Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, Inc.

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 at times subject to severe workplace abuses.  We are currently at a pivotal point in history where work, workers’ rights, and workplaces are being reimagined. 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. Given that migrant workers’ experiences and concerns are often left out of policies and processes that affect them, we believe that greater visibility will advance our fight toward furthering migrant rights.

In 2004, I traveled to Zacatecas, Mexico where I met with some of my clients--farmworkers who traveled between rural Florida and their home communities to work in agriculture. While they were nervous to share their experiences with me in Florida, in Zacatecas they were eager to open up to me. This experience sparked the idea for Centro de los Derechos del Migrante: a binational workers’ rights organization that removed the border as a barrier to justice. Guided by my values of fairness and justice, I became determined to work in solidarity with migrant workers to fight for a more equitable and inclusive future. 

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. We envision a future that reimagines labor migration into a just, equitable system for workers. We aim to reach higher victories for migrant justice by building a wider network of migrant workers and allies and strengthening our efforts over time.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of workers are recruited in rural Mexico, where economic opportunities are scarce, to work in the United States through guestworker visa programs. These programs rely on third-party recruiters and tie workers to one employer. From recruitment to the workplace, the programs’ structure creates an imbalance of power that leaves workers vulnerable to fraud and abuse. Migrant workers often don’t know their rights when they migrate to the US and face tremendous barriers to seeking justice when their rights are violated. To address these injustices, CDM engages in a binational approach to empowering migrant workers and challenging status quo at the policy level. 

Our robust outreach and organizing program engages workers in training to reach their communities with necessary information about their rights and issue priorities. Our legal team connects with workers who express legal concerns, taking on their cases or referring them to legal services. Finally, our policy advocacy team engages decision makers in halls of power on the interests of migrant workers to advance a more equitable and just vision for labor migration. Together, we ensure that migrant workers attain justice for individual and collective wrongs that come about during the labor migration process.

Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, Inc. is the first transnational migrant workers’ rights organization based in Mexico and the United States. Our binational, multilingual team includes organizers, activists, lawyers, policy advocates, and technologists. We draw on our broad array of expertise in narrative craft, organizing, movement-building, migration, labor, public health, law, and policy analysis. For more than fifteen years, we have worked with migrant workers to remove the border as a barrier to justice through four complementary programs—outreach, education, and leadership development; legal intake and referral; direct representation and litigation support; and groundbreaking policy advocacy. CDM and workers have also harnessed the power of technology to improve access to information by co-creating two digital platforms specifically for migrant workers. With offices in Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca, Mexico City, and Baltimore, Maryland, CDM is embedded in the communities where migrant workers are based and where they work. Our binational advantage allows us to be effective in approaching migrant justice at the system level and the individual level.

CDM stands with Mexico-based workers to overcome the border as a barrier to justice and envisions a world where migrant workers' rights are respected and laws and policies reflect their voices. All of our work is built from the ground up. As such, CDM builds and sustains worker leadership through our Migrant Defense Committee (or Comité) formed by over eighty migrant leaders dedicated to educating their communities and coworkers. The Comité is at the heart of our work. 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.

For more than fifteen years, CDM has amplified the voices of migrant workers with Comité leaders, strategically and successfully intervening in policy conversations and debates with stories that amplify the voices of women, indigenous people, and people of color. For too long, employers have dominated conversations about migration and work. This dehumanizes workers, treating them as objects to fill labor quotas, while ignoring the complexities of international labor migration. With the Comité’s leadership, migrant workers shift power from employers to workers, winning durable, structural changes in the economy that make work more just and equitable for migrant workers. 

In its 15 year history, CDM has trained over 27,000 workers in person, recovered and distributed over $36.3 million in earnings and damages, and reached over 1 million people through our award winning online platform, Contratados.org. In the coming year, we expect to provide legal services to more than 400 people. We expect more than 300,000 visits to our “Yelp for migrant workers” site, Contatados.org. Our policy advocacy work has reached some monumental milestones in recent years, including the inclusion of migrant workers in the USMCA labor protections. This new rule has to improve working conditions for millions of workers across industries and immigration statuses.

Our strategic priorities for the upcoming year include: 

As we head into pandemic recovery, CDM’s outreach will focus on ensuring migrant workers have access to health and safety information to exercise their rights. CDM will continue to build and expand our groundbreaking digital platforms, ElPortalMigrante.org and Contratados.org. CDM will continue building and leading coalitions at the intersection of gender equity, migration, racial justice, and workers’ rights.

CDM will strengthen our advocacy by engaging migrant workers to shape the policies affecting them. CDM will bring migrant worker perspectives into policy debates, educating policymakers about recruitment and workplace abuses. We will facilitate migrant workers’ participation and ensure their voices are reflected in related media coverage. We will also leverage our USMCA campaign to advance gender equity and migrant justice in guestworker programs.

Our strategic litigation will continue to defend and advance migrant workers’ rights under state and federal laws.

Funding priorities for some of our long-term funders have undergone changes in recent years, having an impact on our organization. Many funders have left the gender equity (Novo), worker’s rights (Public Welfare), and human rights (Laudes Foundation)  spaces, challenging us to identify new sources of support for our organizing and advocacy. In response, CDM has looked for and will continue to look for strategic, project specific opportunities, bolster its individual donor programs, and develop new relationships with potential funders.

With generous, unrestricted support from Elevate, CDM would be able to leverage its innovative model and remain flexible in the face of unpredictable challenges and opportunities in the labor migration context. 

CDM seeks to transform the way we think about labor migration. Our vision requires a drastic re-imagination of our systems—an alternative migration model that is equitable and just. Yet, conversations about both labor and migration do not currently center the voices of those most affected by labor migration systems. We are confident that the Elevate Prize would give us the tools to build an even greater platform centering the voices of those most affected by labor migration policies. 

Our vision for a new model of labor migration has come from the collective needs expressed by migrant workers over the last fifteen years. With the Elevate Prize, we will  engage with more leaders and community members to understand and join our newly imagined labor migration movement. Our reach into the business community and new areas of civil society needs to grow as we seek to develop El Portal Migrante, our job board for migrant workers, which will require outreach to stakeholders in the private sector.  Through the funding, connections, and training provided by the Elevate Prize, CDM will exponentially expand its reach to form allies for our movement.

At CDM we believe diversity and inclusion are at the core of organizational priorities. 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 planning to incorporate such training 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 that affected communities should be at the forefront of decision making for migrant rights organizations like ours.

CDM’s innovative model of transnational advocacy is developed through our close relationships with migrant workers and their communities. Once in their home communities, migrants generally lack support structures to organize or pursue justice in cases of abuse. We inform migrant workers about their rights before they leave Mexico; help workers enforce their rights in US workplaces and access justice when they return; and support migrant families. Our programs are designed to reorder power dynamics in the recruitment and employment of migrant workers.

CDM has built trusting relationships with migrant workers across Mexico and the US while establishing itself as the thought leader on reforming international labor migration. CDM's expertise and reputation -- with workers, allies and policymakers -- uniquely position us in this space. CDM has a track record of success in developing and deploying innovative digital tools for migrant workers. Our multilingual team with expertise in various fields of migrant justice work is able to deliver a multi-pronged approach to migrant justice. Working with allies in Mexico, the US, and beyond, CDM is poised to continue to engage in transnational advocacy, provide legal support and policy analysis, and build cross-sector momentum for reforms at local, national, and international levels.

The COVID-19 pandemic evidenced the imbalances of power that increase vulnerability for migrant workers. CDM’s dynamic team was placed under tremendous pressure and stress. As the Executive Director, I worked tirelessly to make sure the organization was responding to the challenges posed by the pandemic in terms of individual staff as well as our organizational strategy. I mobilized the operations team to put in place policies to ensure staff had the tools they needed to work from home as well as policies that would allow team members to take paid time off for COVID-related reasons. Our creative and innovative approach allowed us to adapt our strategies to better serve our base during the pandemic as in-person outreach was halted with a renewed focus on digital organizing and information dissemination. During a time when we could have given up hope and stalled our work, we seized the opportunity to lead an effort to prevent infectious diseases in poultry processing, an industry where migrant workers were faced with extremely unsafe conditions from the start of the pandemic. We were able to successfully partner with the CDC, and now a year later have expanded the project to encompass a greater geographical reach.

• https://www.wypr.org/show/on-the-record/2019-12-19/protecting-migrant-workers-rights 
• http://assets.stoopstorytelling.com.s3.amazonaws.com/audio/production/2018-03-13/SS20180309BMARachelMicahJones/SS20180309BMARachelMicahJones.mp3
• http://www.farewellferriswheel.com/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OgtzXZhXWw&
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iwmtzET_rU

Funding from the Elevate Prize will support CDM’s impactful work to advance migrant justice and to promote a rights-based alternative model for labor migration. As mentioned earlier, unrestricted funding allows us to adapt to the rapidly-changing context and seize unprecedented opportunities. These funds would be especially helpful in supporting the provision of critical legal services to migrant workers and to facilitate labor mobility by growing El Portal Migrante. We are currently seeking increased funding for these areas of work because we believe that these areas are crucial for our overall strategy during the pandemic recovery, a time during which digital organizing, advocacy, and legal services are necessary to remove the border as a barrier to justice for migrant workers. 

CDM leads a multi-million dollar campaign to prevent infectious diseases for workers in protein processing industries in the Delmarva region. As part of this campaign, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDM has formed a coalition with local partners including Comité de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agrícolas (CATA), Legal Aid Justice Center, Rebirth, Inc., Migrant Clinicians Network and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) Local 27. After a year of successful partnership, the CDC has extended CDM’s funding for the project, allowing the organization to expand its work into the Southeastern United States in the coming year.