in New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Carnival work is “really hard,” he said, adding, “Americans don’t want to do it.”

As American politicians and business owners wrangle over the limits on the number of H-2B visas for unskilled, nonagricultural workers, Tlapacoyan (pronounced tla-pa-COY-an), with about 60,000 residents in the town and surrounding area, offers a glimpse of how the impasse has stung in Mexico. Last year, Mexicans received more than 70 percent of the approximately 84,000 H-2B visas issued by the United States to migrant workers worldwide.

The lack of visas has denied hundreds of families in the city an annual income that saves them from living hand-to-mouth and deepened the problems of a town struggling, like much of the state, with high crime rates. Of an estimated 4,600 to 6,000 residents who normally work the carnival season according to city officials and recruiters, about a third have been left behind.

Instead, they are selling tacos and driving taxis, or working for just over $1 an hour in the tangerine and banana fields that surround the town. Some use Google Translate and WhatsApp to check their visa status with their former American employers.

Mr. Trujillo is working as a driver for a construction crew, earning about $85 a week, less than a quarter of his carnival salary.

He used savings from his time in the United States to buy a plot of land and build a one-bedroom house, even splurging on a $350 stroller for his son, now 22 months old. This year, however, “there will be no proper Christmas, no presents, no turkey,” Mr. Trujillo said. He abandoned plans to take his son to a safari park in nearby Puebla state for his birthday. “I can barely make it day to day.”

Martín Peña, 34, who has spent two seasons with an Ohio-based amusement company but has not received a visa this year, said he had put off plans to buy a couch and a washing machine for his mother.

From the United States, Mr. Peña sent home as much as $300 a week from his take-home pay of about $345, eating fried chicken or cooking eggs with chili and tomato to save money. He tore down the wooden shack where he lives with his parents on the edge of Tlapacoyan and built cinder block walls. He also paid for his father’s treatment for typhoid.

As wrenching as it was to work far from his family, he said, managing without extra income was worse. “There is this anxiety that doesn’t go away,” he said.

The visa problems began in March when the summer allotment of H-2Bs ran out, leaving some American businesses scrambling for people to clean hotel rooms, run Ferris wheels and fish for shrimp. Demand for visas was high, said recruiters and experts, and Congress did not renew a provision that had excluded returning H-2B workers from counting against the total quota of 66,000 visas, which is split evenly between summer and winter.

Lawmakers in May then granted the government authority to more or less double the cap on this year’s quota to save “American business from irreparable harm,” and the White House on July 17 authorized an increase of 15,000 visas, bringing the total number available close to the number issued last year.

But business owners who have been waiting to bring seasonal workers said the requirements to apply for visas were onerous and that the extra visas were too few, too late.

Deborah Murray, one of the owners of Murray Brothers, a carnival company based in Cincinnati, said she had scaled back this year because she could not muster 30 reliable workers. She applied months ago for 12 visas for Mexican workers; she received four last week.

“You can never really recover,” said Ms. Murray, who spoke by telephone from a Cincinnati church festival where she said she was running five rides instead of the usual 10. “I’ve been working since April and I’m a week from August,” she said. “The season is gone.”

Despite accusations of underhanded or illegal practices by employers, several carnival workers who were waiting for visas this month said they enjoyed the carnival circuit.

Yes, there were days that stretched into the wee hours, patrons who vomited on the Zipper (a ride that involves being spun upside down in cages) and the occasional racist outburst from a parent whose child was not tall enough to board a ride. But there was also the chance to learn English, pick up some trendy, hand-me-down sneakers and leave the violence of Mexico behind.

Eduardo Torres, 25, who has worked two seasons for Murray Brothers in fairs across Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, said he had never imagined traveling by airplane or visiting big cities. He marveled at what he called the “cool stuff” everywhere and picked up all sorts of used clothing. “It was a dream come true,” he said.

For Mr. Trujillo, whose favorite job was serving lemonade and hamburgers and learning English in the process--”like a little school”--the carnival became a window onto a more promising existence.

In the United States, said Mr. Trujillo, “if you dream about 15 things, you can buy five.”

In Tlapacoyan, he said, you dream, too. But when you open your eyes, of the things you dreamed about, “not one of them is there.”

#Mexico #Mexican workers #Tlapacoyan #carnival workers #H-2B visas

31 Official Trailer 2 (2016) - Rob Zombie Horror Movie

31 Official Trailer 2 (2016) – Rob Zombie Horror Movie

Starring: Malcolm McDowell, Richard Brake, Jeff Daniel Phillips 31 Official Trailer 2 (2016) – Rob Zombie Horror Movie

Five carnival workers are kidnapped and held hostage in an abandoned, Hell-like compound where they are forced to participate in a violent game, the goal of which is to survive twelve hours against a gang of sadistic clowns.

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In many cases, federal law requires employers who use H2B workers to pay them an hourly salary known as the “prevailing wage.” To set those hourly benchmarks, the Department of Labor conducts surveys to determine minimum wages paid for certain types of work in different parts of the country. But companies that operate rides and concessions at fairs have long argued that because they travel through geographical areas that have different prevailing wage rates, it is less burdensome for them from a record-keeping standpoint to pay workers a weekly salary, which averages about $350. Paying workers on a weekly, rather than hourly, basis assures a predictable income that allows workers to budget how much to send home, said Robert Johnson, president of the Outdoor Amusement Business Association, a trade group in Winter Park, Fla. He added that employers treated carnival workers fairly and provided them with good income. But Anita Sinha, a lawyer with the Immigrant Justice Clinic at American University, said companies used the weekly approach to avoid paying laborers, who often work far more than 40 hours a week, the money they deserve. Other strategies are employed to reduce pay, including charging laborers fees for housing, said Ms. Sinha, co-author of a 2013 report critical of the carnival industry’s treatment of H2B workers.

Union Accused of Betraying Migrant Carnival Workers - The New York Times

#labor #unions #carnival workers #capitalism