CEDAR RAPIDS (Iowa) GAZETTE

August 7, 2008

No visa exists for simply working at Agriprocessors

Postville, Iowa -  Estela Vega could not have applied for work at a meat processor like Agriprocessors Inc., even if she wanted to.

When she crossed the Mexico-U.S. border 14 years ago, she didn’t have a college degree or a family member to sponsor her.

“I had hope that I would be able to get my status here in the United States,” said Vega, 42, who worked at Agriprocessors until being arrested in the May 12 raid there that made national headlines.

While a limited number of temporary work visas are available for workers with advanced degrees or for farm workers or other seasonal labor, no visa exists for the food processing jobs filled by the foreign nationals detained in May’s Agriprocessors raid, or in earlier Iowa packinghouse raids.

And that, more so than being complicated and costly, drives home the real problem facing immigrants wanting these jobs, says Des Moines-based immigration attorney Lori Chesser.

“It’s that we don’t have a category for employers to bring people that they need,” Chesser said. “It’s just created this vacuum.”

According to federal search warrants, 75 percent of Agriprocessors’ nearly 1,000 pre-raid workers were illegal immigrants. About 400 were arrested and 300 were convicted of crimes such as using false Social Security numbers or identification. Three plant supervisors are accused of encouraging undocumented employees and helping them access false documents.

To legally hire foreign nationals who don’t qualify for temporary work visas, employers can vie for 5,000 employer residency sponsorships. They must recruit employees in the employees’ home country. They also must advertise here to make sure they couldn’t fill the spot with a U.S. resident, then wait about five years for a worker’s paperwork to go through, said Chesser, who has practiced immigration law for 15 years.

“It’s really just not possible for that to happen,” she said.

Chesser said the growing disconnect between employer demand and the number and types of available work visas has put pressure on the family-sponsored immigration route, where wait times have stretched to 16 years for Mexican families.

U.S. citizens can sponsor spouses, parents, children and siblings. Permanent residents can sponsor spouses, minor children or unmarried adult children.

Vega said she didn’t even try to get permission when she came from Mexico to the United States to look for work in 1994. She just crossed the river with a group of friends. Her family made about $3,000 a year at home in San Luis Potosi, where she heard stories from others who had sneaked into the United States and found better-paying jobs.

“People said, well you could work here really well, that you could eat well here, you could get clothes here, take care of yourself,” she said.

She found work in Iowa and Illinois, most recently skinning cows at Agriprocessors for $7.50 an hour. She said she’s never returned to Mexico.In 2001, she applied for residency through her husband, Rene Vega, a legal permanent resident. She was supposed to wait in Mexico during the five to seven years she was told it would take to process her application but also had the choice to stay in the United States for a fee, her attorney, Dan Vondra of Iowa City, said. She says she didn’t consider going to Mexico to wait. She has three children who are U.S. citizens.

Vega’s residency case is being processed while her removal case, which will determine her legal ability to remain in the United States during the residency case, is pending in immigration court, Vondra said. She has not been charged with any criminal violation.

Ira Mehlman, a Federation for American Immigration Reform spokesman, said the legal immigration process “makes no sense at all.” FAIR, based in Washington, D.C., advocates stronger border security, stopping illegal immigration and reducing the number of immigrants allowed in the United States each year.

But Mehlman agreed that Congress needs to take a serious look at the way we decide who can come here.

“There is no set of objective criteria out of the millions of people who want to come to this country to determine who best meets the needs of this country,” Mehlman said. “Whether the workers we need are to work at meat processing plants in Iowa is another discussion.”

Meat processors aren’t interested in temporary visas or guest worker programs, American Meat Institute spokeswoman Janet Riley said. The Washington, D.C., trade association represents companies that process 70 percent of U.S. meat and poultry and their suppliers throughout America. High employee turnover is bad for business, bad for communities and can affect food safety, she said.

“We want a path to legalization,” Riley said.

The trade group supports pending legislation that would make it easier for employers to spot multiple applicants using the same Social Security number to secure employment, she said.