Israel Morales, 44, is one of the thousands of migrant farmworkers hired to harvest New Mexico’s famous chiles. For the past five years, Morales, who asked that his real name not be used, has earned between $4,000 and $7,000 a year stooping to pick chiles in the hot fields. Much of that he sends back to Chihuahua, Mexico, to support his wife and two children, ages 16 and 22, both in school. His earnings are fairly typical for chile workers, according to the Border Agricultural Workers Project. But only a fraction of his earnings were ever reported to the IRS or the Social Security Administration (SSA).
Not that Morales hasn’t tried. For 2012, he filed a tax return listing his total income as $6,791. He worked for two contractors, or contratistas, that year, but they never sent him W2s. Yet the receipts showed that they deducted almost $200 in Social Security payments from his take-home pay. “Clearly, the contractors wrote down that deduction on a pay stub and never paid [it] because they never reported him as an employee,” says Sarah Rich, an attorney who worked for two years at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid (TRLA) in El Paso. Morales’s situation isn’t unusual. Tess Wilkes, a Santa Fe attorney who represents farmworkers, says contratistas underreporting workers’ incomes, or failing to report income at all, “is very widespread.”