Dr. Sandy Smith-Nonini, assistant professor of Anthropology & Sociology at Elon, gave an invited lecture on immigration reform on Thursday March 4th in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The title of her talk was “Southern Hospitality on the Skids: Lessons for Immigration Reform from a study of the Federal H2A Guestworker Program in North Carolina.” Dr. Smith-Nonini warned of the risks of using the H2A program as a model in designing immigration reform in the United States, given the Bush Administration’s recently announced interest in expanding a foreign worker program.
The current H2A program in North Carolina has many shortcomings, including poor federal and state oversight of worker protections, high expense for worker participants, a poor system of verifying growers’ need for foreign labor, and unnecessarily long contract periods with insufficient work in the last month, leading many workers to abandon the program in late summer/early fall.
Dr. Smith-Nonini has been studying North Carolina farmworkers and the H2A program since 1998.