PORTLAND OREGONIAN

October 18, 2008

Smith food plant in U.S. Senate race spotlight

by Jerry Casey, The Oregonian

WESTON -- Tucked away on a remote road northeast of Pendleton sits Smith Frozen Foods, an 80,000-square-foot processing plant that provides about 10 percent of the nation's frozen peas, carrots and corn.

Founded by his grandfather in 1919, the family business is owned by U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., and operated by his wife, Sharon Smith. The operation is deeply rooted in the eastern Oregon landscape, with the plant's vast machinery grinding into gear just hours after the vegetables are harvested. The company motto: "To freeze the freshest vegetables, you build your kitchen next to the garden."

To process up to 1,300 tons of vegetables a day, Smith Foods hires 300 to 400 workers for two-week stints, often with little notice.

Whether any of these seasonal workers is an illegal immigrant is a question that keeps coming up for Smith as he campaigns for a third Senate term.

"There is no company in Oregon under greater scrutiny," Smith says. "I'm proud of my company. There are 400 people working in a factory. Is that a bad thing?"

His company does everything it can to ensure compliance with the law, Smith says, and every worker is documented.

Federal immigration laws governing Smith Foods, however, do not guarantee that every worker at the plant is in the United States legally.

The best tool available to businesses to check whether employees are documented -- a federal electronic program called E-Verify -- is not used at Smith Foods. Company officials argue that it is not 100 percent accurate even though Smith himself voted three times in the Senate to fund the program.

The federal verification system is voluntary, and a bill that would have required all Oregon companies to use E-Verify was derailed in the Legislature last year -- ironically by Smith's Democratic rival in the Senate race, House Speaker Jeff Merkley.

Federal law doesn't require companies to keep records such as copies of Social Security or guest worker ID cards. It doesn't require companies to check the authenticity of these records even though the nation is flooded with counterfeit documents that federal officials say are easily obtained by illegal immigrants.

At Smith Foods, potential employees must show their documents, and the company decides whether they are legitimate. Company officials write the names of the documents they receive on a sheet they keep in their files. They write down the title of the document, the issuing authority, number and expiration date. But no copies of the documents are made, and no one checks whether they are fake.

'86 law helps fuel fraud

Wallace Huffman, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University, says research suggests that more than 50 percent of the nation's farming and related industries employ illegal immigrants, largely from Mexico. It has been that way since 1986, when Congress gave 2.7 million illegal workers citizenship amnesty while making it illegal to hire undocumented laborers.

The unintended consequence of the 1986 law was to help fuel a boom in phony documents.

"The document fraud problem is widespread," Huffman says. "Employers are required to check documents, but they're not required to be experts in determining whether documentation is fraudulent or not."

Two years ago, business groups joined President Bush and others in lobbying Congress to again grant amnesty to illegal immigrants in exchange for tightening borders and other sanctions. But Congress balked under pressure from a coalition of Republicans who opposed amnesty and labor Democrats who argued that it would depress wages.

Hoffman's research has shown that agricultural work -- with its long hours, tough physical demands and low pay -- doesn't appeal to most U.S. workers. While many farmers and food processing companies have tried to mechanize their operations, hand harvesting and human skills are still required.

99.5 percent accurate

Though federal law doesn't require it, Department of Homeland Security officials say E-Verify has a 99.5 percent accuracy rate in vetting identification documents.

"E-Verify takes all the worry out of verifying someone," says Sharon Rummery, spokeswoman for the nation's Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency under the Homeland Security Department. "Either someone is confirmed, or not. If the person is not confirmed, they have the right to show us they are authorized to work."

Employers get answers within seconds of punching in a potential hire's information, while rectifying a wrongful denial takes no more than a week, Rummery said.

In Congress, Smith has voted three times to fund the E-Verify program. He told The Oregonian: "If it's reliable, it should be used. If it is reliable, I would tell my company to use it."

Why doesn't Smith Foods use it?

His campaign spokeswoman, Lindsay Gilbride, said that although Smith has repeatedly voted to fund the system, it remains a "slowly improving program that someday may be a solution."

Mike Lesko, who oversees hiring for Smith Foods, adds: "There's no reason for us to be using it. It's not accurate."

Lesko provided The Oregonian with a copy of a 2006 Social Security Administration Inspector General report that found E-Verify to have a 4 percent error rate.

Federal officials say the program's accuracy has improved since that report. In Oregon, 646 businesses use E-Verify at 2,400 places of employment, federal records show. The federal government uses the Internet-based program to screen its hires along with 11 states, says Janice Kephart, director of national security studies at the Washington nonpartisan think tank Center for Immigration Studies.

"This program tells you who you are hiring. If you don't want to know who you are hiring, you don't use it," said Kephart, who served as counsel to the 9/11 commission. "This is the best interior border program we have."

Democrat Jeff Merkley has criticized Smith for allowing illegal immigrants to work at Smith Foods. But the House speaker helped kill a bill in the 2007 session that would have required Oregon companies to use E-Verify.

House Bill 2715, which had four Republican and four Democratic co-sponsors, died after Merkley's office pulled it out of committee. Jim Ludwick, president of the anti-illegal immigrants group Oregonians for Immigration Reform, says his group pushed the bill as part of its efforts to crack down on illegal immigrants.

Merkley's office released a statement saying E-Verify had glitches at the time, and it's since been improved. "Companies that claim to 'go the extra mile' should use it," Merkley said in the statement.

Bryan Griffith, a spokesman at the Center for Immigration Studies, says that despite its improvements and photo ID capabilities, E-Verify continues to meet resistance from businesses who rely on illegal workers. "Businesses have a lot riding on not having to follow through with these kind of requirements."

Dave Zepponi, president of Northwest Food Processors Association, which represents Smith Foods and similar employers, says the government bears the ultimate responsibility for checking citizenship.

"We can document up to a point and ask for things like driver's licenses that establish residency, but to go beyond that and determine whether they're valid or not is beyond the scope of what we believe the industry should do."