GAINESVILLE (Florida) SUN June 11, 2006 Shadow workers By CINDY SWIRKO, Sun staff writer Until a few years ago, the immigration debate that is now dividing the country would have been largely an abstract issue for Alachua County.
But get a new roof, buy a new azalea bush or build a new house today and more of the workers are apt to be immigrants instead of native-born.
Immigrant labor is migrating to Alachua County and into the very trades that are enabling the county's economic growth. No one knows how many, but based on the hiring of local roofers, builders and landscapers the size of the county's immigrant labor pool could be in the thousands.
While many argue that immigrant workers are taking jobs from Americans by working cheaply, depressing wages and stressing social service agencies and schools, Alachua County builders, roofers and nursery owners say they couldn't thrive without them.
"If they couldn't work here, it would be a dramatic change in the way we live and what we've come to expect," said Keith Perry of Perry Roofing, one of the county's largest roofing companies. About half of his 200 workers are immigrants, he said.
"If you look at it from that standpoint, we're benefiting as a county from good labor in the lower wage fields.
"As a taxpayer and parent, you become alarmed about immigration. But I can tell you from personal experience, overall (immigrant workers) are way more of a contributor to our economy and society than they take away," he said.
According to the 2000 U.S. Census - the latest available - the Alachua County Hispanic population is 5.7 percent. The actual numbers are likely higher due to the influx of laborers since then and the fact that undocumented workers typically avoid being counted. Nationally, it's estimated that 9 million to 20 million undocumented Hispanic workers are in the country.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Miami field office, which covers all of Florida, expelled 7,873 illegal immigrants in 2004, according to its Web site database.
Nationwide, the agency expelled more than 1.2 million, of which more than 1.1 million were from Mexico.
Employers, researchers and the workers themselves say the number of undocumented worker is growing and will continue to grow if immigration law allows.
Wave immigrants
People who work with immigrant laborers said Alachua County's days as an area largely unaffected by immigration trends are over.
"At this moment there is a big wave between Orlando and Ocala that is coming up," said the Rev. Nilo Dominguez of Iglesia Evangelica Bautista, a Spanish Baptist church in northwest Gainesville. "I can see it coming."
Alachua County has lagged behind its neighbors in getting buffeted by the wave in part because the county has less agriculture than neighboring counties.
For years Hispanic immigrants have handled the dirty work of rounding up chickens at the industrial poultry farms of Suwannee County. The July 4 watermelon from Levy County may have been picked by an immigrant worker. And the manure of million dollar race horses in Marion County is largely shoveled by Hispanic immigrants.
Marion County has about 400 thoroughbred farms that employ 13,000, about half of whom are immigrants, said Richard Hancock, executive vice president of the Ocala-based Florida Thoroughbred Breeders and Owners Association.
But increasingly, the construction trades - and the finishing touch of landscaping - are being done by immigrant workers. With those businesses booming in Alachua County, the documented and undocumented immigrant labor force is growing here, business owners said.
University of Florida anthropology professor Allan Burns, who studies immigration from Mexico and Central America, said the current wave of immigration here started around 2000.
"Gainesville reflects a national trend in that while farmwork continues to be an important part of the engine driving immigration, one study I saw showed that about half of the immigrants are now working for private individuals," Burns said. "It started with nannies and gardeners in California, and quickly moved into construction. The contractor hires them. It's day labor."
What drives hiring?
Some of Alachua County's biggest firms in the construction trades are high on Hispanic immigrant workers.
G.W. Robinson builds about 80 homes a year including such new in-demand locations as Turnberry Isle and Garrison Way. Robinson said his contractors hire a sizable number of Hispanics, adding the crews do quality work.
Roofers, drywallers and other contractors are using more Hispanic workers as well. Perry, for instance, said up to half of his workers are immigrants.
"Hispanic workers - to stereotype - are much more dependable, much more eager to work, much harder workers. Everything you read about and hear about is true - I experience it first hand," Perry said. "That's why they don't have too much of a problem getting jobs over here - because of how good and dependable they are."
Robinson said the labor shortage and the post-hurricane demand for construction workers over the last couple years is driving the hiring. As long as lots of homes are being built with too few people to build them, immigrant labor will be needed, Robinson said.
Finding immigrant labor is easy. Many have been here for years.
Robinson, Perry and others said they work with contractors and subcontractors who are tapped into pools of immigrant workers, primarily from Mexico but also from Guatemala and Ecuador. The subcontractors are able to hire the workers for jobs here.
Nursery owners and landscapers say immigrant workers have moved from the fields to the greenhouses and they now do much of the labor at nurseries, while some of the larger landscaping firms fill out their crews with immigrant workers.
"There is such a labor shortage that if we need roofers, and a roofer comes up and signs a contract with us that he will put the roof up for a price, we don't ask him if he's using women, men, whoever - as long as he has all of his papers in order," Robinson said. "We do not hire anyone unless they have all of the federal papers, and we expect the subcontractors to keep it all up. They certify they do all this."
Implicit is the belief that American workers don't want to broil on roofs or toil in fields, or that some of those who do cannot be counted on to show up every day.
That's baffling to business owners, who say workers can earn good pay. Perry said some of his roofers make $50,000 a year depending on the amount of work they do, while Gainesville mason Jim Painter said with overtime, bricklayers can haul in $30 an hour.
Alto Straughn, who owns three blueberry farms in Alachua County and has long hired seasonal migrant labor to work, employs about 25 immigrants year round to maintain the farms.
Straughn said pickers make an average of $15 an hour and packers $8 an hour. Straughn added about a fourth of his workers make $1,000 for a seven-day week. Taxes, Medicare and Social Security are withheld in the checks.
If the U.S. tightens immigration, Straughn said he is considering moving his operation to Mexico. Labor is not an issue there, he said. The other option is mechanical harvesting, which damages the berries and would require new bushes in addition to other expenses.
"There are companies looking at moving operations to Mexico and that is certainly on my agenda," he said. "Not that I want to, but if you produce the berries there, labor is not an issue."
Immigrants often endure difficult journeys to get here for the chance to pick berries or frame a house - a trip they may pay thousands of dollars to make.
They said they do it to make a better life for themselves and the relatives they leave behind. Reaction of native-borns to the immigrants can vary
"You can make $500 to $600 a week. There is always work but if it rains you don't work, so you don't make money then," said roofer Israel Carballo, a Mexican immigrant who usually works on a crew of five. "You see different people. Sometimes they are nice, sometimes they are racist. Sometimes people are nice and don't care about the situation. But other times you can tell they don't want you there and so we hurry to do the job. They try to find fault with the work we do. But we are doing a good job. I have not encountered a situation yet where people have yelled at us, but it is a concern."
Impact on jobs, pay
A primary argument against immigration is that the new workers are taking jobs away from American citizens.
The Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank, recently reported that immigration does take jobs from American citizens and deflates wages by providing a larger labor pool.
Center researcher Steve Camarota reported that between March 2000 and March 2005 the number of adult documented and undocumented immigrants with a high school degree or less in the labor force increased by 1.6 million.
During the same period unemployment among less-educated adult Americans increased by nearly one million, and the number of Americans who left the labor force altogether increased by 1.5 million.
The study concluded that some of the occupations most affected by immigration include maids, construction, dishwashers, janitors, painters, cabbies, groundskeepers and meat/poultry workers.
It was also stated that the overwhelming majority of workers in these occupations are American-born.
"In the debate in the Senate going on right now, the impact of immigration on America's most vulnerable workers unfortunately has not come up very much, yet it should," Camarota said during a March 22 panel discussion on the report at the National Press Club in Washington. "Letting illegal aliens stay in the country, dramatically increasing the number of green cards . . . almost certainly has enormous implications for America's poorest workers."
Gainesville's Ron Sanford said he has firsthand experience with job loss.
Sanford said that until recently he worked for a Ridgeway Roof Truss of Gainesville, which he contends is replacing American-born workers with non-natives.
After seven years with the company, Sanford said he was fired after a miscommunication with his Hispanic supervisor. Sanford said he told his supervisor he went into the office to do some business, while the supervisor apparently thought Sanford told him it was none of his business why he went to the office.
"I got a copy of my termination and it said insubordination. But I'd never had a reprimand before," Sanford said. "My boss said he was going to get Mexicans because they come to work and that he wasn't hiring anymore Americans. They've fired about six Americans and they'll bring Mexicans right in."
Karl Thelosen of Ridgeway said Sanford has filed a worker's rights action against Ridgeway and that the company's attorneys told him not to comment on the matter of Sanford or hiring practices.
Climbing their way up
Meanwhile, immigrant workers say they have no problem starting low in agriculture jobs and working up into construction.
On a lunch break from building a house in Haile Plantation, Julio Gomez, who did not want to give his legal status, talked of the work he does and how immigrant workers often climb their way up to construction work after starting in the fields. He has been in the U.S. for several years, working in Georgia before coming to Gainesville.
"A lot of Spanish (people) work in the fields first and then become hired labor. Then if the boss sees you progress, they will teach you to be a framer or a roofer. You can start at $8 or $9 an hour and then in a couple of months the boss gives you more money," Gomez said. "We're not taking jobs away from Americans. They don't want to roof. They don't want to work in the field. You never see Americans there. Nobody wants to pick cucumbers or tomatoes or blueberries."
Painter, president of the Builders Association of North Central Florida, said he has a devil of a time finding experienced masons or young people who want to learn the trade.
To interest young people in the construction crafts, the Builders Association has teamed with Alachua County schools and Santa Fe Community College to start training and apprenticeship programs.
A special aim is to recruit young blacks who, Painter said, represent a deep untapped labor pool.
"It's frustrating to me that we have a population that we can put back to work, and we probably wouldn't need Hispanics, but we can't get that population into our own workforce, so for our own survival we are going to have to recruit more," Painter said. "I don't know how to get that African-American population, but we have that Hispanic population that says 'I'm willing to work.' They are hard workers. They are hungry for work and (local residents) really aren't, and it's a shame."
Michael Bowie, president of the Alachua County NAACP, said more efforts should be made to get young people in general interested in the trades.
But Bowie added he believes in opportunity for all - immigrants included.
"There is going to be a major need for people in that field, especially in this area. And yes, these apprenticeship opportunities for young people, especially young African-Americans, would assist in the labor force," Bowie said. "Does it mean that there is not enough room for everyone to benefit from this? No, it doesn't. With the whole issue of immigration and the number of people coming here because of job opportunities, I think there is a place for everyone to flourish."
The potential laws that could criminalize undocumented immigrants has workers in a state of uncertainty and dread. It may also be inadvertently keeping more workers here.
It has not been uncommon for workers to travel back and forth, said the workers themselves and those who study immigration trends.
But now more are staying because they are not certain how difficult it will be to get back in.
And workers say they are looking over their shoulder much more.
"A lot of people are scared. They want to go back but they are not sure what they should do," said construction worker Antonio Garcia. "We come to America to support our family and have a better life. That may not be possible anymore." |