SCRANTON (Pennyslvania) TIMES-TRIBUNE

April 6, 2008

A bitter crop sown in climate of fear

BY LAURA LEGERE
STAFF WRITER

One early morning last summer, 30 migrant workers walked onto Bruce Pallman’s South Abington strawberry fields and expertly pulled weeds from the rows.

At the end of the day, they returned to Keith Eckel’s Newton Township farm — their home for the six-week harvest season — and Mr. Pallman had a tidy field.

“Instead of stretching it out with five to six guys for five to six days, we would use Keith’s guys and finish it in a day or two,” said Mr. Pallman, a turkey and strawberry farmer. “We’re going to miss that.”

Since March 24, when Mr. Eckel announced he would shutter his tomato operation because he can’t get enough migrant laborers to pick his crop, the story and the problem have reverberated across the community of area farmers. It has also rippled through the network of laborers who work in their fields.

For both groups, Mr. Eckel’s decision changed the economic promise of current and future growing seasons and signaled a familiar, but worsening problem tied to a troubled immigration system.

Although no single area farmer relies on as many migrant workers as Mr. Eckel did, smaller farmers depend utterly on the few they employ, according to John Esslinger, an educator with the county Penn State Cooperative Extension.

In recent years, it has been harder for smaller farms to fill those needs.

“Even if they have five or six people, they absolutely have to have those five or six people,” Mr. Esslinger said. “They need them as much to do their farming as, say, the Eckels need 100 or 200 to do theirs.”

Farmers say migrants are integral to their operations because local laborers will not work the short, intense harvest season.

Mr. Pallman said a high school or college student — the most likely local candidate for seasonal work — has not applied for a summer job in his fields in the past 18 years.

Now, he is looking toward a June strawberry harvest without enough hands to do the work.

He has a building with space to house eight migrant workers and, for the first time in seven years, no one to put in it.

“We’re still looking, but we don’t know what we’re going to do,” he said.

At a press conference in his tomato packing house, Mr. Eckel blamed a political climate that intimidates immigrant workers and puts enforcement pressure on their employers for why he could hire only about half of the laborers he needed last year.

Gary Swan, head of governmental affairs for the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, said the same labor concerns that closed Mr. Eckel’s tomato business are being felt across the state.

Although Mr. Swan said he is not aware of any other farmers making the kind of drastic change Mr. Eckel plans, he said “there are a lot of fingers being crossed across Pennsylvania about this growing season.”

The workers who pick the nation’s fruits and vegetables are likewise making wishful gestures for their futures and contemplating change.

In Georgia, Ramiro Vega and Debbie Peaster, who serve as Mr. Eckel’s labor contractors, are considering getting out of the labor business entirely and going back to driving a truck.

“Going there to pick tomatoes is what kept us all surviving,” Ms. Peaster said by phone.

Ms. Peaster said for some workers, the promise of higher pay in Pennsylvania wasn’t enough to outweigh the risks of being scrutinized by immigration enforcement in the state.

“The workers wanted to go,” she said, “but with the immigration problem over there — because they’re really bad over there — they were scared of being sent back.”

George Barron, a Wilkes-Barre-based immigration attorney, stopped short of attributing the dearth of migrant labor in the state to a reputation for strict enforcement. But he said that enforcement efforts in the region have increased dramatically in the last few years and, more generally, there is a pervasive hostility toward immigrants in the region.

“I can’t say why anyone has decided not to come to Northeast Pennsylvania,” he said. “I can tell you that almost without exception my immigration clients are aware of what happened in Hazleton” — where Mayor Lou Barletta tried to outlaw renting to or employing illegal immigrants in the city — “and believe that Northeastern Pennsylvania is less tolerant of immigrants of all types, not only Latinos.”

When four of John Roba’s regular migrant laborers decided not to return to his Dalton-based tree farm this year, it forced him to hire employees through a federal temporary guest worker program that farmers consider cumbersome and slow.

Mr. Eckel has called the program, known as H-2A, “totally unworkable” for the scale of his labor needs and the short duration of his harvest season.

The program allows farmers to recruit workers from abroad, but only after they have gotten approval from four government agencies, built federally certified housing, and proven they can’t hire locally.

For Mr. Roba, that meant advertising for, then hiring, a local worker who quit after two days on the job.

Mr. Roba said the program is “the only way you can know absolutely for certain that your workers are legal,” but it took him a significant monetary investment and several years to prepare for it.

Three weeks ago, four new workers arrived at his farm. For Gustavo and Victor Cruztitla, it was their first time in America.

Jose Avalos, one of Mr. Roba’s foremen and, since 2003, a dual Mexican and American citizen, said it will take time to train the new men.

“They still got a lot of things to learn,” he said. “It’s a little hard for me to have to teach them everything.”

At dusk on a recent Thursday, Mr. Avalos stood on a gravel drive near Heart Lake at Mr. Roba’s Lakeland farm, near acres of Christmas trees and deciduous saplings laid out in rows. Behind him, the four workers from the H-2A program waited for him near a Bobcat loader that was leaking oil.

Mr. Avalos has worked on U.S. farms since he was 18, harvesting oranges in Florida, Christmas trees in North Carolina and apples and cabbages in Virginia.

He said migrant workers don’t want to make the trip north to work short harvest seasons in Pennsylvania, where there aren’t many options for them to find work if one farm fails.

He also said workers are afraid to travel in the state.

“They say they love it here, but it’s too hard,” he said. “If they get pulled over, they get in trouble.”

Since he settled at Roba’s, where he has worked since 1997, he doesn’t follow the harvest seasons anymore. When he travels, he returns home to his wife and three young children in Mexico. Then he comes back to the fields.

“I like to come back to Pennsylvania,” he said. “Since I got here, I don’t go no more places.”

Not far down the road from where Mr. Eckel recently closed his tomato empire, a father-and-son team of Mr. Eckel’s workers have begun sowing 5 acres of tomato plants of their own.

Ray and Anthony Vega, the uncle and cousin of Mr. Eckel’s labor contractor Ramiro Vega, built their lives by picking fruit and vegetables across the country and, often, on Mr. Eckel’s farm.

Ray Vega, 64, picked tomatoes with his family since he came to America from Nuevo Leon, Mexico, when he was 4.

Anthony Vega said his mother and father together could pick 700 buckets of tomatoes a day; when his mother was pregnant with him, she would have an older son carry her bucket so she could keep her pace.

Neither of them can pinpoint exactly what is keeping Mr. Eckel’s migrant workers away, but Anthony Vega mentioned recent raids by the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement on a T.J. Maxx distribution center in Pittston, a Scranton manufacturing plant and an East Stroudsburg plastics plant.

And although neither relies on Mr. Eckel’s farm for a living anymore, they both say the closed tomato farm marks the end of an era.

“I couldn’t believe that,” Ray Vega said of Mr. Eckel’s decision. “It was over.”