Read Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684) Online
Authors: Aviva Chomsky
Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684) (19 page)
Operation Vanguard ended in 2000, but in 2006 a new enforcement effort began, focused on workplace raids. On December 12, 2006, ICE agents descended on six Swift meatpacking plants in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, Colorado, and Utah, arresting thirteen hundred of the company’s seven thousand day-shift workers. Swift was also part of the industry pattern of shifting from urban to rural, and employing large numbers of new Latin American immigrants, many of them undocumented. In several Swift plants, researchers drew a direct connection to the Bracero Program. Two small communities in the Mexican states of Michoacán, Villachuato and La Huacana, which had begun to send recruits northward as braceros, had now become major sources of migrants to Swift plants. These workers were later joined by Central Americans. In Swift’s Cactus, Texas, plant, most of the workers were Maya Quiche Guatemalans, many of them undocumented.
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In an eerie replay of previous roundups and deportations of Mexicans like Operation Wetback, ICE agents relied on appearance to determine who to detain. One American citizen of Mexican origin at Swift’s Nebraska plant recounted that “when they said all the US citizens come over to this place, I went up there and I stood right by my boss. My boss showed his driver’s license and then he was free to go. I showed my driver’s license and my voting registration card and that was not enough. He [the ICE agent] said, no, you need either your passport or citizenship certificate.”
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Most of those arrested in the raids were charged not with the civil violation of unauthorized presence in the country, but with criminal charges of fraudulent use of Social Security numbers and/or identity theft.
The raids affected more than just those arrested, as family members and others were afraid to show up to work in the aftermath. The Center for Immigration Studies looked at what happened in the devastated plants over the following months. All managed to replace the hundreds of workers who were arrested, but none improved working conditions or wages, and none shifted back to employing US citizens. The companies scoured the United States for workers willing to accept the jobs, and most of the lost workers were eventually replaced by immigrants from Burma and different parts of Africa who held refugee status and thus had legal authorization to work.
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THE POSTVILLE RAID
Another devastating raid took place at the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa, in May 2008. Agriprocessors represented a cross between in-sourcing and a new industry. Although meatpacking in general was an old industry that was moving into new rural areas, kosher processing had been a local, small-scale industry before the late twentieth century. “In the 1980s, before the Postville plant had opened, almost all fresh kosher meat had been sold through local butchers. It came in raw quarters from slaughterhouses that were rented out by rabbis, and it rarely made it beyond major cities on the coasts.”
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The Rubashkin family changed all that. Locating their new plant in the small town of Postville, Iowa, they proposed to turn kosher meat into a nationally available, mass-produced product. “The Rubashkins created a world in which it was possible to buy fresh kosher beef and poultry in ordinary supermarkets across the country, even in places that had few Jews. . . . The changes brought about by the Rubashkins did something more than expand the reach of kosher meat. They brought an entirely new customer base to kosher food: the secular Jews and even non-Jews who never would have stopped at a butcher shop. The expansion also allowed Orthodox communities in places that had never had them.”
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Agriprocessors also differed from other meatpackers in choosing the tiny town of Postville as its location. Most meatpackers moved to medium-sized towns of thirty thousand to sixty thousand when they left the urban centers. Postville, with a population of fourteen hundred, was “a town with no stoplights, no fast-food restaurants and a weekly newspaper that for years featured the ‘Yard of the Week.’”
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Most of the workers were recruited from two small villages in Guatemala. Over 75 percent of the workers were undocumented, and some were minors.
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Working conditions at the plant were abysmal.
“One of those workers—a woman who agreed to be identified by the pseudonym Juana—came to this rural corner of Iowa a year ago from Guatemala,” said one newspaper account. Since then, she has worked 10-to-12-hour night shifts, six nights a week. Her cutting hand is swollen and deformed, but she has no health insurance to have it checked. She works for wages, starting at $6.25 an hour and stopping at $7, that several industry experts described as the lowest of any slaughterhouse in the nation.”
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In May 2008, ICE agents descended on the plant and arrested 389 of its 900 workers, most of them Guatemalan. As their lengthy saga of incarceration and deportation began, the rest of the town’s immigrant population panicked. “Within weeks, roughly 1,000 Mexican and Guatemalan residents—about a third of the town—vanished. It was as if a natural disaster had swept through, leaving no physical evidence of destruction, just silence behind it.”
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The Agriprocessors raid in May 2008 was “the largest single-site operation of its kind in American history.”
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Because one of the court interpreters, Erik Camayd-Freixas, wrote a detailed protest about the irregularity of the procedures, which circulated widely on the Internet and was later submitted to Congress, the public obtained access to an unusually complete picture of the process. According to Camayd-Freixas’s account, “The arrest, prosecution, and conviction of 297 undocumented workers from Postville was a process marred by irregularities at every step of the way.” The government charged the workers en masse, and without any evidence whatsoever, of the criminal charge of “aggravated identity theft.” Prosecutors then coerced them into a plea bargain for a lesser but still criminal charge of misuse of a Social Security number.
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The Guatemalan workers knew that they were in the country without legal permission. But that’s a civil violation, not a crime. The only punishment should have been removal. Through their own networks, most of the undocumented immigrants know that they have few rights in the immigration court system. Most of them had no idea what the criminal charges meant, and when pressured to accept a plea bargain, most of them did so. Many acquiesced out of desperation, since as the sole support for their families, they could not afford to remain in detention awaiting trial. They believed they would quickly be deported. Instead, they had signed up for a five-month prison sentence.
Camayd-Freixas described the heart-wrenching scenes as court-appointed lawyers tried to explain the criminal charges and advise those arrested. One conversation illustrates the utter disconnect between the world of the workers and the legal system they were caught in.
The client, a Guatemalan peasant afraid for his family, spent most of that time weeping at our table, in a corner of the crowded jailhouse visiting room. How did he come here from Guatemala? “I walked.” What? “I walked for a month and ten days until I crossed the river. . . . I just wanted to work a year or two, save, and then go back to my family, but it was not to be. . . . The Good Lord knows I was just working and not doing anyone any harm.” This man, like many others, was in fact not guilty. “Knowingly” and “intent” are necessary elements of the [criminal] charges, but most of the clients we interviewed did not even know what a Social Security number was or what purpose it served. This worker simply had the papers filled out for him at the plant, since he could not read or write Spanish, let alone English. But the lawyer still had to advise him that pleading guilty was in his best interest. He was unable to make a decision. “You all do and undo,” he said. “So you can do whatever you want with me.” To him we were part of the system keeping him from being deported back to his country, where his children, wife, mother, and sister depended on him. He was their sole support and did not know how they were going to make it with him in jail for 5 months. None of the “options” really mattered to him. Caught between despair and hopelessness, he just wept. He had failed his family, and was devastated. I went for some napkins, but he refused them. I offered him a cup of soda, which he superstitiously declined, saying it could be “poisoned.” His Native American spirit was broken and he could no longer think. He stared for a while at the signature page pretending to read it, although I knew he was actually praying for guidance and protection. Before he signed with a scribble, he said: “God knows you are just doing your job to support your families, and that job is to keep me from supporting mine.”
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Like Swift, Agriprocessors looked to other sources of marginalized, immigrant workers in the wake of the raid. “In one of its most desperate moves, Agri recruited 170 people from the Micronesian island of Palau—whose status as a former US protectorate means its citizens can work legally in the United States. In September 2008, the Palauans traveled 72 hours and 8,000 miles on planes and buses before arriving in Postville with little more than flip-flops and brightly colored shorts and tops.”
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Six months later, the plant closed. It was later sold and reopened, and like other plants in the industry, implemented the E-Verify system. However, as a journalist found in 2011,
few Iowan-born locals work there. Ridding this small community of its illegal workforce, far from freeing up jobs for American-born citizens, has resulted in closed businesses and fewer opportunities. Even nearly four years later, many homes still remain empty, and taxable retail sales are about 40 percent lower than they were in 2008.
In order to staff its still low-paying jobs with legal immigrants, the new owner of the plant has recruited a hodgepodge of refugees and other immigrants, who often leave the town as soon as they find better opportunities, creating a constant churn among the population. The switch to a legal workforce has made the community feel less stable, some locals say, and it’s unclear if Postville will again become a place where immigrants will put down roots, raise children, and live in relative harmony with their very different neighbors.
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Years later, a researcher in Guatemala met with families that had been deported, including sixteen US-born, US citizen children. The children, Aryah Somers reported, were “growing up in extreme poverty, with little schooling and scant medical care. . . . The kids are undernourished and barely literate in either Spanish or English.” Their parents planned to send them back to the United States once they are ten or twelve years old and able to travel alone.
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While the Obama administration scaled down the Bush-era policy of workplace raids, the E-Verify system expanded rapidly. E-Verify was created in 1997 under the auspices of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and requires participating employers to check each new hire against a set of federal databases to ensure that the individual is either a citizen or an immigrant specifically authorized to work in the United States. The system was initially voluntary, but in 2007, the Office of Management and Budget required all federal government agencies to screen all new hires through the system and, in 2009, required certain federal contractors and subcontractors to use it for existing employees as well as new hires. Several states, beginning with Arizona in 2007, have mandated that all employers in the state utilize E-Verify.
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Other states have tried to restrict its use.
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S. 744, the comprehensive immigration reform bill supported by President Obama and passed by the Senate in June 2013, would make the system mandatory for all employers nationwide. (As this book goes to press, the bill seems to have little chance of passing in the House or becoming law.)
But the experience of the meatpacking industry shows that eliminating undocumented workers, either through workplace raids or through the use of E-Verify, has not increased employment opportunities for citizens. Instead, it has destabilized businesses and communities, created temporary flows of refugees, and brought harm to innumerable immigrants, citizens, and businesses with benefit to none. Many argue against the use of E-Verify because the GAO found it to be plagued with errors and false alarms, as amply illustrated by several GAO investigations between 2005 and 2011.
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While it’s quite true that the program has mistakenly ensnared large numbers of work-authorized immigrants and naturalized citizens, that is not the only or even the main reason to oppose it. Even if the program worked perfectly, its impact on individuals, businesses, communities, and the economy would only be to cause harm.
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NEW JOBS: LANDSCAPING
Other sectors that employ significant numbers of undocumented workers are the mostly unregulated, small-scale niches in the service sector like landscaping, nanny services, and newspaper delivery. The first two are sectors where employment has grown in recent decades, while in the latter it has shrunk. But all three have been refuges for undocumented workers, in part because they involve low pay; insecurity and lack of benefits; difficult hours; and isolated, heavy, and sometimes dangerous working conditions. These poor working conditions parallel the working conditions in industries that have been outsourced (manufacturing) and in-sourced (meatpacking, construction). The cheap products provided by outsourcing and in-sourcing, along with the cheap services provided by these new service industries, have contributed to rising consumption and illusions of affluence in the United States.
The landscaping industry has grown steadily since the 1970s, hand in hand with the construction industry. Newly built homes, businesses, and public buildings created a fresh demand for landscaping services. Landscaping companies responded to the increased demand by creating new products and services, which soon came to be considered essential.
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