Insurance Facts

With so many American citizens without decent health care most people do not even think about the plight of the migrant worker.  Migrant workers are workers that travel from one part of the country to the other looking for seasonal work.When one thinks about the traditional migrant worker, the ones that are working in the agriculture industry comes to mind.  Most people see migrant workers from other countries coming in to tend the fields and work on farms for the summer months.Although the type of work that is mostly known for migrant workers is not the only kind.  Migrant workers can be very skilled technical personnel coming into the country or already living in the country to do a highly specialized job.

Migrant workers come in either legally or illegally.Most of these migrant workers work in the USA to get legal status such as visa or the green card.But for most of these workers, health care is not a given right. In the USA it is the employer who decides if they will provide health insurance coverage for migrant workers.  With legal migrant workers, there is a bit of incentive to provide some kind of healthcare but if the worker is illegal there is not much health protection offered.In fact, a lot of these people have been exploited, working under extreme conditions.

The largest temporary visa offered to migrant workers that come from other countries and that plan to return home is what they call the H1V program and that this migrant worker visa program is similar to the program adopted by the Canadian provinces for their migramnt workers. This particular program allows for USA companies to recruit people from other countries for high tech jobs or jobs in the healthcare field. The migrant worker can apply for permanent status.  The second class is the H2A program and is the temporary visa extended to agricultural workers.This visa allows the migrant worker to come to the US for a period of up to one year, but then the migrant worker must return home.  Workers are to be paid the going rate under the H2A visa but they do not have to be paid if they do not complete the contract.A lot of farmers tend to take advantage of this stipulation and allow workers to go home before their contracts are over in order to not pay them.

These workers can work under very unsanitary and abusive conditions, which leads to several healthcare issues.  The department that presides over these workers is The Department of Labor and the local employment offices but they do very little surveillance of the conditions these migrant workers must work under.

In Canada the provinces provide a health card for migrant workers so they have access to health care, however there is no health card provided in the USA, many of these migrant workers do not have any health care coverage at all. There are a some employers who do provide health coverage but they are few and far between, for the most part the only help these workers would have would be the emergency room at a local hospital.These workers would be entitled to a workman’s compensation but not to healthcare should they get a flu or any other health issues not related to the job at hand.

In Canada there are now migrant worker centers that bring to the forefront the issues facing migrant workers and this sort of program should be implemented in the USA to allow them basic rights to health care and wages and allow them some sort of a health insurance plan.