By Mark Strassmann
ABC News
October 14, 2011
(CBS News)--Alabama has put itself on the front lines of the battle against illegal immigration with a tough new law. But that law is being challenged as unconstitutional. On Friday, a panel of federal judges in Atlanta weighed in on the most controversial parts of the law, overturning -- at least for now -- two major provisions.
The law requires schools to check the immigration status of students, which the judges have suspended. It also requires legal immigrants to carry papers proving their legal status; the judges suspended that too. But the court let stand a provision that allows the police to detain immigrants they suspect are illegal.
The law took effect six weeks ago and had swift and dramatic effects in Alabama. CBS News correspondent Mark Strassman reports on what this all means.
Liz Betancourt is scared to leave the house in Florence, Alabama.
"I am illegal," she said. "I am not from here."
Her family moved from Mexico to the U.S. when Liz was an infant. She's now 19, but has never applied for citizenship or a green card.
Under the state's new law, if she's picked up by police, she could be deported. And during that process, which can take months, there's no legal guarantee her daughter Idelfy -- born in Alabama and a U.S. citizen -- would stay with her.
But the widespread perception among illegal immigrants is deportation would split families apart -- although deported parents would be allowed to take their children with them.
"We just came here to work," said Betancourt. "Our parents ... they just come here to give their children a good education."
Even a routine trip to the store has many illegal immigrants here worried they'll end up arrested. And in case they're deported, some parents are signing papers, turning over legal care of their kids to someone else.
If Betancourt's deported, her aunt, a U.S. citizen, would care for Idelfy so the baby could stay here.
Fear of deportation is spreading through families living here illegally. In Albertville, Alabama's public schools, 81 of 1,100 Hispanic students have dropped out in the last two weeks.
Alabama employers like farmer Keith Smith are also feeling the effects. Smith needs 20 workers to harvest his sweet potatoes. Most mornings, he's lucky now if only nine show up.
"They're putting me out of business, this law," said Smith, "And if things don't change, if they don't come up with something better, people like me -- we're a has-been."
On the contrary, Scott Beason, the Republican state senator who sponsored the state's new law, argued: "They're displacing Alabama workers. And our goal is to have many Alabamians as possible working."
He points to Alabama's unemployment rate -- just under 10 percent -- and the estimated $290 million Alabama spends educating and caring for illegal immigrants.
"Has the impact been what you expected?" Strassman asked.
"I think so," answered Beason. "All the focus is on the illegal alien and the challenge they may have for being here illegally. People always forget the person who were unable to start a business or who lost their business because the competitor down the road hired an illegal alien."
The Friday decision by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals here in Atlanta is only temporary. Its final decision could be months away. And Liz Betancourt -- the woman interviewed in our story -- was fired by her cleaning company right after she spoke with CBS News.
CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley asked Strassman what happens next in the court fight.
"Friday's decision conflicts with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision about a similar provision in Arizona's law -- the provision that focuses on whether a local or state police agency can check the immigration status of someone simply because they're suspected of a crime. Because those decisions conflict, legal scholars now say it is much more likely this issue will reach the U.S. Supreme Court."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/10/14/eveningnews/main20120777.shtml
Showing posts with label Farmers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Farmers. Show all posts
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Hiring Locally for Farm Work Is No Cure-All
By KIRK JOHNSON
The New York Times
October 5, 2011
OLATHE, Colo. — How can there be a labor shortage when nearly one out of every 11 people in the nation are unemployed?
That’s the question John Harold asked himself last winter when he was trying to figure out how much help he would need to harvest the corn and onions on his 1,000-acre farm here in western Colorado.
The simple-sounding plan that resulted — hire more local people and fewer foreign workers — left Mr. Harold and others who took a similar path adrift in a predicament worthy of Kafka.
The more they tried to do something concrete to address immigration and joblessness, the worse off they found themselves.
“It’s absolutely true that people who have played by the rules are having the toughest time of all,” said Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado.
Mr. Harold, a 71-year-old Vietnam War veteran who drifted here in the late ’60s, has participated for about a decade in a federal program called H-2A that allows seasonal foreign workers into the country to make up the gap where willing and able American workers are few in number. He typically has brought in about 90 people from Mexico each year from July through October.
This year, though, with tough times lingering and a big jump in the minimum wage under the program, to nearly $10.50 hour, Mr. Harold brought in only two-thirds of his usual contingent. The other positions, he figured, would be snapped up by jobless local residents wanting some extra summer cash.
“It didn’t take me six hours to realize I’d made a heck of a mistake,” Mr. Harold said, standing in his onion field on a recent afternoon as a crew of workers from Mexico cut the tops off yellow onions and bagged them.
Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard. On the Harold farm, pickers walk the rows alongside a huge harvest vehicle called a mule train, plucking ears of corn and handing them up to workers on the mule who box them and lift the crates, each weighing 45 to 50 pounds.
“It is not an easy job,” said Kerry Mattics, 49, another H-2A farmer here in Olathe, who brought in only a third of his usual Mexican crew of 12 workers for his 50-acre fruit and vegetable farm, then struggled to make it through the season. “It’s outside, so if it’s wet, you’re wet, and if it’s hot you’re hot,” he said.
Still, Mr. Mattics said, he can’t help feeling that people have gotten soft.
“They wanted that $10.50 an hour without doing very much,” he said. “I know people with college degrees, working for the school system and only making 11 bucks.”
A mismatch between employers’ requirements and the skills and needs of the jobless — repeated across industries — has been a constant theme of this recessionary era. But here on the farm, mismatch can mean high anxiety.
The H-2A program, in particular, in trying to avoid displacing American citizens from jobs, strongly encourages farmers to hire locally if they can, with a requirement that they advertise in at least three states. That forces participants to take huge risks in guessing where a moving target might land — how many locals, how many foreigners — often with an entire season’s revenue at stake. Survival, not civic virtue, drives the equation, they say.
“Farmers have to bear almost all the labor market risk because they must prove no one really was available, qualified or willing to work,” said Dawn D. Thilmany, a professor of agricultural economics at Colorado State University. “But the only way to offer proof is to literally have a field left unharvested.”
Mr. Harold’s experience is a repeated refrain where farm labor is seasonal and population sparse. And even many immigration hard-liners have come to agree that the dearth of Americans willing to work the fields requires some sort of rethinking, at least, of the H-2A program. Indeed, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, a conservative Republican, is pushing a bill that would greatly expand the number of foreign guest workers admitted to the country each year.
In Colorado, the unemployment rate in many rural counties is also significantly lower than in the cities — two neighboring counties here, for example, had 5.5 percent and 6 percent unemployment rates in August, according to state figures, compared with 9.1 percent for the nation as a whole. The big increase in the wage rate for H-2A workers, meanwhile, up nearly $2.50 an hour — calculated by averaging what farmers had to pay last year — also suggests that labor demand was already rising.
Mr. Harold usually hires about 50 local workers for the season — regulars who have worked summers for years — and most returned this year, he said. Finding new employees was where he ran into trouble. He was able to recover after the season started, he said, by rushing in another group of H-2A workers from Mexico.
But the broader story of labor in agriculture, economists and historians said, is that through good times and bad and across socioeconomic lines, people who find better lives off the farm rarely return. Mr. Harold and other H-2A farmers said that most of the local residents who tried field work this summer, for example, were Hispanic, many of whom, they said, had probably immigrated in years past for agricultural work before taking better-paid jobs in construction or landscaping.
Other farmers left in the lurch by local workers conceded that what they had to offer was a tough sell — full-time but temporary work. About 56,000 foreign workers came into the country with H-2A visas last year, according to the most recent federal figures, down from 60,000 in 2009.
Heath Terrell is one of the few new local residents who stuck it out. Mr. Terrell, a former hay hauler, was hired to drive a corn truck. That job kept him out of the fields, and out of the sun. Now, as the season has shifted from corn to onions, Mr. Terrell, 42, said he might just stay on with Mr. Harold through the winter, or at least onion season.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/us/farmers-strain-to-hire-american-workers-in-place-of-migrant-labor.html?_r=1&hp
The New York Times
October 5, 2011
OLATHE, Colo. — How can there be a labor shortage when nearly one out of every 11 people in the nation are unemployed?
That’s the question John Harold asked himself last winter when he was trying to figure out how much help he would need to harvest the corn and onions on his 1,000-acre farm here in western Colorado.
The simple-sounding plan that resulted — hire more local people and fewer foreign workers — left Mr. Harold and others who took a similar path adrift in a predicament worthy of Kafka.
The more they tried to do something concrete to address immigration and joblessness, the worse off they found themselves.
“It’s absolutely true that people who have played by the rules are having the toughest time of all,” said Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado.
Mr. Harold, a 71-year-old Vietnam War veteran who drifted here in the late ’60s, has participated for about a decade in a federal program called H-2A that allows seasonal foreign workers into the country to make up the gap where willing and able American workers are few in number. He typically has brought in about 90 people from Mexico each year from July through October.
This year, though, with tough times lingering and a big jump in the minimum wage under the program, to nearly $10.50 hour, Mr. Harold brought in only two-thirds of his usual contingent. The other positions, he figured, would be snapped up by jobless local residents wanting some extra summer cash.
“It didn’t take me six hours to realize I’d made a heck of a mistake,” Mr. Harold said, standing in his onion field on a recent afternoon as a crew of workers from Mexico cut the tops off yellow onions and bagged them.
Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard. On the Harold farm, pickers walk the rows alongside a huge harvest vehicle called a mule train, plucking ears of corn and handing them up to workers on the mule who box them and lift the crates, each weighing 45 to 50 pounds.
“It is not an easy job,” said Kerry Mattics, 49, another H-2A farmer here in Olathe, who brought in only a third of his usual Mexican crew of 12 workers for his 50-acre fruit and vegetable farm, then struggled to make it through the season. “It’s outside, so if it’s wet, you’re wet, and if it’s hot you’re hot,” he said.
Still, Mr. Mattics said, he can’t help feeling that people have gotten soft.
“They wanted that $10.50 an hour without doing very much,” he said. “I know people with college degrees, working for the school system and only making 11 bucks.”
A mismatch between employers’ requirements and the skills and needs of the jobless — repeated across industries — has been a constant theme of this recessionary era. But here on the farm, mismatch can mean high anxiety.
The H-2A program, in particular, in trying to avoid displacing American citizens from jobs, strongly encourages farmers to hire locally if they can, with a requirement that they advertise in at least three states. That forces participants to take huge risks in guessing where a moving target might land — how many locals, how many foreigners — often with an entire season’s revenue at stake. Survival, not civic virtue, drives the equation, they say.
“Farmers have to bear almost all the labor market risk because they must prove no one really was available, qualified or willing to work,” said Dawn D. Thilmany, a professor of agricultural economics at Colorado State University. “But the only way to offer proof is to literally have a field left unharvested.”
Mr. Harold’s experience is a repeated refrain where farm labor is seasonal and population sparse. And even many immigration hard-liners have come to agree that the dearth of Americans willing to work the fields requires some sort of rethinking, at least, of the H-2A program. Indeed, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, a conservative Republican, is pushing a bill that would greatly expand the number of foreign guest workers admitted to the country each year.
In Colorado, the unemployment rate in many rural counties is also significantly lower than in the cities — two neighboring counties here, for example, had 5.5 percent and 6 percent unemployment rates in August, according to state figures, compared with 9.1 percent for the nation as a whole. The big increase in the wage rate for H-2A workers, meanwhile, up nearly $2.50 an hour — calculated by averaging what farmers had to pay last year — also suggests that labor demand was already rising.
Mr. Harold usually hires about 50 local workers for the season — regulars who have worked summers for years — and most returned this year, he said. Finding new employees was where he ran into trouble. He was able to recover after the season started, he said, by rushing in another group of H-2A workers from Mexico.
But the broader story of labor in agriculture, economists and historians said, is that through good times and bad and across socioeconomic lines, people who find better lives off the farm rarely return. Mr. Harold and other H-2A farmers said that most of the local residents who tried field work this summer, for example, were Hispanic, many of whom, they said, had probably immigrated in years past for agricultural work before taking better-paid jobs in construction or landscaping.
Other farmers left in the lurch by local workers conceded that what they had to offer was a tough sell — full-time but temporary work. About 56,000 foreign workers came into the country with H-2A visas last year, according to the most recent federal figures, down from 60,000 in 2009.
Heath Terrell is one of the few new local residents who stuck it out. Mr. Terrell, a former hay hauler, was hired to drive a corn truck. That job kept him out of the fields, and out of the sun. Now, as the season has shifted from corn to onions, Mr. Terrell, 42, said he might just stay on with Mr. Harold through the winter, or at least onion season.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/us/farmers-strain-to-hire-american-workers-in-place-of-migrant-labor.html?_r=1&hp
Thursday, November 18, 2010
In Denial: Illegal immigration enforcers try to find a balance
By Chris Collins
The Sacramento Bee
Monday, Nov. 15, 2010
FRESNO — Brian Poulsen fought on the front lines of the war against illegal immigration for three decades. He patrolled the border near San Diego on horseback, grew a ragged beard to disguise himself as a human smuggler, arrested and deported thousands of illegal immigrants, and tracked down fake document vendors at flea markets.
His job description was clear: Do everything you can to stop illegal immigrants from coming and kick them out if they get here.
But Poulsen and other agents have discovered it's not easy to enforce immigration laws, especially those that target employers.
Aggressive crackdowns can backfire if they hurt business. A sweep of Midwestern meatpacking plants in the late 1990s, for example, prompted outrage from business and civic leaders. Immigration officials have learned to tread lightly.
Poulsen, who retired this year as the top immigration enforcement official in the central San Joaquin Valley, tried to strike a balance between stopping illegal immigration and protecting farmers' interests. His office rarely conducted audits, never issued a fine and avoided messy, high-profile raids that would permanently shut down a business and separate families.
"There's a little bit of a tightrope. I understand where the farmers are coming from," said Poulsen, who grew up harvesting potatoes in Idaho. "You don't want to see people go out of business, but at the same time, we're sworn to do a job and can't look the other way."
Things may be changing: The Obama administration has stepped up the pace of audits, which are less likely to spark a backlash than workplace raids. For example, of 16 audits conducted in the central San Joaquin Valley over the past eight years, 11 have come since late 2008.
Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties and all areas north to Oregon are covered by the San Francisco office, which has been considerably more aggressive. There have been 75 audits this year and 391 since 2004, including parts of western Nevada run out of the Reno office..
Some agriculture leaders are worried about the audits, which can hurt businesses by making them fire all the illegal workers.
But government figures show that the new effort is tame compared with the early 1990s, when immigration officials fined about 900 companies a year and audited thousands. This year, they fined 237.
Many experts say aggressively cracking down on employers will rid the nation of illegal immigrants. Because the vast majority of them come here to work, the United States would be a much less appealing destination without job opportunities.
But advocates for stricter enforcement say there is little political appetite to sever the co-dependent relationship between businesses and illegal immigrants.
And aggressive enforcement, agents have learned, can backfire.
Meat plant sweeps
In the late 1990s, in response to calls for tougher enforcement, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which later became Immigration and Customs Enforcement, blanketed Midwestern meatpacking companies with audits that identified thousands of employees suspected of being illegal immigrants.
Frightened workers left in droves, slowing slaughter-line speeds to a crawl and hurting farmers who relied on the meatpacking businesses.
"All hell broke loose," said Mark Reed, a former top INS official who was in charge of the crackdown, dubbed Operation Vanguard. "All of a sudden, these communities that wanted these people out of there realized that they needed them. They didn't realize that the kids who played on their soccer teams and the people they went to church with were going to go. They didn't realize that they were the center of their economy."
Nebraska's governor and members of Congress intervened. Operation Vanguard — which was scheduled to expand to the rest of the country — was nipped in the bud.
That's the problem with aggressive enforcement — it works too well, Reed said. The Obama administration's strategy could cause trouble, too, if it targets entire industries with audits. So far, however, ICE has focused on cases driven by leads — an approach that is more tempered than Operation Vanguard.
"They're smarter about it today," Reed said. "They're very cautiously going out and doing the audits in such a way that they won't rock the boat so much that they'll lose their authority."
But the essential problem remains: Create too much publicity about immigration enforcement and risk a backlash from politicians and business leaders. Too little, however, means businesses won't pay attention.
Roundups in the fields
The history of immigration enforcement in the Central Valley has been marked by inconsistencies and shifting policies.
Decades ago, federal agents would show up at fields in vans and helicopters to round up and deport illegal workers. Often, the workers would come right back.
David Remus, now a school librarian in Clovis, worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the 1970s and saw it firsthand.
"Sometimes the Border Patrol would come by and pick them up and they'd be back the next day from Mexico," he said.
In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted amnesty to almost 3 million immigrants and made it a crime to hire illegal workers. Agents were required to obtain search warrants; the result was fewer raids.
Posing as smugglers
In the 1990s, the Border Patrol — which at that time wasn't restricted to the border — infiltrated human smuggling rings and tried to crack down on fake document vendors. Its agents also posed as grape growers and ranchers in the valley and asked smugglers to bring them workers.
But in 1996, the Border Patrol began withdrawing from the INS Fresno office, which covered the central San Joaquin Valley. The office was left with few resources to investigate smugglers or to document vendors or employers who hired illegal immigrants.
"We lost a lot of ground," Poulsen said. "It was very frustrating."
Acting on tips from disgruntled workers or competing businesses, agents tried to crack down on businesses that hired illegal immigrants.
But those they audited usually were able to negotiate a small fine — "a slap on the hand," Poulsen said. Agents grew tired of it and decided to focus their efforts elsewhere.
After the backlash from Operation Vanguard, INS scaled back employer enforcement efforts across the country. After the Sept. 11 attacks, INS narrowed its focus to contractors that worked at places critical to national security, such as airports and military bases. As a consequence, the number of employers fined dropped from 535 in 1998 to 13 in 2002, according to government data.
After ICE was formed in March 2003, the Fresno office began to regain its footing. But because the office had limited resources and a wide range of responsibilities, most employers escaped scrutiny, said Poul-sen, who was a supervising agent until he became the resident agent in charge of the Fresno office in 2006.
From 2003 to 2006, the office didn't audit a single company. In the past two years, following the national trend, it has audited 11. Still, it has yet to fine a single company in the central San Joaquin Valley.
The Fresno office has been even less aggressive with raids. Poulsen remembers only one, in 2004 — a boat-manufacturing business in Merced that refused to fire illegal workers. He said about a dozen illegal workers were arrested. The employer wasn't arrested or fined.
When angry employers complained to Poulsen about being audited, he told them it could be worse: "I'd say, 'Well, I'm auditing you instead of showing up with a dozen agents and shutting you down completely. I'm doing you a favor.' "
Part of the reason for his approach, he said, was that he understood the farmers' plight.
"Nobody is more empathetic to the farmworkers than I," he said. "The guys who have their grapes, they need to have their crops harvested. In our society, we think we're too good for stoop labor. There has to be somebody to do it."
During the waning years of the Bush administration, immigration agents grabbed headlines by raiding companies and deporting workers. The raids across the country drew controversy, just as Operation Vanguard did a decade earlier.
Controversy, then change
The Obama administration decided to take a different approach.
In April 2009, ICE issued a memo that downplayed the importance of raids, noting that they did little to prove that employers knowingly hired illegal immigrants.
Instead, it hired scores of auditors and directed them to build cases against businesses. If an audit shows that a business employed illegal immigrants, the owner must fire them to avoid fines of up to $3,200 for each illegal worker — or prison time.
In 2006, ICE spent just 2 percent of its staff time on worksite enforcement, and not a single company was fined for hiring illegal immigrants. This year, it audited 2,196 businesses and fined 237.
Still, ICE spent only about 5 percent of its staff time on worksite enforcement through April — less than a fourth of the time it spent on drug smuggling.
'Nightmare' for farmers
Manuel Cunha, president of the Fresno-based Nisei Farmers League, an association of agriculture businesses in the West, said ICE audited four growers in his association last year, forcing them to fire many of their workers. He described it as a farmer's "worst nightmare."
"It was like Satan came to their door and said, 'We're taking your children because you know what? Your children sinned,' " Cunha said. "These farmers knew these workers. They were part of their community. They were part of their families. You yank them out, what does that do to that industry? To those farmers? To those workers?"
Mike Saqui, a Sacramento immigration attorney for businesses, said an audit can be destructive for businesses. One client who was audited in the middle of harvest time last year had to fire 269 of his 280 field workers.
If ICE wanted to use audits to get agriculture employers' attention, it worked. Cunha said growers worry about audits "every day now." Yet some doubt the administration's audit strategy will succeed.
Reed, the former INS official who runs an immigration consulting firm in Tucson, Ariz., said ICE should take a more comprehensive strategy and audit all companies in a region in the same industry instead of its "hodgepodge" approach. Otherwise, he said, businesses will continue to hire illegal immigrants because they believe there's little risk of an audit.
Audits only 'half a loaf'?
And another expert thinks ICE needs to continue workplace raids to clamp down on employers.
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, said audits alone don't do enough because illegal immigrants don't have to worry about being arrested.
"What we have now is half a loaf," she said.
Philip Martin, an immigration and farm labor expert at the University of California at Davis, said one question is whether the administration will follow its strategy consistently.
"So far, it hasn't been sustained long enough for it to have a significant effect," he said. "That's the big question: Is it going to be sustained?"
Audits aren't the only thing employers worry about. Immigration officials are deporting illegal immigrants, many of them working for farmers or construction companies, at a record pace. In the 2009-10 fiscal year, they deported 393,000, almost twice as many as four years earlier.
Much of the focus has been on deporting illegal immigrants suspected or convicted of crimes. But others often are swept up in such efforts.
That is what happened in Mendota during a February 2007 raid that was criticized by some local officials. Mendota officials said it took residents about a year to recover and the local economy suffered.
Former Fresno Mayor Alan Autry criticized ICE for being "mind-boggling in its callousness."
Erik Bonnar, the deputy field office director who supervises deportations in the San Joaquin Valley, said agents couldn't ignore the fact that some residents were illegal immigrants.
"If our officers determine that they're here illegally, then they'll take them into custody," he said.
More recently, ICE started a program in 2007 called Secure Communities that has attracted growing attention. It uses fingerprints to determine whether jail inmates are illegal immigrants, which often leads to their deportation.
Fresno, Tulare and Merced counties joined the rapidly expanding program this year. Because of jail crowding, however, many illegal immigrants arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor crimes are not booked into jail. Still, ICE officials predict that Secure Communities will help the agency dramatically increase the number of deportations.
Win Eaton, a Bakersfield-based immigration attorney who represents several agriculture employers, said his clients are "running scared" because of the audits and increasing number of deportations. The worst is yet to come, he said.
"We're seeing a great deal more enforcement activity in 2010 than we ever saw under the Bush administration," Eaton said. "What I'm most concerned about is where this could lead."
© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.
The Sacramento Bee
Monday, Nov. 15, 2010
FRESNO — Brian Poulsen fought on the front lines of the war against illegal immigration for three decades. He patrolled the border near San Diego on horseback, grew a ragged beard to disguise himself as a human smuggler, arrested and deported thousands of illegal immigrants, and tracked down fake document vendors at flea markets.
His job description was clear: Do everything you can to stop illegal immigrants from coming and kick them out if they get here.
But Poulsen and other agents have discovered it's not easy to enforce immigration laws, especially those that target employers.
Aggressive crackdowns can backfire if they hurt business. A sweep of Midwestern meatpacking plants in the late 1990s, for example, prompted outrage from business and civic leaders. Immigration officials have learned to tread lightly.
Poulsen, who retired this year as the top immigration enforcement official in the central San Joaquin Valley, tried to strike a balance between stopping illegal immigration and protecting farmers' interests. His office rarely conducted audits, never issued a fine and avoided messy, high-profile raids that would permanently shut down a business and separate families.
"There's a little bit of a tightrope. I understand where the farmers are coming from," said Poulsen, who grew up harvesting potatoes in Idaho. "You don't want to see people go out of business, but at the same time, we're sworn to do a job and can't look the other way."
Things may be changing: The Obama administration has stepped up the pace of audits, which are less likely to spark a backlash than workplace raids. For example, of 16 audits conducted in the central San Joaquin Valley over the past eight years, 11 have come since late 2008.
Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties and all areas north to Oregon are covered by the San Francisco office, which has been considerably more aggressive. There have been 75 audits this year and 391 since 2004, including parts of western Nevada run out of the Reno office..
Some agriculture leaders are worried about the audits, which can hurt businesses by making them fire all the illegal workers.
But government figures show that the new effort is tame compared with the early 1990s, when immigration officials fined about 900 companies a year and audited thousands. This year, they fined 237.
Many experts say aggressively cracking down on employers will rid the nation of illegal immigrants. Because the vast majority of them come here to work, the United States would be a much less appealing destination without job opportunities.
But advocates for stricter enforcement say there is little political appetite to sever the co-dependent relationship between businesses and illegal immigrants.
And aggressive enforcement, agents have learned, can backfire.
Meat plant sweeps
In the late 1990s, in response to calls for tougher enforcement, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which later became Immigration and Customs Enforcement, blanketed Midwestern meatpacking companies with audits that identified thousands of employees suspected of being illegal immigrants.
Frightened workers left in droves, slowing slaughter-line speeds to a crawl and hurting farmers who relied on the meatpacking businesses.
"All hell broke loose," said Mark Reed, a former top INS official who was in charge of the crackdown, dubbed Operation Vanguard. "All of a sudden, these communities that wanted these people out of there realized that they needed them. They didn't realize that the kids who played on their soccer teams and the people they went to church with were going to go. They didn't realize that they were the center of their economy."
Nebraska's governor and members of Congress intervened. Operation Vanguard — which was scheduled to expand to the rest of the country — was nipped in the bud.
That's the problem with aggressive enforcement — it works too well, Reed said. The Obama administration's strategy could cause trouble, too, if it targets entire industries with audits. So far, however, ICE has focused on cases driven by leads — an approach that is more tempered than Operation Vanguard.
"They're smarter about it today," Reed said. "They're very cautiously going out and doing the audits in such a way that they won't rock the boat so much that they'll lose their authority."
But the essential problem remains: Create too much publicity about immigration enforcement and risk a backlash from politicians and business leaders. Too little, however, means businesses won't pay attention.
Roundups in the fields
The history of immigration enforcement in the Central Valley has been marked by inconsistencies and shifting policies.
Decades ago, federal agents would show up at fields in vans and helicopters to round up and deport illegal workers. Often, the workers would come right back.
David Remus, now a school librarian in Clovis, worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the 1970s and saw it firsthand.
"Sometimes the Border Patrol would come by and pick them up and they'd be back the next day from Mexico," he said.
In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted amnesty to almost 3 million immigrants and made it a crime to hire illegal workers. Agents were required to obtain search warrants; the result was fewer raids.
Posing as smugglers
In the 1990s, the Border Patrol — which at that time wasn't restricted to the border — infiltrated human smuggling rings and tried to crack down on fake document vendors. Its agents also posed as grape growers and ranchers in the valley and asked smugglers to bring them workers.
But in 1996, the Border Patrol began withdrawing from the INS Fresno office, which covered the central San Joaquin Valley. The office was left with few resources to investigate smugglers or to document vendors or employers who hired illegal immigrants.
"We lost a lot of ground," Poulsen said. "It was very frustrating."
Acting on tips from disgruntled workers or competing businesses, agents tried to crack down on businesses that hired illegal immigrants.
But those they audited usually were able to negotiate a small fine — "a slap on the hand," Poulsen said. Agents grew tired of it and decided to focus their efforts elsewhere.
After the backlash from Operation Vanguard, INS scaled back employer enforcement efforts across the country. After the Sept. 11 attacks, INS narrowed its focus to contractors that worked at places critical to national security, such as airports and military bases. As a consequence, the number of employers fined dropped from 535 in 1998 to 13 in 2002, according to government data.
After ICE was formed in March 2003, the Fresno office began to regain its footing. But because the office had limited resources and a wide range of responsibilities, most employers escaped scrutiny, said Poul-sen, who was a supervising agent until he became the resident agent in charge of the Fresno office in 2006.
From 2003 to 2006, the office didn't audit a single company. In the past two years, following the national trend, it has audited 11. Still, it has yet to fine a single company in the central San Joaquin Valley.
The Fresno office has been even less aggressive with raids. Poulsen remembers only one, in 2004 — a boat-manufacturing business in Merced that refused to fire illegal workers. He said about a dozen illegal workers were arrested. The employer wasn't arrested or fined.
When angry employers complained to Poulsen about being audited, he told them it could be worse: "I'd say, 'Well, I'm auditing you instead of showing up with a dozen agents and shutting you down completely. I'm doing you a favor.' "
Part of the reason for his approach, he said, was that he understood the farmers' plight.
"Nobody is more empathetic to the farmworkers than I," he said. "The guys who have their grapes, they need to have their crops harvested. In our society, we think we're too good for stoop labor. There has to be somebody to do it."
During the waning years of the Bush administration, immigration agents grabbed headlines by raiding companies and deporting workers. The raids across the country drew controversy, just as Operation Vanguard did a decade earlier.
Controversy, then change
The Obama administration decided to take a different approach.
In April 2009, ICE issued a memo that downplayed the importance of raids, noting that they did little to prove that employers knowingly hired illegal immigrants.
Instead, it hired scores of auditors and directed them to build cases against businesses. If an audit shows that a business employed illegal immigrants, the owner must fire them to avoid fines of up to $3,200 for each illegal worker — or prison time.
In 2006, ICE spent just 2 percent of its staff time on worksite enforcement, and not a single company was fined for hiring illegal immigrants. This year, it audited 2,196 businesses and fined 237.
Still, ICE spent only about 5 percent of its staff time on worksite enforcement through April — less than a fourth of the time it spent on drug smuggling.
'Nightmare' for farmers
Manuel Cunha, president of the Fresno-based Nisei Farmers League, an association of agriculture businesses in the West, said ICE audited four growers in his association last year, forcing them to fire many of their workers. He described it as a farmer's "worst nightmare."
"It was like Satan came to their door and said, 'We're taking your children because you know what? Your children sinned,' " Cunha said. "These farmers knew these workers. They were part of their community. They were part of their families. You yank them out, what does that do to that industry? To those farmers? To those workers?"
Mike Saqui, a Sacramento immigration attorney for businesses, said an audit can be destructive for businesses. One client who was audited in the middle of harvest time last year had to fire 269 of his 280 field workers.
If ICE wanted to use audits to get agriculture employers' attention, it worked. Cunha said growers worry about audits "every day now." Yet some doubt the administration's audit strategy will succeed.
Reed, the former INS official who runs an immigration consulting firm in Tucson, Ariz., said ICE should take a more comprehensive strategy and audit all companies in a region in the same industry instead of its "hodgepodge" approach. Otherwise, he said, businesses will continue to hire illegal immigrants because they believe there's little risk of an audit.
Audits only 'half a loaf'?
And another expert thinks ICE needs to continue workplace raids to clamp down on employers.
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, said audits alone don't do enough because illegal immigrants don't have to worry about being arrested.
"What we have now is half a loaf," she said.
Philip Martin, an immigration and farm labor expert at the University of California at Davis, said one question is whether the administration will follow its strategy consistently.
"So far, it hasn't been sustained long enough for it to have a significant effect," he said. "That's the big question: Is it going to be sustained?"
Audits aren't the only thing employers worry about. Immigration officials are deporting illegal immigrants, many of them working for farmers or construction companies, at a record pace. In the 2009-10 fiscal year, they deported 393,000, almost twice as many as four years earlier.
Much of the focus has been on deporting illegal immigrants suspected or convicted of crimes. But others often are swept up in such efforts.
That is what happened in Mendota during a February 2007 raid that was criticized by some local officials. Mendota officials said it took residents about a year to recover and the local economy suffered.
Former Fresno Mayor Alan Autry criticized ICE for being "mind-boggling in its callousness."
Erik Bonnar, the deputy field office director who supervises deportations in the San Joaquin Valley, said agents couldn't ignore the fact that some residents were illegal immigrants.
"If our officers determine that they're here illegally, then they'll take them into custody," he said.
More recently, ICE started a program in 2007 called Secure Communities that has attracted growing attention. It uses fingerprints to determine whether jail inmates are illegal immigrants, which often leads to their deportation.
Fresno, Tulare and Merced counties joined the rapidly expanding program this year. Because of jail crowding, however, many illegal immigrants arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor crimes are not booked into jail. Still, ICE officials predict that Secure Communities will help the agency dramatically increase the number of deportations.
Win Eaton, a Bakersfield-based immigration attorney who represents several agriculture employers, said his clients are "running scared" because of the audits and increasing number of deportations. The worst is yet to come, he said.
"We're seeing a great deal more enforcement activity in 2010 than we ever saw under the Bush administration," Eaton said. "What I'm most concerned about is where this could lead."
© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Massive firings in Brewster, and a big debate about illegal immigration
By Melissa Sanchez
The Seattle Times
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Janeth Hernandez opens another bill she is unable to pay after her husband was fired from Gebbers Farms in Brewster. Like many in the same situation, the couple don't know what they are going to do next.
BREWSTER, Okanogan County -- The letters came on a Wednesday, hand-delivered to hundreds of field and warehouse workers two days before Christmas.
Each contained a four-sentence explanation beneath the company's letterhead.
Federal immigration authorities had alerted Gebbers Farms that a number of its employees' hiring forms were suspect. Unless those employees could prove they were in this country legally, the company would let them go.
Many couldn't. Like the vast majority of America's agricultural work force, they were illegal immigrants who used fake documents to get jobs picking and packing fruit, in this case in and around this small town on the Columbia River north of Wenatchee.
Five days later, the company dismissed an estimated 550 workers -- equal to about a quarter of Brewster's population. It was the biggest firing of its kind ever seen in Washington. And former workers say the letters and firings are still coming.
What's happened at Gebbers Farms has been felt far beyond this shaken community. It's raising worries about more audits and firings across Central Washington, where much of the agricultural economy depends on an illegal work force.
"If the entire industry was audited it'd be impossible to fill all of the jobs," says Mike Gempler, executive director of the Washington Growers League.
With the firings, the complexity of illegal immigrants in the work force becomes starkly clear.
Other immigrants--some legal and some not--have learned of the sudden job openings and are arriving to fill the void. Some of the applicants may not be new at all.
"I was thinking about changing the Social Security number I use and reapplying," says Antonio Sanchez, a 51-year-old former Gebbers orchard worker. "I don't know what to do."
Five generations of the Gebbers family have farmed here along the Columbia River. The company runs more than 5,000 acres of apples and cherries, including one of the world's largest contiguous orchards. Its products are marketed internationally.
"This town exists because of them," says Esteban Camacho, who manages a local bakery and like most Mexican immigrants here has worked for Gebbers.
By most accounts, the company is well thought of. It built housing and soccer fields for its workers and, unlike many other growers, provides stable year-round work.
Rumors about the firings abound in Brewster, but details remain scarce.
Lorie Dankers, spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Seattle, says she can't say anything about the incident at Gebbers or even confirm her agency conducted an audit.
Industry officials say ICE has audited a half-dozen smaller Washington growers in recent years. The only other known massive firing prompted by an ICE audit was last year at American Apparel, a Los Angeles-based garment company.
ICE first notified Gebbers in 2008 that it had been audited and that it needed to take action, according to industry officials. Gebbers acknowledged the audit in a brief statement dated the day of the firings. The statement closed with: "Gebbers Farms will continue to welcome workers of all backgrounds with proper work authorization."
Since then, company officials have declined to speak publicly about the situation. Even Brewster's mayor says he's had trouble finding out what happened.
Obama shift to audits
What happened at Gebbers reflects a change in strategy under President Obama's administration, which is shifting ICE's focus away from targeting illegal immigrants and instead focusing on those who hire them.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors tougher enforcement, sees Obama scaling back efforts to crack down on illegal immigration by emphasizing audits instead of workplace raids.
Immigrant-rights advocates call audits the more humane of the two approaches.
"This is not to say this new approach does not create hardship," says Matt Adams, legal adviser for the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project in Seattle. "But I think if the government is going to enforce the laws that are on the books, they should be given credit for doing it in a way that is not tearing families apart."
Thirty-three Washington companies were audited last year, and ICE spokeswoman Dankers says employers can expect more to come.
"We know that changing the behavior of employers to ensure they hire a legal work force doesn't happen overnight," she says. "We want employers to know that regardless of size and industry or your location and the type of business you have, the federal government expects these businesses to comply with the law."
Few growers will speak openly about the issue. Bob Brody, who owns King Blossom Natural, a 344-acre organic apple orchard in Brewster, is one of them.
"What happened at Gebbers--it fries my brain sometimes," says Brody, adding that he shouldn't have to verify whether a worker's status is legitimate.
He says every one of his employees, except for his office manager, is Latino. "Americans don't stop by and ask for jobs right now," Brody says. "There is a 10 percent unemployment rate. And I've not had a single U.S. American stop by and ask for a job."
On many evenings, the conversation between Daniel and Angelica Aguilar turns to just that. The recently dismissed couple and their toddler daughter live in a tiny one-bedroom apartment near the center of Brewster.
"During the cherry-picking season, there's maybe 2,200 of us working in the orchards," says Daniel Aguilar, 26. "Of those, there wasn't a single white American.
"Why does it bother them that we're doing the work they don't want to do?"
In part, the Gebbers firings have produced the desired effect. Of the dozen or so families in Brewster interviewed by the Yakima Herald-Republic, about half say they plan to return to Mexico. And everybody knew someone who had already left.
"What's the point of staying? There are no jobs," says one woman, who identified herself only as Mariela in fear of being deported.
"Fight the good fight"
But for every illegal immigrant who leaves, there seems to be another one willing to risk his luck.
Before dawn one recent foggy Tuesday, groups of men waited in the cold for Gebbers vans to pick them up for work pruning apple trees.
"I just got a job here," says one young man who came from Los Angeles after learning about the sudden openings. He would not identify himself.
The others laughed nervously. "Are there supposed to be more audits?" one called out, before saying he needed to find a better Social Security number.
The presence of new workers who are here illegally has created some resentment among those who were laid off. But some have a hard time blaming their fellow countrymen.
"It's not their fault they're working," says Janeth Hernandez, who doesn't know how her family will make the rent this month. "They have to fight the good fight, too, just like us."
The December firings clearly disrupted the Gebbers operation, says Dan Fazio, the Washington State Farm Bureau's director of employment services.
"It's wrong for the administration to be doing raids or ... audits without investing time and energy into a functional guest-worker program," says Fazio, noting that growers can't compete with lower wages in Chile and China.
ICE encourages the companies it audits to use the federal E-Verify system, which allows employers to check whether new hires are legally authorized to work, Dankers says.
A spokeswoman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which operates E-Verify, says no companies in Brewster use it. Industry leaders say most growers are reluctant because the program won't give them an answer they like.
And in politically conservative Eastern Washington, that doesn't gain them many supporters. Some people, including the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and Grassroots on Fire, blame the growers for attracting illegal immigrants.
"They want the illegals to disappear and they want the employers that hire illegals to be put in jail," the farm bureau's Fazio says. "We want to assure these people that farmers don't want illegals more than any other citizen ...
"But when you ask these people, 'Do you want to have your apples from China?' they always respond, 'No, we'd like American apples.' "
U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Pasco, says it doesn't have to be an either-or issue.
"First we have to realize that we have to secure our borders," Hastings says. "The nature of our agriculture industry requires a migrant labor force, and ... the best way to address that is with a workable guest-worker program."
Few Washington growers use the current guest-worker program, which they consider expensive and cumbersome.
The Growers League, meanwhile, supports a bill that would create a path toward legal status for agricultural workers as well as revise the guest-worker program.
"Most difficult times"
In Brewster, the next six weeks will see a tense waiting game for former Gebbers employees. The company has given those who live in a series of camps deep inside its orchards until the end of March to vacate. School officials are bracing for the loss of state funding that comes with each of the children of the fired workers. Food-bank volunteers say they're seeing plenty of new faces.
Despite what happened, few former employees complain about the company. They just want their jobs back. The rumor these days is that in March they'll be rehired.
"Fifteen years I've worked for this company," says one man, who declined to give his name for fear of losing his housing. "I still have some hope that maybe by March everything will get sorted out. In the meantime, these are the most difficult times."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2011069760_brewster14.html
The Seattle Times
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Janeth Hernandez opens another bill she is unable to pay after her husband was fired from Gebbers Farms in Brewster. Like many in the same situation, the couple don't know what they are going to do next.
BREWSTER, Okanogan County -- The letters came on a Wednesday, hand-delivered to hundreds of field and warehouse workers two days before Christmas.
Each contained a four-sentence explanation beneath the company's letterhead.
Federal immigration authorities had alerted Gebbers Farms that a number of its employees' hiring forms were suspect. Unless those employees could prove they were in this country legally, the company would let them go.
Many couldn't. Like the vast majority of America's agricultural work force, they were illegal immigrants who used fake documents to get jobs picking and packing fruit, in this case in and around this small town on the Columbia River north of Wenatchee.
Five days later, the company dismissed an estimated 550 workers -- equal to about a quarter of Brewster's population. It was the biggest firing of its kind ever seen in Washington. And former workers say the letters and firings are still coming.
What's happened at Gebbers Farms has been felt far beyond this shaken community. It's raising worries about more audits and firings across Central Washington, where much of the agricultural economy depends on an illegal work force.
"If the entire industry was audited it'd be impossible to fill all of the jobs," says Mike Gempler, executive director of the Washington Growers League.
With the firings, the complexity of illegal immigrants in the work force becomes starkly clear.
Other immigrants--some legal and some not--have learned of the sudden job openings and are arriving to fill the void. Some of the applicants may not be new at all.
"I was thinking about changing the Social Security number I use and reapplying," says Antonio Sanchez, a 51-year-old former Gebbers orchard worker. "I don't know what to do."
Five generations of the Gebbers family have farmed here along the Columbia River. The company runs more than 5,000 acres of apples and cherries, including one of the world's largest contiguous orchards. Its products are marketed internationally.
"This town exists because of them," says Esteban Camacho, who manages a local bakery and like most Mexican immigrants here has worked for Gebbers.
By most accounts, the company is well thought of. It built housing and soccer fields for its workers and, unlike many other growers, provides stable year-round work.
Rumors about the firings abound in Brewster, but details remain scarce.
Lorie Dankers, spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Seattle, says she can't say anything about the incident at Gebbers or even confirm her agency conducted an audit.
Industry officials say ICE has audited a half-dozen smaller Washington growers in recent years. The only other known massive firing prompted by an ICE audit was last year at American Apparel, a Los Angeles-based garment company.
ICE first notified Gebbers in 2008 that it had been audited and that it needed to take action, according to industry officials. Gebbers acknowledged the audit in a brief statement dated the day of the firings. The statement closed with: "Gebbers Farms will continue to welcome workers of all backgrounds with proper work authorization."
Since then, company officials have declined to speak publicly about the situation. Even Brewster's mayor says he's had trouble finding out what happened.
Obama shift to audits
What happened at Gebbers reflects a change in strategy under President Obama's administration, which is shifting ICE's focus away from targeting illegal immigrants and instead focusing on those who hire them.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors tougher enforcement, sees Obama scaling back efforts to crack down on illegal immigration by emphasizing audits instead of workplace raids.
Immigrant-rights advocates call audits the more humane of the two approaches.
"This is not to say this new approach does not create hardship," says Matt Adams, legal adviser for the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project in Seattle. "But I think if the government is going to enforce the laws that are on the books, they should be given credit for doing it in a way that is not tearing families apart."
Thirty-three Washington companies were audited last year, and ICE spokeswoman Dankers says employers can expect more to come.
"We know that changing the behavior of employers to ensure they hire a legal work force doesn't happen overnight," she says. "We want employers to know that regardless of size and industry or your location and the type of business you have, the federal government expects these businesses to comply with the law."
Few growers will speak openly about the issue. Bob Brody, who owns King Blossom Natural, a 344-acre organic apple orchard in Brewster, is one of them.
"What happened at Gebbers--it fries my brain sometimes," says Brody, adding that he shouldn't have to verify whether a worker's status is legitimate.
He says every one of his employees, except for his office manager, is Latino. "Americans don't stop by and ask for jobs right now," Brody says. "There is a 10 percent unemployment rate. And I've not had a single U.S. American stop by and ask for a job."
On many evenings, the conversation between Daniel and Angelica Aguilar turns to just that. The recently dismissed couple and their toddler daughter live in a tiny one-bedroom apartment near the center of Brewster.
"During the cherry-picking season, there's maybe 2,200 of us working in the orchards," says Daniel Aguilar, 26. "Of those, there wasn't a single white American.
"Why does it bother them that we're doing the work they don't want to do?"
In part, the Gebbers firings have produced the desired effect. Of the dozen or so families in Brewster interviewed by the Yakima Herald-Republic, about half say they plan to return to Mexico. And everybody knew someone who had already left.
"What's the point of staying? There are no jobs," says one woman, who identified herself only as Mariela in fear of being deported.
"Fight the good fight"
But for every illegal immigrant who leaves, there seems to be another one willing to risk his luck.
Before dawn one recent foggy Tuesday, groups of men waited in the cold for Gebbers vans to pick them up for work pruning apple trees.
"I just got a job here," says one young man who came from Los Angeles after learning about the sudden openings. He would not identify himself.
The others laughed nervously. "Are there supposed to be more audits?" one called out, before saying he needed to find a better Social Security number.
The presence of new workers who are here illegally has created some resentment among those who were laid off. But some have a hard time blaming their fellow countrymen.
"It's not their fault they're working," says Janeth Hernandez, who doesn't know how her family will make the rent this month. "They have to fight the good fight, too, just like us."
The December firings clearly disrupted the Gebbers operation, says Dan Fazio, the Washington State Farm Bureau's director of employment services.
"It's wrong for the administration to be doing raids or ... audits without investing time and energy into a functional guest-worker program," says Fazio, noting that growers can't compete with lower wages in Chile and China.
ICE encourages the companies it audits to use the federal E-Verify system, which allows employers to check whether new hires are legally authorized to work, Dankers says.
A spokeswoman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which operates E-Verify, says no companies in Brewster use it. Industry leaders say most growers are reluctant because the program won't give them an answer they like.
And in politically conservative Eastern Washington, that doesn't gain them many supporters. Some people, including the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and Grassroots on Fire, blame the growers for attracting illegal immigrants.
"They want the illegals to disappear and they want the employers that hire illegals to be put in jail," the farm bureau's Fazio says. "We want to assure these people that farmers don't want illegals more than any other citizen ...
"But when you ask these people, 'Do you want to have your apples from China?' they always respond, 'No, we'd like American apples.' "
U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Pasco, says it doesn't have to be an either-or issue.
"First we have to realize that we have to secure our borders," Hastings says. "The nature of our agriculture industry requires a migrant labor force, and ... the best way to address that is with a workable guest-worker program."
Few Washington growers use the current guest-worker program, which they consider expensive and cumbersome.
The Growers League, meanwhile, supports a bill that would create a path toward legal status for agricultural workers as well as revise the guest-worker program.
"Most difficult times"
In Brewster, the next six weeks will see a tense waiting game for former Gebbers employees. The company has given those who live in a series of camps deep inside its orchards until the end of March to vacate. School officials are bracing for the loss of state funding that comes with each of the children of the fired workers. Food-bank volunteers say they're seeing plenty of new faces.
Despite what happened, few former employees complain about the company. They just want their jobs back. The rumor these days is that in March they'll be rehired.
"Fifteen years I've worked for this company," says one man, who declined to give his name for fear of losing his housing. "I still have some hope that maybe by March everything will get sorted out. In the meantime, these are the most difficult times."
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2011069760_brewster14.html
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Farmers: Immigration Raids Imperil Harvests
Farmers: Immigration Raids Imperil Harvests
Jay Gallagher and Leah Rae
The Journal News (NY)
ALBANY - With the harvest season beginning, farmers around the state say crackdowns on immigrants are causing a widespread labor shortage that threatens this year's harvest of some fruits and vegetables.
"Some farmers are flat-out short of hands," said Pete Gregg, a spokesman for the state Farm Bureau. "They're worried about leaving fruits on the trees and vegetables on the ground."
New York is home to a labor-intensive farming industry that expects this year to produce 3 billion apples, second to Washington state, as well as cabbage, corn, cherries, peaches, strawberries and blueberries. Most of those crops have to be picked by hand.
At Cascade Farm in Patterson, David Frost is preparing to work harder and longer hours when four of his employees return to high school and college, halfway through the growing season. It's impossible to find replacements, he said, even though there is no shortage of willing laborers nearby.
"We've checked with a lot of day laborers, and none of them have papers," said Frost, who runs an educational farm with a range of organic produce. "And we're a not-for-profit, so we don't want to jeopardize our status with any kind of problems. So we're doing it by the book.
"They all need work. We need them. But they don't have papers," Frost said.
About half of the nation's 1 million hired farmworkers do not have legal authorization to work in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Earlier migrants have had opportunities to legalize their status, but Congress has deadlocked over a proposed legalization program. Of farmworkers who entered the United States since 2001, only 2 percent have legal status, according to the National Agricultural Workers Survey.
http://www.lohud.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008808140410
Jay Gallagher and Leah Rae
The Journal News (NY)
ALBANY - With the harvest season beginning, farmers around the state say crackdowns on immigrants are causing a widespread labor shortage that threatens this year's harvest of some fruits and vegetables.
"Some farmers are flat-out short of hands," said Pete Gregg, a spokesman for the state Farm Bureau. "They're worried about leaving fruits on the trees and vegetables on the ground."
New York is home to a labor-intensive farming industry that expects this year to produce 3 billion apples, second to Washington state, as well as cabbage, corn, cherries, peaches, strawberries and blueberries. Most of those crops have to be picked by hand.
At Cascade Farm in Patterson, David Frost is preparing to work harder and longer hours when four of his employees return to high school and college, halfway through the growing season. It's impossible to find replacements, he said, even though there is no shortage of willing laborers nearby.
"We've checked with a lot of day laborers, and none of them have papers," said Frost, who runs an educational farm with a range of organic produce. "And we're a not-for-profit, so we don't want to jeopardize our status with any kind of problems. So we're doing it by the book.
"They all need work. We need them. But they don't have papers," Frost said.
About half of the nation's 1 million hired farmworkers do not have legal authorization to work in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Earlier migrants have had opportunities to legalize their status, but Congress has deadlocked over a proposed legalization program. Of farmworkers who entered the United States since 2001, only 2 percent have legal status, according to the National Agricultural Workers Survey.
http://www.lohud.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008808140410
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