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The American Prospect
November 2005

And the winner is.....

The Bitter Truth about Immigration Enforcement

By David Bacon

OMAHA, NE

Hiding from the Border Patrol in an air conditioning
duct for nine and a half hours, Jorge Mendez couldn't
even come down to urinate.  As agents passed below, he
had to keep from making the slightest noise.  "I
thought about my wife and my family," he remembers.  "I
had filled out my application to get all of them
documents.  If the migra had taken me, I would have
ruined all of that.  I thought of all of my hopes and
dreams ending there. From the moment I saw the migra, I
thought, 'Everything is over.'"

Miraculously, the agents left without finding him.
"Thank God I escaped," he says fervently.

Unlike 212 of his 900 coworkers, Mendez had narrowly
survived one of the most famous immigration raids in
modern US history - the enforcement action at Nebraska
Beef on December 6, 2000.  That day, agents swooped
down on the big Omaha meatpacking plant.  They picked
up three managers and another three labor recruiters,
accusing them of conspiring to bring workers up from
Mexico and supplying them with false documents.

In bloodstained work clothes, the immigrant laborers
were shackled like criminals, and packed into busses.
Many Omaha children didn't see their fathers or mothers
come home that night.  Instead, their parents were
driven hundreds of miles to the border, and dumped on
the other side.

Even for those who escaped, like Mendez, the raid was a
frightening and deeply humiliating experience.
Assessing its impact, it's not unreasonable to ask, who
gained, who lost, and who paid the price?

For more than a decade, Omaha has been a testing ground
for the enforcement of US immigration policy, in large
part because the city, and the small towns of Nebraska
and Iowa which surround it, are ground zero for the
meatpacking industry.  Its labor needs are shaping the
debate in Congress, which will determine who benefits
from the country's immigration laws.  By the same
token, it is a good place to ask whether immigration
policy has worked at all in the past, and if so, in
whose interest?

The Immigration and Naturalization Service said it had
evidence a Nebraska Beef recruiter in Mexico was
offering jobs at $8.50/hour, a $100 signing bonus, free
housing, and fake Social Security cards. But the agency
deported the very people who could have testified about
how they were hired, so a Federal judge dismissed the
charges in April 2002.  They company walked.

The workers were not so fortunate. The deportations
heightened a climate of fear inside the plant - already
a fact of life for those without papers.  "If they
treat you poorly at work, you have to take it," Mendez
explains.  People fear, not just raids, but the
consequences of losing their jobs.  Employer sanctions,
a provision of the Immigration and Reform Act of 1986,
make holding a job a crime for an undocumented worker.
"You have to keep working because if you lose that job,
finding another is difficult.  When you're working at
the plant and don't have papers, you're always being
threatened, every day, that the migra [the Border
Patrol] is coming."

After the raid, line speed increased to make up for the
missing workers, beyond the normal rate of 2400 cows a
day, or one killed and cut apart every 24 seconds. When
seven of them protested and demanded a raise to
compensate, they were fired.  Many remaining workers,
angrered by the raid and firings, tried to organize a
union.  The fear was too strong, however.  When the
union election finally took place on August 17, 2001,
just months afterwards, a majority voted against the
United Food and Commercial Workers, 452 to 345.

The raid wasn't Nebraska Beef's first experience with
employer sanctions. For an entire year in 1998, the
Immigration and Naturalization Service went through the
employment records of every meatpacking plant in the
state of Nebraska, and two counties next door in Iowa,
during Operation Vanguard.  Poring through the
documents of 24,310 people employed in 40 factories,
they pulled out 4,762 names.  These individuals were
sent letters, asking them to come in for a chat with an
INS agent down at the plant.  About a thousand actually
did that.  Of them, 34 people were found to be in the
country illegally and deported.  The rest, over 3500
people, left their jobs, whether for immigration
reasons or just as part of normal turnover.  At
Nebraska Beef, over 300 people quit.

Employers complained.  After Operation Vanguard,
Nebraska's Governor (now US Secretary of Agriculture)
Mike Johanns and the American Meatpacking Institute
accused the INS of creating production bottlenecks, and
implied they'd been denied a necessary source of labor.
Within six months, however, the meatpacking workforce
had returned to previous levels.  Omaha has a
reputation as a place where people can find work, and
they come looking for it, not just from Mexico and
Central America, but from barrios across the US.

For immigration authorities (the INS before 2002, and
now the Bureau of Immigration Control and Enforcement -
BICE) the results at first seemed negative.  The agency
commonly defends sanctions by arguing they discourage
workers from coming to the US illegally, and free up
jobs for citizens and legal residents, especially in
communities with high unemployment. INS/BICE officials
sometimes accompany the media to a local unemployment
office after a raid, and post the jobs that supposedly
have been vacated.

In fact, however, the number of people coming to the US
did not diminish with increased enforcement.  According
to the Census Bureau and the Pew Hispanic Center, there
are 10.3 million undocumented residents in the country,
an increase from 8.4 million in 2000.  They estimate
that the number has increased at 485,000/year - the
description of a steady, social process, rather than a
failure by immigration authorities.  Internationally,
over 130 million people now live outside the countries
where they were born, on all continents.  They are
overwhelmingly moving from poorer to richer countries.
It's unrealistic to expect workplace raids to deflect
such an enormous global movement of people.

"We're used to working, and the way people live here is
very different," Mendez explains.  "Here what you earn
is enough to eat, to dress, no luxuries but a way of
getting around. In Mexico, you dress or you eat - you
don't earn enough to eat, dress and live. You work a
lot here too, but at least you have something to show."

People also dream for their children.  "They're never
going to have to go through what we went through to get
here," Mendez swears.  He doesn't want them to work in
meatpacking plants, and they have options he didn't.
As in many immigrant families, the children are
citizens, while other family members have legal
residence, and some are still undocumented.
Immigration is a process.  "My daughters were born here
in the United States and have all of the privileges of
citizenship. They can come and go anytime they want,"
he says proudly.

But hard work, striving toward security and a better
life for a new generation, isn't rewarded by
immigration policy.  Instead, raids and sanctions make
up a set of terrifying dangers, to be avoided at all
cost.

They didn't produce jobs for anyone else, either. The
communities in Omaha that used to provide workers for
the meatpacking plants, and that no longer do so today,
have seen almost no effect from immigration
enforcement.

There have always been Mexicans and Latinos in Omaha.
Immigrants have populated South Omaha's working class
neighborhoods over a century (22% in 1900).  They still
do today (26%). Over the last three decades, however,
meatpacking has moved from plants in urban centers,
like Omaha and Chicago, to small towns closer to the
areas where livestock are raised.  The Latino
population in Nebraska as a whole rose by 94.75% from
1990 to 2005, due to the increase in the small
meatpacking towns within a few hours radius.
Lexington's barrio made up only 5% of its population in
1990, but a quarter just three years later.

In the late 1960s, Omaha's three largest plants closed,
costing the jobs of over 10,000 workers.  Omaha's Black
community fought hard to pull down the color line in
these plants in the 1930s and 40s.  The jobs provided
not just economic stability, but political power.  In
the 1950s, Black members used their hard-won base in
the United Packinghouse Workers to demand that bars,
restaurants and other public establishments take down
segregationist restrictions.  In the McCarthyite
hysteria of the time, Blacks and their allies were
labeled as reds by a conservative local union leaders.

Then came the closures, devastating Omaha's African
American neighborhoods.  Although other plants
eventually took their places - Nebraska Beef, Northern
States Beef (now Swift), and Greater Omaha Packing
Company - the percentage of African American workers
remains tiny. Immigration raids and Operation Vanguard
didn't create a single job for North Omaha's African
American neighborhoods.  Instead, packers relied on
recruiting labor from further and further away, driven
by a desire to keep labor costs low.

Meatpacking wages have steadily fallen behind the
manufacturing average. According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, 1980 slaughtering plant wages were 1.16
times the manufacturing average. After twenty-five
years, they are now .76 times that average.  US
manufacturing wages certainly haven't soared - in fact,
they've fallen behind inflation.  But meatpacking
wages, in relative terms, have fallen faster.
Considering how hard and dirty a slaughterhouse job can
get, that wage is not a great attraction to any native-
born or longtime-resident worker who can find another
job.  Meatpacking companies therefore face a choice -
raise wages, or find other workers.

Unionization of packinghouse workers also fell from
over 80% in 1980 to less than 50% today.  In Nebraska,
like other meatpacking states, right-to-work laws
prohibit unions from requiring membership. Nebraska now
has an average manufacturing wage of $12.32, 13.2%
below the production average for the other 15 states
where meatpacking is a major industry.

Immigration raids didn't raise wages, any more than
they created jobs.  If anything, they lowered them by
making workers more vulnerable, creating a climate of
fear in which union organization was much harder.

Sanctions enforcement, however, did become a means to
pressure Congress, and set a political agenda into
motion.  One of Operation Vanguard's architects, then-
Dallas District Director Mark Reed, boasted he would
force employer groups to support guest worker
legislation. "We depend on foreign labor" he declared
at the operation's height.  "How can we get
unauthorized [undocumented] workers back into the
workforce in a legal way?  If we don't have illegal
immigration anymore, we'll have the political support
for guest worker."

There's no question that many US industries have become
dependent on immigrant labor.  The Migrant Policy
Institute reports that in 1990 11.6 million immigrants
made up 9% of the US workforce, and that by 2002, their
numbers had grown to 20.3 million workers, or 14% of
the workforce.  The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that,
in 2001, undocumented workers comprised 58 percent of
the work force in agriculture, 23.8 percent in private
household services, 16.6 percent in business services,
9.1 percent in restaurants, and 6.4 percent in
construction.

Reed might have been a little ahead of his time, in
thinking Congress was prepared to act quickly.  But he
did get industry thinking.  In the operation's wake,
large employer groups, the American Meat Institute
prominent among them, began pushing for guest worker
programs tailored to industry.

In 2002, the AMI issued a call for immigration reform.
It suggested automating the INS database, so employers
could verify immigration documents easily, and
moderating enforcement actions against employers who
try to comply.  Its centerpiece called for "creating a
new, separate employment-based immigrant visa category
covering mid- to low-skill workers."  The proposal has
been embraced by the Essential Worker Immigration
Coalition, which encompasses 36 employer groups from
drug stores (think Wal-Mart) to hotel chains.

President George Bush, who signed onto the idea at the
beginning of his administration, calls it "connecting
willing employers with willing employees."  For
industry, the adoption of guest worker proposals by the
president and powerful forces in Congress is an
indirect benefit from Operation Vanguard and the
Nebraska Beef raid. These enforcement actions helped
provide the political momentum for guest worker
proposals.

Two major bills in Congress reflect the AMI and EWIC
agenda.  One, the Kennedy/McCain bill, would allow
corporations to recruit 400,000 workers annually,
offering these temporary immigrants the chance to apply
for permanent residence if they remain constantly
employed for four years.  The bill allows the currently
undocumented to become guest workers too, with the
promise that they also can apply for legal residence,
after six years.  Meanwhile, employer sanctions would
be enforced much more systematically, forcing them to
either sign up or leave.  Another bill, by Senator John
Cornyn (R-TX), allows companies to recruit guest
workers for more limited periods, after which they'd
have to go home.  The currently undocumented would have
to go back home too, in order to apply for guest worker
visas. The bill has no real legalization program, and
would direct enormous new resources into sanctions
enforcement.  President Bush has introduced a proposal
very much like the Cornyn bill.

The American Meat Institute doesn't endorse any
particular proposal. According to Rob Rosado, director
of legislative affairs, meatpackers would like to
normalize the status of the industry's current
workforce, "to allow the people already working to
continue to work." The key issue, however, is the
constant stream of new workers needed to keep plants
running.  "We support a new guest worker visa," Rosado
explains, "since there isn't one currently for
permanent, fulltime non-seasonal workers."  Asked if
the industry would accept a basic wage guarantee for
those workers, he responded that "we don't want the
government setting wages.  The market determines
wages."

If either bill becomes law, plants like Nebraska Beef
could gradually recruit new guest workers as normal
turnover opened up jobs, essentially doing legally what
the government accused the company of doing in
violation of the law five years ago.

"Hispanics are always viewed as the labor force, and
the only right we have is the right to come here and
work," says Tiberio Chavez, who helped lead successful
efforts to organize another Omaha meatpacking plant,
Northern States Beef.  Immigrants will only have rights
if they can fight for them, he says, and proposals for
immigration reform can make that easier or harder.
"The companies want to make more money, and if one day
they can make us work without pay, then they will.  But
the day we organize a strong united effort we will
force them to grant us the rights we are entitled to,
because all human beings have rights," he exclaims.

But union organizers believe they'd have a hard time
coming to the aid of any worker who couldn't get a
green card, and didn't want to sign up as a guest
worker.  Social Security  and the Department of Labor
inspectors would check their immigration status of any
worker who complained about unpaid wages or overtime,
under the Kennedy/McCain or Cornyn bills.  Under this
new regime of employer sanctions, the undocumented
would be more vulnerable than ever.

Would workers on temporary visas be likely to sign a
union card, the next time the line speed got too fast,
or if wages fell even further behind the manufacturing
average?

Sergio Sosa was the key organizer in the alliance
between Omaha Together One Community, a community
project of the Industrial Areas Foundation, and the
United Food and Commercial Workers, which successfully
organized the union at Northern States Beef.  Sosa says
the obstacles for guest workers would be daunting.
"With community support it's still possible for workers
to resist, even when they have no papers," he says,
pointing to the way the documented and undocumented
worked together at Northern States.  "But guest workers
are cut off from the community.  By definition they're
temporary, and can't put down roots or look to a future
here.  Their function is to work and leave."

Last year Rodolfo Bobadilla, bishop of Huehuetenango,
Guatemala, visited his countrymen working in Omaha's
meatpacking plants.  With the clarity of an outsider he
observed that "the US needs these workers, so there
should be a system to allow them to come to this
country in a legal manner.  But when only men come to
the US on a temporary basis," he warned, "the family
disintegrates.  Our people here need to keep their own
culture, and integrate themselves in US culture as
well.  They need to participate in social movements to
protect themselves. People must plant their roots."

And in Congress, African American political leaders
agree.  Members of the Congressional Black Caucus have
sponsored a third alternative, the comprehensive
immigration reform proposal introduced by Houston
Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX).  Her bill,
like the reform signed by Ronald Reagan in 1986, would
allow the undocumented to apply for permanent legal
status if they have been living in the US for five
years, and understand basic English.  Fees paid by
applicants would fund job training and creation in
communities with high unemployment. Her bill has no
guest worker provision, and instead strengthens
enforcement of the workplace rights of immigrants.

"This would be better for us," says Sosa.  "If we're
going to improve conditions in our communities, we need
legal status for those who lack it.  We're prepared to
struggle for something better, but we need enforcement
which will make that easier, not harder."

In April, the National Labor Relations Board finally
threw out the 2001 union election at Nebraska Beef,
citing the company's illegal intimidation tactics.  The
union and OTOC at first chose another date for an
election, and then withdrew their petition as that date
grew near.  One worker, Jesus Lopez, fired in April,
said the company was threatening to close the plant if
the union won, an illegal campaign tactic.

"It took four years to throw out that old election
because of the fear those same tactics created," Sosa
exclaims angrily.  "It's pretty obvious to workers that
the company can violate all kinds of laws without
paying a penalty.  And Congress, instead of enforcing
the laws that should guarantee workers their rights,
and allow them to raise the incomes of their families,
is debating an immigration reform that will just help
the company even more.  Who do you think is the real
winner here?"