The workers were loaded onto planes back home.     More recently, in 2000 in Leamington, Ontario, a group of Mexicans brought in under the Canadian guest worker program stopped work, protesting abuse by a foreman on a local farm.  Sixteen workers were deported as a result.     The H2-A program establishes a wage rate, which is supposed to be a minimum, currently a little over $7/hour in most areas.  "But if workers demand more," Goldstein says, "the employer can say, 'I'm offering all that the Department of Labor requires.  If you don't like it, I can get more workers.'  In effect, the minimum standard becomes the maximum standard.  You could even have a union for braceros, but in this system, it would have no bargaining power.  The Department says you can't fill a vacancy created by a strike with a guest worker, but they define this so narrowly that it's virtually impossible to enforce."     Despite the low wages and bad conditions, however, Garcia did eventually manage to find an employer who was different.  And because of that, he was able to become a permanent legal resident.     "In San Diego I worked for a Japanese grower named Suzuki, a good man," he remembers.  "During the war they had put him into one of the camps. He told us, 'I know what your life is like, because we lived that way too, in concentration camps, watched over with rifles.'  So he got papers for all of us, and told us to come work with him.  That was the last contract I worked."     Some growers in Canada, Goldstein says, even go to the Mexican towns from which their workers come to attend the local fiesta.  One New Hampshire apple grower attempted to take over the local growers' association to raise the wages for H2-A workers, only to wind up losing his own seat on the group's board.  "Occasionally there is a person who wants to be fair," he says, "but the economic forces at work are too powerful.  You can't really go against them."     And why should workers have to rely on the benevolence of their employers anyway?     The answer unions give to the vulnerable state of immigrant farm workers is amnesty -- a legalization program which would allow those who are undocumented to gain legal status.  According to a recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center, 47% of  all farm workers lack papers -- about 1.25 million people.  Counting their families, that number is even higher.  The same study says there are about 7.8 million undocumented immigrants in the country as a whole, and in urban areas, they make up almost 4% of the entire workforce.     In 1986, after the amnesty program of the Immigration Reform and Control Act took effect, over 3 million people gained legal status.  The act, with its special provision for farm workers, had a big effect on union organizing among immigrants.  As people lost their fear of deportation, and employers lost their ability to threaten workers with it, an upsurge in strikes and organizing drives swept through Los Angeles and areas of the country where immigrants are concentrated.  One strike alone, among the workers who hang drywall in new homes, shut down home construction throughout southern California for most of 1992.  The 1986 amnesty set the stage for the war to regain contracts among Los Angeles janitors, chronicled in the movie Bread and Roses.     The strategy of farm worker unions, therefore, has been to get a new amnesty, which would aid those workers presently in the fields to organize and win better conditions.  Even if the present. [Continue....]