DAYTONA BEACH NEWS-JOURNAL March 27, 2005 SECRETLY, IN PLAIN VIEW
PIERSON- Sergio Paniagua looks at his paycheck and sees $50 deduced for federal taxes and Social Security.
The illegal immigrant from Mexico knows he’ll never benefit from any of it.
“I work hard,” says Paniagua, who earns about $450 a week. “Last week, they took $54 from my paycheck. That’s a lot of money.”
Farmworker advocates say people like Paniagua who pay into Social Security should be able to collect benefits. The advocates also want better monitoring to ensure the workers’ deductions are sent and recorded in Washington, D.C.
As a worker using a fake Social Security card, Paniagua was unable to find out about his deductions through the Social Security Administration or even if they were sent in, when he filed a request with the agency.
One day, if he becomes a legal resident, he will be unable to collect benefits because there’s no record of his payments, farmworker advocates say.
Social Security officials say they face a huge problem nationwide in tracking deductions for America’s vast illegal work force and making sure employers send them in. But enforcement is a low priority for them.
The same is true with other federal work-related laws. Enforcement is virtually nonexistent in Pierson. Undocumented workers easily buy fake Social Security cards and permanent resident green cards that allow them to go to work.
“The fernery industry operates in the shadows,” said Gregory Schell, an attorney with the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project in South Florida.
As a small town, Pierson is a microcosm of America’s escalating immigration problem. More than 10 million immigrants now live illegally in the United States. And more arrive every day, mostly from Mexico, taking jobs Americans don’t want, lured by the chance to earn 10 times what they could at home – enough to support themselves and relatives back home.
Immigration advocates and critics agree that something needs to be done to rein in this illegal work force. President Bush and several members of Congress are pushing proposals to try to do just that, including an ambitious, delayed plan to pardon millions of long-time workers.
While they debate the proposals, an estimated 5,000 undocumented workers continue to live and work in Northwest Volusia – secretly, illegally and in plain view.
FAKE DOCUMENTS EASY TO COME BY The orange house with red window frames sits off U.S. 17 in DeLeon Springs. A statute of the Virgin Mary sits in the front yard. The walkway is lined with daisies.
This is where the workers say they come to buy fake documents to go to work.
A boy, about 10 years old, answers the door.
“I am here because I was told someone can help me get a tarjeta (card),” a reporter for The Daytona Beach News-Journal said in Spanish.
The boy runs inside, and a few minutes later a man, maybe 40, Mexican, comes to the door.
He does not have the materials today to make the cards, he says, but come back. A Social Security card and a green card will cost $120. Or, if it’s urgent, he suggests another place – a trailer park on State Road 11.
With the demand for workers in Pierson – the Fern Capital of the World – getting a fake Social Security card is easy.
“The bosses look at the cards and know they’re fake. But they don’t care,” said Salvador Moreno, a one-time fern cutter and illegal immigrant from Mexico.
It wasn’t always that way. When growers first planted fern in the early 1900s, they hired mostly blacks as pickers. But black people abandoned those jobs more than two decades ago. Since the early 1980s, the fields have been filled with Mexican workers, hunched over with small knives cutting “hoja” and paid a per-piece rate of 25 cents a bundle.
The workers, from impoverished regions in Mexico, help to sustain the $70-million-a-year fern industry in Northwest Volusia.
At C. Frank Jones Fernery in Pierson, crew leader Florencio Rodriguez says he doesn’t even bother looking at his workers’ Social Security cards. He knows they buy fake ones for $100.
“Who am I, la migra (immigration)?” he says.
Unlike the workers, Rodriguez and other crew leaders tend to be legal residents, having been in the United States long enough to rise through the ranks of undocumented to documented workers.
Crew leaders work for the fernery growers and act as a sort of middleman. They hire workers. They provide transportation. And they keep track of how many bundles of fern get cut, determining each worker’s pay.
At Albin Hagstrom & Sons, another Pierson fernery, crew chief Jorge Bastidas, says most of the 130 employees are illegal immigrants.
“Nobody but the crew leaders are legal,” he said. “The workers buy illegal green cards and Social Security numbers.”
But the fernery owners tell a different story. All of their workers are legal, they say.
“I’ve got the legal papers on all of them,” said C. Frank Jones, the third-generation owner of C. Frank Jones Fernery, and boss to Rodriguez.
Jones says he has no way of knowing if the Social Security cards and permanent resident cards of his 10 to 15 employees are authentic.
“I take whatever they give me. I can’t ask any questions. That would be racial profiling. I wouldn’t want a lawsuit on something like that,” he said.
Fern workers say some employers find ways to get around accepting fake Social Security cards. Regino Hernandez, 28, said he has worked for years for Greenlund Ferneries, owned by Pierson Town Council member Robert Greenlund. Hernandez doesn’t get a paycheck. Instead, the fernery writes a check to another employee, who cashes the check and pays him, Hernandez says.
Greenlund did not return a phone call from the News-Journal.
A few employers admit they’re caught in a bind between finding workers and abiding by immigration laws. Federal law makes it a crime to knowingly hire an illegal alien, punishable by up to six months in prison.
Richard Noll, owner of Florida Floral Supply, Inc. said three of his six employees are illegal immigrants. He’d rather not hire them, but there simply aren’t enough workers in a small town like Pierson, he said.
“I have the same problem as the bigger ferneries,” Noll said. “I just happened to luck out that the other three I have are documented.”
Noll said he supports a proposal by President Bush to allow many undocumented workers to remain in the United States as guest workers. The workers would be given valid Social Security numbers and if they returned home after six years, as required, they could eventually collect retirement benefits.
“I’ve shifted my whole thought about immigration being a problem,” he said. “You can’t stop them now. There’s too many people here. They’ve got homes. They’re working. Hopefully, they’re adding to the community. There’s still going to be some that aren’t.”
But immigration opponents say employers like Noll are taking advantage of workers whose wages are kept artificially low. The current arrangement flouts the law, said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for strict immigration rules.
“Whatever the law is we should enforce it,” he said.
Instead, undocumented workers are migrating out of the fern fields and into other jobs. Salvador Moreno worked at a fernery for a year and left. Now, he cuts sod and earns about $750 a week – twice what he made cutting fern and almost 10 times what he earned in Mexico.
Many now work in construction, the sod business or other better-paying jobs, according to The Farmworker Association of Florida, whose 6,300 members advocate for better wages and working conditions statewide. The exodus has led to an increase in the number of Mexican women who are cutting fern, often wives contributing a second income.
“We have a huge undocumented work force,” said Schell with the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project, a group funded by the Florida Bar Foundation that advocates legally for farmworkers. “So, we wink at it. We have immigration laws. We have post 9-11. But everybody knows it: It’s all a game.”
SHOULD THEY GET BENEFITS? The lack of enforcement clears a path for illegal immigrants to go to work in the fern fields and remain on the job for a decade or even longer. Chances are slim that a worker, once here, will be arrested for working with fake documents and deported, farmworker advocates acknowledge.
But farmworker advocates say the hands-off approach can hurt workers. Many labor here for years, having money deducted from their pay for Social Security, federal taxes and Medicare, and will never reap the benefits.
“If they pay into a fund, they should have access to those benefits,” said Tirso Moreno with the Farmworkers Association. “Social Security is still functioning because of the undocumented workers’ contributions.”
Moreno said he wants the government to better monitor workers’ deductions to make sure they reach Washington and are recorded.
Three illegal workers – Sergio Paniagua, Salvador Moreno and his wife, Angeles – filed requests with the Social Security Administration, with the help of the News-Journal, and could not find out about their deductions. They were told that their names and Social Security numbers did not match agency records, and no information was available.
Schell, the lawyer with the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project, said he believes that the lack of records can lead to abuses. Some employers may deduct money from their workers’ pay for federal taxes, Social Security and Medicare, and never send it in. Later, if farmworkers become legal residents and apply for Social Security benefits, there is no record of their contributions, Schell said.
“A lot of employers know their workers are no documented, so they won’t squawk,” he said.
Angeles Moreno’s boss said it’s not hard to figure out why her deductions don’t show up in agency records.
“Her damn number’s no good,” said Noll, of Florida Floral Supply. “That’s real simple. Guaranteed, it belongs to an 80-year-old person in California.”
Based on the first three numbers of her Social Security number (507), it would have been issued in Nebraska – a state she has never visited.
“I can’t ask them: Are you an alien or not?” Noll said. “You can only take what’s given you.”
After the interview ended and the reporter had left, according to Salvador Moreno, Richard Noll called in Angeles and fired her. Moreno said Noll threatened to call immigration officials and give them his wife’s address.
The next day, according to Moreno, Noll and his wife came to their home and offered Angeles her job back, which she accepted.
The Nolls dispute his account. Noll and his wife said Angeles was never fired nor did they threaten to call immigration officials.
CRACKING DOWN NOT A PRIORITY Immigration opponents, such as Mark Krikorian with the Center for Immigration Studies, disagree that illegal workers should expect benefits.
“They have no claim to that money. Their jobs are illegal,” he said. “They committed a felony by using illegal documents to get the jobs.”
Agricultural producers send in millions of payments to the Social Security Administration in which the worker’s name and Social Security number don’t match the agency’s records, said Charles Liptz, director for employer wage reporting with the Social Security Administration in Washington. Since 1937, when the Social Security Administration began collecting money, it has received 245 million mismatched wage reports.
Liptz did not know the amount of these payments, but they go into the overall pool of money used to pay benefits.
Going after employers who submit bogus documents or who don’t bother to send in deductions is not a priority, Liptz said.
“Employers who don’t send in money? Oh my!” Liptz said in mock horror.
“It would be very costly to try to keep track of that information. Our systems aren’t that sophisticated to track that,” he said.
Frank Cioffi, resident agent in charge for the inspector general of Social Security’s office in Clearwater, said he could not recall any prosecutions for Social Security fraud in Flagler or Volusia counties since he started in Florida in 1978. But his office may have supplied information to other agencies involved in prosecuting wrongdoing, he added.
The Internal revenue Service can assess employers a $50 penalty for each invalid Social Security number submitted, up to a maximum $250,000 fine. But, the IRS doesn’t place a priority on pursuing employers or employees because enforcement could have a “negative impact on the participation of employers and employees in the tax system.” IRS Commissioner Mark Everson told Congress last year.
The IRS even allows undocumented workers to file annual tax returns and possibly collect a refund. To do so, they must obtain an individual taxpayer identification number, or an ITIN. Of the 6 million people estimated by IRS to be working here illegally, 353,000 filed tax returns in 2000, according to one recent government review.
This alphabet soup – IRS, ITIN – draws blank looks from undocumented workers in Northwest Volusia.
Fern cutter Juan Velasquez, who works for a fernery owned by Samuel Bennett, chairman of the Pierson Town Council, said he receives a W-2 each year, but has never filed a tax return.
“I just throw them in the garbage,’ Velasquez said.
Asked if he knew about undocumented workers in his fern fields, Bennett said: “I wouldn’t know about undocumented workers. But I understand there are people in the community that are not documented.”
And so, workers in Northwest Volusia, as in all of America, labor on illegally, secretly in plain view.
They know Mexicans are good workers,” said Salvador Moreno, a former fern cutter who now cuts sod. “Who else is going to take the heavy jobs? Are American citizens going to work in the ferneries? Or cook the food in restaurants? Who?”
ANYTHING FOR FAMILY
PIERSON- Before dawn, a dented red Ford rumbles up the gravel drive.
Salvador Moreno yanks on his Levi’s and mud-caked boots and runs outside. He jumps into the bed of the truck with other migrant workers to begin the day, a new day in America.
Four years ago, Moreno was struggling to support his wife, Angeles, in a poor barren town in central Mexico. He earned $10 a day and knew what lay ahead if he raised a family there.
His mother had seven children. Two died as infants because there was no money for medicine.
His oldest sister and her husband already had crossed the border illegally into the United States. So, he boarded a bus for the 40-hour ride from his hometown of Acambaro to a border town near Nogales, Ariz.
At the bus station, Moreno met his coyote, the smuggler who would get him across. The man took Moreno to a house near a fence on the border.
Holding a walkie-talkie, the coyote watched from the second-story window until another member of his network told him the way was clear.
It was safe to go now, but walk, don’t run, he told Moreno. La Migra, the border guards, were on break.
Moreno is 5 feet 2 inches and quick. He climbed the fence and grabbed a wooden power pole on the other side. H shimmied down it, scraping his hands.
He swears a border patrolman looked right at him, but let him go.
Moreno walked to a Burger King and ordered a hamburger, sat and waited. He had $47 left in his pocket.
A man and a woman came and ushered him to their beige Lincoln Towncar. They gave Moreno sunglasses and told him to say he was a citizen as the car approached a border checkpoint. The officer waved them through.
They took Moreno to Tucson and stopped at a Western Union office to call his sister in San Jose, Calif. “Let me to talk to him,” she said. Then, she wired the $2,000 to pay the coyote.
The couple gave Moreno new jeans, a short and a plane ticket and left him at the airport. No one asked to see an ID in those days before Sept. 11.
Moreno had crossed the border at 10 a.m., been in Tucson by 3 p.m. and in San Jose by 8 p.m., where he was reunited with his sister.
“everyone says to me ‘How did you do that?’ I know a lot of people cross in the desert and die. I am very, very lucky,” the 29-year-old said.
The journey is not so smooth for many Mexicans. At least 151 died attempting to illegally cross into the United States during a 12-month period ending September 30, 2003, the U.S. Border Patrol says.
Even Moreno’s wife, Angeles, 34, had a longer journey.
Salvador Moreno spent a year in California, picking lettuce, broccoli and strawberries, before someone said life was better in Florida. He found a ride to Pierson and joined friends from his home state of Guanajuato. Two years passed before he could send for his wife.
She would need to cross the border at a different point and follow another route to Florida. Instead of crossing in Arizona, where her husband had, she would cross in Texas at the Rio Bravo, as it is called in Mexico.
Angeles didn’t know how to swim. She was terrified.
Her coyote knew the lowest point in the Rio Grande River. It was dark as Angeles waded into the water and felt water rising just below her chin.
Once she reached shore, Angeles followed others up an embankment, along a well-worn dirt path through the mesquite bushes. In wet clothes, she walked four hours before they reached their safe house. She spent the next five days inside, as the coyote kept talking on the phone, asking his network of smugglers, “How is the path?”
One morning, the coyote told her to get into a green van and drive to Dallas with seven other immigrants.
There, the driver left her at a fast-food restaurant. A man approached and asked, “Usted es el leon?” (Are you the lion?)
The code told the driver she was going to DeLeon Springs.
Salvador Moreno paid the coyote $2,200 for her two-week journey.
“Some coyotes charge $800, but I got her the best,” he boasts, offering his wide grin, a gap between his two front teeth.
That was a year ago. Now, Angeles and Salvador live in a white-frame house in Pierson.
A small American flag hangs in their doorway. Their newborn baby, Leslie, is an American citizen.
She was born at Florida Hospital, DeLand, which was free for the Morenos, once Salvador showed his pay stub. Prenatal care at the Health Department cost 34 cents a visit.
Despite the ordeal to get here, the Morenos find the American Dream is not what they imagined.
Angeles, one of 12 children, misses her family. Salvador hesitates, as if worried about offending anyone. “In our culture, we are different. Family is so important.”
“We are together all the time. Here, when someone turns 21, they’re gone,” he says, making a scooting motion with his hands. “We take care of the grandfathers and grandmothers.”
The couple sends at least $200 a month to their families in Mexico. Recently, they scraped together $2,500 so Salvador’s mother could have surgery for kidney stones.
Salvador says he wants to be near family, but wonders if staying in America and sending the money home is better.
“My mama wants to hold my baby, but she may die before she gets to.”
ONLY HOPE TO HELP HIS FAMILY IS AMERICA
Jose “Patches” Velasquez was spending his days harvesting fields of maize in central Mexico and struggling to support his eight children when a freak accident changed his life.
As the sun began to set, he led a cow into the fields to graze. The animal stumbled and fell on Velasquez, crushing his right leg.
He knew he wouldn’t be able to afford medical care. But a friend paid the country doctor, who inserted a steel rod into Velasquez’s shattered leg.
As he lay in bed recovering, the 52-year old knew he had only one choice. He would leave his family. He would go to America.
“I had no hope of repaying my friend,” recalled Velasquez. “The only way was to go to America to look for work.”
His oldest son, Humberto, said he would go with him. Velasquez still was limping as they boarded a bus to a town near the border with Arizona.
With the help of a coyote, a hired smuggler, they crossed the border illegally and got into a truck. The truck took them to Pierson, where other men from their village of Acambaro had found work.
Friends steered Velasquez to a job at a fernery owned by Pierson Town Council Chairman Samuel Bennett, Velasquez said. They also arranged for him to live in a trailer rented to Bennett’s workers by his crew leader.
But he decided not to join the 10 men crammed into the trailer. He rented a van next to it, instead. Each of the men paid $100 a month to live in the trailer, sleeping on mattresses on the floors. Velasquez paid $100 to live in the van.
He rigged a television antenna to the van and put in a window air conditioning unit.
“It had everything I needed,” said Velasquez, better known as “Patches,” a common nickname for Jose in his home state of Guanajuato.
At 58, Velasquez is older than the men in the trailer amd in the fields picking ferns. The majority of Mexicans crossing the border are young men, according to a study by Stetson University professor Robert Sitler.
The Mexican work force in Pierson is fairly recent, so the population is young, Sitler said. In the predominantly Mexican town of Pierson, the average age is 28.4 years compared to 42.4 years for Volusia County as a whole, Sitler said.
The men come to America for the same reason as Velasquez: to send money home. Florida’s Latin American immigrants send an estimated $2.5 billion back to their families each year, according to the Washington-based Inter-American Development Bank.
In Mexico, Velasquez made just 400 pesos a week (about $35.50 at current exchange rates). Now, he is able to send home half of his $300 weekly paycheck. He is the sole supporter of his wife and three remaining children in Mexico. The $150 (or 1,690 pesos) allows them to live in their small house and buy food and clothes, he said.
“They wait for me to send money,” he said. “It is not giving them the grand life, but it keeps food on the table.”
His other son, Refugio, has joined him in Pierson. Velasquez recently moved out of the van into a trailer with his two sons and Humberto’s wife and two young children.
“Now we have the family together,” said Velasquez.
Velasquez, who said his leg still hurts at the end of the day when he is tired, has been back to see his wife and children in Mexico twice since he came to America in 1999. He planned to go back this past Christmas but was concerned about the border being tightened for security reasons.
“So I will stay awhile and if I go, I may not come back,” he said.
Still, he is thankful for the opportunity he has had in America. He has paid back the friend who arranged for his medical care in Mexico.
“I was blessed,” he said.
IT’S A HARD-KNOCKS LIFE, SAYS NUERSERY OWNER
PIERSON – As a small nursery owner, Richard Noll says he has little choice but to hire illegal workers.
“It’s not because you want to do it,” he said. “You can’t even ask if they are or aren’t. You know how the deal works.”
Noll, 58, an engaging man with salt and pepper hair, owns Florida Floral Supply, Inc., the only tropical plant wholesale nursery in Pierson. He faces many of the same problems as the fernery operations that employ an estimated 5,000 undocumented workers in Northwest Volusia.
His business, started by his grandfather in 1948, employs six people. Noll guesses half of them are here illegally.
A lot of attention gets paid to the fern cutters, Noll said, especially by charities and the media, but he sees their plight differently.
Fern cutters are paid by the bunch, but if their piecework rate for the hours worked in a week doesn’t equal the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, they get minimum wage.
“If he’s not clearing $500 a week, you will not see a Mexican cutting fern,” he said. “They will go somewhere else.”
“So, if there’s 5,000 up here cutting fern, it’s not because they are getting inderpaid, I can tell you,” he said, breaking into a laugh. “An average fern cutter and his wife make more than my wife and I do owning this place.”
The past year was particularly hard for Noll and his family. Hurricanes destroyed $55,000 worth of plants and caused about $30,000 in damage to his nursery. He wasn’t reimbursed for any of it. Hew canceled his insurance policy two years ago when the premiums soared from $3,600 to $10,250, he said.
And his losses won’t be easy to overcome because sales have slowed by 10 percent to 20 percent since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he said.
Just the night before, Noll had been up all night, trying to protect his tender shoots from temperatures that dipped toward freezing. He was grateful that the temperatures didn’t quite reach freezing. He couldn’t afford more lost plants.
As the interview went on, he suddenly became angry.
“Why don’t you worry about the owners?” he screamed. “They are trying to run a business after the storms and paying the taxes. The workers have had care and been given stuff for months.
“I’m so…sick of it I could spit. I work my ass off from the day I grew p ‘til the day I … die.”
John Hoblick, a fern grower in DeLeon Springs, said owners have been under a lot of stress since last year’s hurricanes.
“As far as the majority of those in the industry, we have been in the mode of trying to recap losses,” he said. “I understand the frustrations.”
“You go to bed with a million things on your mind to get done the next day,” said Hoblick, a board member for the Volusia County Farm Bureau and secretary of the Florida Farm Bureau Federation.
Noll and Hoblick are among a few growers in Northwest Volusia who were willing to talk to The Daytona Beach News-Journal. None of the four Pierson Town Council members who own ferneries, for example, would agree to a sit-down interview. Council Chairman Samuel Bennett said he was tired of negative coverage of the fernery owners and feared The News-Journal would “smear” him.
Bennett was in the news in September after he ordered a hurricane relief volunteer to shut down and stop giving aid to farmworkers after three hurricanes. Bennett said workers didn’t need any more aid – including food, water and medical supplies – and should get back to work, according to Federal Emergency Management Agency officials, who ignored the order and reopened the next day as planned.
Farmworkers said there wasn’t enough work cutting ferns damaged by the hurricanes. They said they were working as little as two days a week and earning $150. But fernery owners said aid from the federal government, Red Cross and other groups took away the farmworkers’ motivation to work.
Noll said he tried to hire workers for $10 an hour after the hurricanes, but “they looked at me like I was stupid.
“There were trucks and semis every day, Noll said, adding the workers also could qualify for unemployment compensation. “As soon as they were going to pay them not to work, none of them wanted to work.”
“They’re not even citizens and babies born every day, free Medicare every day,” said Noll, pacing around his office.
Noll’s views are shared by others in Pierson who say, usually without wanting their names in the newspaper, that their small community has been changed, and not for the better, by the arrival of thousands of illegal Mexican immigrants. They say the immigrants have brought drugs and gangs to their small community.
“I’ve got a poor guy who worked for me. He was in the service for three years in ‘Nam and he got cancer. They wouldn’t touch him because he couldn’t get a gold card. I watched (him) die last week. And he’s a … citizen, never missed a day in his life. Ain’t got no family and they buried (him) in a pauper’s grave.
“But they (fern cutters) get babies and houses and money and everything else. It just makes me sick.”
IMMIGRATION POLARIZES PUBLIC
For nine years, farmworker advocates tried to hammer out an agreement between undocumented workers and growers who employ them.
Their efforts are contained in a bill before Congress that would allow farmworkers to become temporary residents and apply for permanent status after working 360 days in a six-year period.
The Agricultural Jobs, Opportunity, Benefits and Security Act, known as AgJOBS, has 35 co-sponsors in the Senate, almost evenly split between the parties. Both Florida Senators, Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican, and Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat, are co-sponsors of the bill.
“We think with the widespread bipartisan support, it will pass,” said Bruce Goldstein, an attorney with the Farmworker Justice Fund.
The bill “has a snowball’s chance in Hades” of passing, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
Krikorian, whose group advocates strict immigration rules, said any bill that allows illegal immigrants to stay in the United States won’t go anywhere in Congress. The same applies to President Bush’s proposed guest worker program, said Krikorian.
Republican gains in the fall election have stiffened resistance on Capitol Hill, where conservatives view Bush’s plan as granting amnesty, experts agree.
Bush’s plan, not yet written into a bill, would be the first overhaul of immigration laws in 19 years.
It would allow three-year work visas for the millions of immigrants living illegally in the United States. To get the work permits, applicants would have to show letters from employers saying their job could not be filled by U.S. citizens. Immigrants could get one renewal for three years and then would have to return home.
“The White House has twisted itself into knots to say this is not amnesty,” Krikorian said. “But the illegals get to stay. That’s amnesty.”
An estimated 10.3 million undocumented immigrants now live in the United States and Mexicans make up about 5.9 million of that, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Another half million unauthorized workers enter the country each year.
The immigration boom has polarized the two sides of the debate. One side says foreign-born workers who enter the country illegally take jobs from citizens, drive down wages and undermine national security.
The other side says immigrants satisfy employer and consumer demands for cheap labor, pay taxes and continue America’s proud immigrant tradition, which should entitle them to rights and benefits.
University of Florida Professor Manuel Vasquez, who studies Florida’s immigrant communities, said he is surprised by the conflict generated by the arrival of new immigrants.
“The backlash against immigrants is a paradox,” he said. “On the one hand, we need the immigrants to run the local economy, but on the other hand, we don’t want them visible.”
Critics say American taxpayers are concerned about the cost of social services used by undocumented immigrants and their U.S.-born children.
And the current system poses a security threat, Krikorian said. “Any system that a Mexican dishwasher can sneak through is one a terrorist can sneak through.”
Michele Waslin, spokesman for the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights organization, agrees the current system is ineffective.
“We don’t want smugglers to determine who is crossing the border,” she said. “We want them to be vetted by the U.S. government.”
It’s ironic the immigration boom in the past decade has occurred when the United States is spending considerably more on immigration control than ever before, especially on border enforcement, said Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California San Diego.
And while border enforcement has risen, interior enforcement has declined sharply, he aid. In 2003, only four employers nationwide were prosecuted for knowingly hiring an illegal immigrant, a crime punishable by six months in prison.
Proponents and opponents do agree on one thing: Undocumented workers are driving down wages for Americans. Construction jobs that used to pay $10 to $15 an hour are only paying $7 said Gregory Schell, an attorney with the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project in Lake Worth.
Critics argue that if cheap labor wasn’t available, employers would have to pay more.
“Illegal immigration is a subsidy for employers,” said Krikorian.
Experts say Bush’s proposals and the AgJOBS bill are just putting Band-Aids on a terminally ill system. Both plans fall short of the reform needed, said UF’s Vasquez.
But John Hoblick, a fernery owner in DeLeon Springs, said the AgJOBS bill is a good start.
“AgJOBS is the best thing we have going,” said Hoblick, a member of the Volusia County Farm Bureau board and secretary of the Florida Farm Bureau Federation.
“We need workers, especially in the state after the hurricanes,” he said.
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