El Portal Migrante

Guestworker programs facilitate worker exploitation of people of color. Visas tie guestworkers to a single employer, hindering labor mobility.  Employers often force guestworkers to work in dangerous conditions, leaving them to make an impossible choice: remain in abusive situations or risk losing their visa and ability to work in the US.

CDM and dozens of worker leaders from CDM’s Migrant Defense Committee (Comité) responded by launching el Portal Migrante, a virtual job board for migrant workers that leverages technology to shift power dynamics. El Portal Migrante promotes recruitment transparency, ethical conditions, and labor mobility by enabling workers to find legitimate job offers and freely leave abusive employers, providing job postings alongside working condition reports and rights information. Co-designed with the Comité, El Portal Migrante will disrupt the opaque H-2 visa recruitment infrastructure and improve working conditions for one of the country’s most vulnerable populations.

Each year, over 350,000 men and women -- mostly people of color -- travel to the US on H-2 guestworker visas to work in low-wage industries including agriculture, landscaping and seafood processing. The opaque recruitment process allows unscrupulous recruiters or defraud workers, discriminate against women and older workers and charge exorbitant fees in exchange for US jobs.

Once they arrive in the US, workers often get paid lower salaries, live in deplorable employer-provided housing, work in unsafe conditions and face harassment. Because visas tie guestworkers to their jobs, employers threaten them with deportation, deterring workers from reporting abuse and forcing them to remain in dangerous conditions. 

The number of H-2 guestworkers has tripled in the last 10 years. Recently, the US expanded these programs as they limit access to asylum for the hundreds of thousands of people from Central America arriving at the border. The trend extends far beyond North America.  From Qatar to Thailand to Spain, governments around the world are turning to guestworker programs to meet labor shortages at the expense of workers’ safety. Without disrupting existing power dynamics and ensuring labor mobility, millions of guestworkers will be channeled into a system that puts them at risk for exploitation.

El Portal Migrante disrupts guestworker recruitment by connecting workers directly with US jobs and bypassing abusive recruiters who charge exorbitant fees and limit their access to basic information about working conditions. 

El Portal lists job publicly available offers (via the Department of Labor) and postings promoted by employers with crucial information that is often inaccessible to guestworkers including salary, type of job, location. Postings are listed alongside employer reviews and information about workers’ rights. El Portal Migrante’s design reflects migrant workers’ priorities and values with a minimalistic user interface that ensures broad accessibility. This platform also integrates with CDM's award-winning Contratados.org, where workers can write anonymous reviews about employers and access to vital know-your-rights information.

In order to reach a broad audience of job seekers, CDM will leverage social media and online ads, targeting migrant communities in Mexico and states with a high-density of guestworkers in the US. Additionally, CDM will train worker leaders and advocates across borders to amplify the use of the site and increase trust with migrant communities. 

El Portal provides workers with the ability to choose -- better-paid work and fair working conditions -- and the freedom to move between jobs without losing their immigration status.

Hundreds of thousands of men and women -- mostly people of color -- are recruited each year to perform low-wage work in the United States under the fast-growing H-2 guestworker visa programs. Employers and the government are increasingly looking to guestworker programs to fill jobs in essential industries including agriculture, protein processing industries and hospitality. 

Workers are often recruited in communities with high rates of poverty and limited job opportunities -- sometimes, the economy of entire communities relies on the seasonal labor of guestworkers. Recruitment is loosely regulated and typically involves layers of subcontracting.  Through discriminatory recruitment and hiring practices, women are largely excluded from accessing these visas. For example, in 2018, 3% of all H-2A visas were issued to women, while women made up approximately 25% of all farm laborers in the United States. Migrant worker women who are hired on H-2 visas are often channeled into lower-paying jobs under the programs and face gender-based violence. Workers report that hiring practices are often influenced by racism. Our staff has documented cases in which employers and recruiters choose to hire indigenous workers because language barriers create a chilling effect to speak out against abuse. 

Given the lax government oversight, recruiters often charge exorbitant fees in exchange for jobs in the US and provide workers with little or false information about workplace conditions. This puts workers in an impossible position: stay at a job that puts their health at risk or leave the job, thousands of dollars in debt from recruitment fees. The lack of transparency and oversight recruitment shields those responsible for abuse from liability and facilitates worker exploitation. As a result, internationally recruited workers routinely face fraud, discrimination, economic coercion, retaliation, blacklisting, and human trafficking. Their transient status as they return to their home countries at the end of a season in the United States often leaves them unable to seek justice for abuses faced, as the border becomes a barrier to justice. 

As a binational organization with offices in Mexico and the United States, and with our long-time ties with migrant communities, Centro de los Derechos del Migrante is uniquely positioned to serve this population. Our work is guided by the insight and leadership of our Migrant Defense Committee (or Comité), formed by over 100 migrant leaders dedicated to educating their communities and coworkers. Comité leaders bring their experiences as migrants and migrants' family members to lead community outreach and education and shape CDM's legal and policy campaigns. In 2014, CDM launched our award winning site, Contratados.org, which serves as a “Yelp for migrant workers,” where workers can anonymously review employers and recruiters to prevent abuse for others. The platform was co-designed with Comité leaders. 

After the success of Contratados.org, CDM responded to a need identified by the Comité and hundreds of questions from workers and job seekers over the years: a tool to find employment opportunities in the US in an effort to avoid abusive recruitment practices. This idea was the inception of El Portal Migrante. From the site map and name to the colors and dissemination strategy, CDM has collaborated in a thorough co-design process to develop El Portal Migrante. Our methodology to ensure workers are at the center of the design process includes a combination of formal focus groups with worker leaders and our design partners, facilitated workshops at our Comité in-person and virtual meetings and online surveys and one-on-one conversations with worker leaders. Our plan is to engage Comité members in upcoming phases -- their partnership and insights will be key to the success of the adoption phase in order to foster trust and increase impact.

ElPortalMigrante.org leverages technology and information to provide communities of color tools with access to equitable job opportunities in the US. Recruiters have long controlled access to US work visas, discriminating against women, charging high fees for jobs and making fraudulent offers. Workers’ visas depend on their job, deterring them from speaking out against abuse. 

ElPortalMigrante.org shifts power dynamics in a system built at the expense of people of color. By granting workers the ability to connect directly with employers, workers can find alternative employment, allowing workers to leave abusive workplaces and providing employers with the incentive to improve working conditions.

We are currently in the pilot phase of the El Portal Migrante project. The site with its full functionality was launched in February of this year. Through focus groups, CDM staff consulted with Migrant Defense Committee (or Comité) leaders to develop the website prototype, while testing its features for accessibility and ease of use. Our soft launch in February gave us the opportunity to further test the site with migrant workers and analyze improvements that need to be made. We hope to now grow the site’s reach by engaging migrant workers in peer-to-peer campaigns to promote El Portal Migrante as well as with advocates and allied organizations in Mexico and in the US. CDM also plans to leverage digital organizing methodologies -- Google ads, social media, and press -- in order to broaden our user base.

From the opaque recruitment process to limited worker protections, there is an undeniable power imbalance embedded in the structure of guestworker programs. Abuse begins from the moment workers start seeking opportunities in their communities of origin. Before CDM launched el Portal Migrante, no online job portal for migrants seeking work in the United States focused on workers’ interests or rights. The US Dept. of Labor publishes verified jobs on Seasonal Jobs, a website designed by the government. Difficult to navigate and featuring job offers in English, the site was designed with employers, and not migrant workers, in mind. El Portal Migrante was co-created with migrant workers to develop an accessible digital tool for workers and their communities, carefully considering their technology and language needs. Our business model aims to make our site self-sustaining and to improve working conditions: we plan to charge a fee for employers to connect with workers via El Portal, requiring them to agree to terms and conditions and ethical standards set by CDM. El Portal provides an incentive for employers to improve working conditions in order to attract and retain a talent pool with newfound labor mobility. 

As the use in guestworker programs continues to expand, El Portal presents an opportunity to disrupt a system that undermines labor rights by providing workers with job opportunities and the freedom to move. CDM is leveraging its strong existing digital presence, integrating el Portal Migrante with CDM’s award-winning, widely used Contratados.org, a Yelp-like site with employer and recruiter reviews.

CDM has yet to disseminate the tool, as we are engaging in further user testing post-soft launch. El Portal Migrante has seen 811 unique page visits since its recent soft launch with each visit averaging about 9 minutes! However, as we begin outreach to the worker leaders in our workers’ committee about the platform, our goal is to quickly scale that number. In our first year, we expect the site to reach more than 80,000 people, representing a significant proportion of the total H-2A and H-2B visa program workers. As hundreds of thousands of workers already follow and use Contratados.org, this should be an easy feat. As both the visa programs and our outreach efforts grow, we expect the reach of El Portal Migrante to benefit 200,000-300,000 people in year 2.

We are tracking site analytics that show unique visits and time spent on the site as one metric for measuring impact of El Portal Migrante. As we head into a more robust outreach effort connected to these goals, we will also look at the number of people reached through in person visits and workshops directly related to promotion of El Portal Migrante to migrant workers. We will also track how many advocates and allied organizations we train and motivate to use the platform with workers in their client base. Finally, we will examine the employer and recruiter reviews on our sister site, Contratados.org, to measure the impact of El Portal Migrante on employer and recruiter behavior.

Five full-time staff members work on this solution.

CDM’s cross-border movement-building prioritizes concerns of migrant, worker, and gender justice. All of CDM’s work is built from the ground up, centered on advancing goals that are directly informed by our Migrant Defense Committee (or Comité), a group of more than 100 migrant leaders dedicated to educating their communities and coworkers.

Our binational, multilingual team embodies this commitment to diversity. Our board is composed of passionate advocates for migrant and low-wage workers. Meanwhile, many of our staff members’ investment in migrant justice reflects their experiences growing up in migrant-sending or -receiving communities. Both of the CDM outreach workers who staff CDM’s office in Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca, are native Mixtec speakers from the surrounding Mixteca region, which sends many H-2B workers to the United States each year. Other Mexican-born staff have watched family members migrate to the United States for work in agriculture and other sectors, while several of CDM’s U.S.-born staff grew up in first- or second-generation immigrant families. While CDM’s advisory board members include former migrant workers, CDM’s volunteers have included DREAMers, whose own migration experiences have inspired their work with CDM.

Finally, as a women-led organization, we are particularly attentive to issues of gender justice and violence against women and gender minorities. Our staff’s expertise on these issues enhances our efforts to document the abuses migrant women face, to attend to the gendered dimensions of labor exploitation through our policy and legal work, and to cultivate migrant women’s leadership through our workers’ Comité.

At Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, Inc. we believe diversity and inclusion are at the core of our leadership development. All of our staff members take part in continuing education on race, diversity, and inclusion, and we promote language justice by conducting our internal communications in Spanish. One of the evaluative frameworks applied to all staff members in annual evaluations is adherence to values of the organization, which include diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our organization is committed to ongoing conversations about race, racism, and other systems of oppression, restructuring our staff meetings and plannings to incorporate such trainings on a regular basis. CDM’s Migrant Defense Committee is at the core of guiding major undertakings like the El Portal Migrante project, because we believe the affected communities should be at the forefront of decision making for migrant rights organizations like ours. 

Our project’s leadership development team consists of bilingual people, and two of our outreach team members are indigenous women who are fluent in Mixtec and members of an indigenous migrant sending community. Our outreach coordinator is based in Mexico City and came to the organization with a background in organizing and advocacy for human rights issues faced by marginalized communities. Finally, our project lead is our award-winning executive director, who has worked with migrant workers for over 18 years.

With MIT Solve’s support, CDM will extend elPortalMigrante.org's power and reach through targeted virtual and socially distanced outreach to migrant workers  in Mexico and the United States. Our team will train migrant worker leaders to provide peer-to-peer training in their communities, educating their peers about the platform and their recruitment and US workplace rights. Additionally, CDM will develop and deploy a series of virtual popular education videos for migrant workers promoting the portal and educating workers about their rights and antidiscrimination laws. Our broad know-your-rights and popular education campaign will give workers access to a life-changing tool, supporting their labor mobility and access to work.

We believe the Solve network and tools will provide us with creative solutions to measure impact given the vulnerability and privacy concerns of the populations we serve. We are invested in continued improvement and innovation for the El Portal Migrante platform, and Solve will provide us with knowledge and tools that we can’t find elsewhere to meet this goal. We are also eager to connect with partners in the Solve network who can help us expand our reach in the business community. Private sector partners that can champion El Portal as a trusted and necessary tool will be imperative in allowing CDM to frame the platform in the self-interest of employers seeking to hire guestworkers.

If chosen as a Solver for the Anti-Racist Technology challenge, CDM would benefit from partners in the Solve community and the MIT network with expertise in digital organizing and scaling tools for underserved communities. We would also take full advantage of the Solve community’s connections to prominent private sector leaders and existing solvers that have had success with partnerships with private businesses in enacting their solutions.

Though migrant workers are at the core of the “essential” workforce we’ve come to recognize during the Covid-19 pandemic, they are often excluded from policy conversations and the creation of digital tools, and at times subject to severe workplace abuses.  The Elevate Prize would support our organization as we seek to grow our reach and impact in order to include migrant workers’ perspectives as our world changes. Our binational strategy positions us to impact workers’ lives across borders in Mexico and the United States.

Our binational strategy incorporates community organizing, digital outreach, policy advocacy, and legal services. This multi-pronged approach allows us to seek justice for migrant workers, use research as a tool for advocacy, and organize workers to speak truth to power. Given the nature of migrant workers’ lived experiences, which include isolation, fear, and language barriers, digital organizing has been a key component of our strategy to advance our work. 

After the success of our award winning platform, Contratados.org, a Yelp-like site, co-designed with migrant workers, where workers can anonymously review employers and recruiters, CDM saw the opportunity for digital tools to empower migrant workers. CDM, and migrant worker leaders co-designed and launched El Portal Migrante, a job board to promote transparency, ethical working conditions, and labor mobility. The Elevate Prize for Anti-Racist Technology would allow CDM to meaningfully invest in tools like El Portal Migrante, a site that has the potential to shift the power imbalance between workers and employers.

Each year, more than 200,000 migrants work in low-wage guestworker visa programs. Thousands are women. To get work in the United States, women face discrimination, fraud, and abuse in international labor recruitment. Some recruiters unlawfully exclude women from work. Others channel them into lower-paying jobs with poor working conditions. The worst recruiters defraud women, promising them nonexistent jobs in exchange for fees. And the worst employers prey on women's visa status, which ties them to their jobs. In this abusive system, women earn lower wages than men and risk losing their work altogether if they speak out against abuse.

El Portal Migrante will give hundreds of thousands of women across Mexico and the United States unparalleled access to labor mobility. In the past, women seeking H-2 employment faced geographic constraints restricting them from finding ethical international labor recruiters; most have relied on their local recruiters. Moreover, in the United States, women’s H-2 visas typically bind them to a single employer, preventing them from leaving abusive workplaces. With el Portal Migrante, women will have broad access to H-2 job postings, enabling them to selectively apply for jobs that match their experiences and needs, bypassing sexist and racist recruiters and employers.