Agricultural Personnel Management Program
University of California

12/5/99 News Report -- Austin American-Statesman

Ask the managers of some of Austin's construction companies and service businesses what they would do without illegal workers, and they give the same answer: nothing.

"It would shut us down, and I cannot think of a single construction company that could operate," said a construction company manager who estimates 70 percent of his workers are illegal. "There would be no construction projects, because there are not enough (legal workers) in Austin to fill those positions."

In Eagle Pass, Border Patrol agent Greg Deimel said he and his fellow agents have intercepted an increasing number of Mexicans and Central Americans on their way to Austin construction companies, hotels, motels, restaurants and landscaping companies. "Helping Austin grow and build," Deimel said with a wry smile.

Illegal immigrants who get past the border find plenty of employers willing to hire them, and both have little chance of being caught. Immigrants can easily obtain counterfeit documents. The growing national practice of using contract labor shields businesses from the risk of having illegal workers on the payroll.

And the immigration agents who enforce the laws in the nation's interior face a lack of resources, as well as political pressure to leave illegal workers alone. In recent years, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has made work site enforcement a low priority.

Austin's booming economy and 2 percent unemployment rate have made the area a magnet for illegal immigrants. They build the new subdivisions and the high-tech factories, wash the dishes after power lunches, trim the office park hedges and take out the corporate trash.

"The reason that this boom has been sustainable is because of the labor of the undocumented workers that has kept prices low," said Maria Loya, the community development director at El Buen Samaritano, an immigrant aid group. "If one day all undocumented workers would not go to work, the whole city of Austin would feel the impact."

An illegal immigrant living in South Austin put it more bluntly: "Would you wash dishes for $4.50 an hour?"

The prevalence of illegal workers in Austin is an open secret few want to talk about -- almost every employer and worker interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity, fearful of attracting the attention of immigration authorities.

But they agree the Border Patrol's five-year buildup -- doubling the number of agents to form a human blockade around major U.S. border cities -- has done little to slow the flow of illegal workers to Austin and other cities.

In the past year, INS agents have arrested illegal immigrants working in restaurants at Minnesota's Mall of America and at a major construction site in the Washington, D.C., area -- the renovation of the Pentagon.

"They're never going to control it," said a painter who has lived in Austin illegally for seven years.

The INS estimates there are at least 700,000 illegal immigrants in Texas. No one can say for sure how many live and work in Austin, but the city has tried to make them feel welcome -- or at least less fearful. The City Council passed a resolution in 1997 declaring Austin a "safety zone" and forbidding city agencies from asking people's immigration status, a policy also followed by the Austin Police Department.

That don't-ask-don't-tell philosophy is at work throughout Austin. The construction company manager said when he hires workers, "they give us papers, they give us Social Security numbers, all of which says they're here legally."

But when the company landed a job at a military base in Texas, it quickly became clear the documents were phony. The job required an extensive background check for workers to enter a restricted area, and "none of them would go," he said. No one pressed the subject, he added.

Will Americans do these jobs?

Hal Seimer, spokesman for Austin-based Texans for Fair Immigration, said Austin is a perfect example of what's wrong with the country's immigration enforcement: The INS does little to punish employers who hire illegal workers, while the city practically condones illegal immigration.

"Americans are paying the tab for their cheap labor," said Seimer, whose group favors reduced immigration. "They need to pay what an American citizen is willing to do it for. I have a lot more sympathy for the immigrants than I have for the employers, because the immigrants are coming here out of economic necessity, and the employers are exploiting it."

Former City of Austin employee Andrew Henry agrees. Henry, 50, who recently retired from his maintenance job in the city's Public Works and Transportation Department, said illegal immigrants take jobs from some U.S. citizens and drive down wages for others. "Where you or I wouldn't take a job for $8, they'll take it for $2 or $3 an hour," he said.

Several employers said illegal immigrants' pay is comparable to what legal residents earn. Illegal immigrants said they are paid less than legal workers. Both say they don't see Americans lining up for manual labor.

"I've never had an Anglo person come in here and ask for a job," an Austin cleaning company manager said. "I think Americans don't want the jobs that we've got."

Some employers say they prefer hiring illegal immigrants to citizens and argue that hiring U.S. citizens would drive up costs for everyone.

"It would probably double the price of a house, and it would take them three to four times longer to finish a house," said an Austin contractor who builds house foundations. U.S. citizens "wouldn't work as fast as illegals -- you see them out there in 100-degree weather swinging a sledgehammer all day long."

Even though employers say they are desperate for help and welfare reform laws are pushing more people off state welfare rolls, few people are leaving public assistance to work in construction, landscaping and other jobs where illegal immigrants are prevalent.

According to the Texas Workforce Commission, the top jobs landed by the more than 800 Travis County residents who left state welfare rolls in the year ending Sept. 30 were all indoors: cashier, child-care worker, clerical or administrative support worker, food preparer and home health aide.

At American Youthworks, an Austin nonprofit group that helps train people who are just entering the work force, Jennifer Price said the students prefer office and clerical positions to less prestigious jobs that involve mopping floors or working outside in the heat.

"This generation is choosy, because I guess they can be," said Price, who runs the organization's career resource center.

Ken Dillinger, a local chef, said he sees "help wanted" signs all over town.

"The work's there if people look for it," Dillinger said. Illegal immigrants "are doing jobs nobody else wants."

Coming up the hard way

The underbelly of the boom looks like this: five adults and a toddler in a one-bedroom apartment near East Riverside Drive. Three of them sleep on the couch or the floor. Jesus watches over them from a cross tacked to the wall.

Long hours gripping nail guns in the heat. Sunday afternoons at the laundromat. Counting out cash at the little window for the wire transfer to Mexico. And one eye always watching for the INS.

The apartment is home to a 26-year-old woman, her husband, their 2-year-old son, two of her brothers and her husband's brother-in-law. None of them would consent to having their names published because they fear being deported.

Back in Mexico, they all worked menial jobs that paid next to nothing -- the wife and her brothers earned $30 a week painting the same pottery that sells for top dollar in trendy Austin import shops.

Here, they work menial jobs that pay as much as $8 an hour. The wife cleans houses and watches children for three Austin families. The men all work in construction, nailing house frames together. They don't have papers, but "the bosses don't care," the husband said. "They pay us in cash."

They came here the hard way. The husband once walked four days through the South Texas brush to get around a Border Patrol checkpoint. Four years ago, the wife hired a smuggler, or coyote, swam the river, hopped a train and spent two tense days as a captive in an Elgin house before a friend arrived with the rest of the coyote's $700 fee. A few years later, she paid the smugglers from Dilley in South Texas who drove her 20-year-old brother to Austin. The Border Patrol had caught him four times before he broke through.

Now the coyotes charge more because of the Border Patrol blockades. After he was deported by INS this year while in jail in Austin for a traffic violation, the woman's husband paid $1,500 to get back to Austin. In another part of Austin, a carpenter from Toluca said he has paid coyotes $1,200 to $1,500 for recent trips, up from $600 three years ago.

"We have to work almost a month here to pay the coyote," he said.

Not paying can be dangerous. Three years ago, Austin police charged a coyote with murder after he allegedly shot a carpenter to death over a $2,000 smuggling debt. The man from Toluca said smugglers held three of his relatives hostage in San Antonio until the family scraped together the $3,600 fee.

And the coyotes aren't the only predators. Illegal immigrants are robbed by criminals who see them as easy targets and cheated by employers who hire them by the day and refuse to pay them. Some see them as potential slave labor.

A 22-year-old from Veracruz said he was lured to the Midwest by men promising a $900-a-month restaurant job, then found himself in North Dakota, washing dishes 14 hours a day and spending each night locked in a room above the restaurant with seven other Mexicans. After a couple of weeks, he decided to leave.

"Pay me what you owe me, or I'll go to the police," he said he told the owner. "He said, 'If you go to the police, I'll go to immigration.' " He said he returned to Austin empty-handed.

Austin's other world

When newcomers arrive, they can tap into Austin's well-established immigrant network.

"When I got (to Austin), I had work, I had a place to stay, they helped me find an apartment," said Paulie Carpio, 20, who said he has traveled from Guanajuato to Austin three times to work as a concrete finisher. "Everyone helps you."

In Central Texas, Spanish-speaking immigrants can visit restaurants and cantinas that cater to them. They can choose from various Spanish-language newspapers and radio stations. They can mix with people from back home in any of 10 informal social clubs -- called "clubes oriundos," or native clubs -- formed by residents of Guanajuato, Mexico City, Zacatecas and other areas of Mexico. Local bus companies offer service to destinations throughout Mexico.

Illegal immigrants dominate some apartment complexes, with a legal immigrant often signing the lease for groups of illegal residents.

"In parts of Austin, everyone speaks Spanish," said a painter from Zacatecas.

His 23-year-old co-worker, also from Zacatecas, said when the INS is roaming the area, the network spreads the word. Contractors share information by cell phone. The painter said he has heard warnings on Spanish radio.

"They tell us where the immigration is going: 'They're on (RM) 620; watch out,' " he said.

Outside of work, they have minimal contact with the city's English-speaking majority. The couple living near East Riverside said most people treat them decently, but they know some people don't want them here, such as the police officer who threw the husband in jail for driving with a suspended license -- "I didn't even have a license!" he said -- or the guy behind the counter at the driver's license office who told him, "No IDs for wetbacks."

"And they live in houses built by Mexicans, painted by a Mexican," the husband said. "The yard at their office was mowed by a Mexican."

Contractors as shields

In the Spanish-language newspapers, employers jockey for workers: cleaners, painters, housekeepers, cooks.

Residential and commercial construction alone employs 60,000 people in the Austin area, and competition for workers has become fierce as new houses break ground at a rate of 750 per month.

In the local homebuilding industry, some contractors estimate that as many as 80 percent or 90 percent of the workers who smooth concrete foundations, nail up house frames, install Sheetrock, paint walls and shingle roofs are here illegally. That figure doesn't sound overblown to Dwight Jones, an INS supervisory special agent in San Antonio.

"Construction, that's probably the biggest employer of illegal aliens in Austin, and most of those are working for subcontractors,'' Jones said. "There are probably illegal aliens working on any construction site (in Austin)."

The percentages may vary, but dependence on illegal labor is the same all over Texas and the Southwest, according to industry officials.

At the Texas Capitol Area Builders Association, which has 300 home builders among its 750 Central Texas members, Executive Vice President Harry Savio said the builders "recognize that a large percentage of the guys doing the work are immigrants.''

"We really don't talk that much about them being illegal,'' Savio said. "In fact, we don't talk about it hardly at all."

The builders can honestly say they don't employ illegal immigrants, said Ramiro Lazcano, 24, an illegal immigrant from Nuevo Leon who has worked as a framer and drywall installer in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

"You're not working for the (building) company, you're working for a contractor,'' Lazcano said in July after the Border Patrol caught him in Eagle Pass during his latest trip to Dallas.

There's a pecking order in construction, Lazcano said: Anglo builders hire Mexican American -- or legalized Mexican -- contractors and subcontractors, who have crews of undocumented immigrants. The contractors and subcontractors are legal, and that's all anyone cares about.

"All the people I hire are legal, the subcontractors, but all the people they hire are not necessarily legal,'' said the Austin foundation contractor, who works for some of Austin's biggest builders. "What they do is their business."

INS abandons raids

It became the federal government's business in 1986, when Congress made hiring undocumented workers illegal for the first time and put the INS in charge of policing businesses to make sure their workers were legal.

The new law had little effect, and catching illegal immigrants once they get past the border remains the Achilles' heel of the nation's immigration enforcement strategy. INS officials estimate that 40 percent to 50 percent of the estimated 5 million illegal immigrants in the United States entered the country with tourist or student visas and didn't leave when their visas expired. But the agency still has no way of tracking these so-called visa overstays.

Even though visa holders present themselves to U.S. officials when they enter the country, the INS does not keep records on those who cross the Mexico or Canada borders, where 90 percent of visa holders enter. A computer system to track all visa holders is supposed to be developed by 2001.

In Washington, D.C., Mark Krikorian, executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, said Congress never gave the INS the money or the political support to make employer sanctions work. Instead, Congress has focused on beefing up the Border Patrol.

"When the INS has actually had the temerity to enforce the law within the U.S., members of Congress have attacked the INS for failing to understand the agricultural industry and things like that,'' said Krikorian, whose group supports restricting immigration.

"Border enforcement alone can't really do anything, but it makes everybody feel good. . . . They can satisfy the urge for law and order,'' he said. "But at the same time, these very same congressmen have the desire to receive large checks from employers and to be seen as responsive to business. This way, they're able to balance that tension between the need for order and the need for campaign cash."

The 1986 law requires employers to verify applicants' identity and eligibility to work. But a black market in counterfeit documents quickly emerged, and illegal immigrants say fakes are easily obtained on Austin's streets.

The owner of an Austin landscaping company -- who estimates half of the city's landscaping workers are illegal -- said landscaping companies usually check documents. But "we're not experts,'' he said. "That's the stance everybody takes."

Joe Greene, director of the Denver district of the INS, said the agency "didn't expect employers to become fraudulent document analysts."

"Unless you had illegals who were willing to stand tall and say, 'Yeah, I told the guy I was illegal,' . . . (prosecutions) were hard to do,'' Greene said.

The landscaping company owner said the INS leaves businesses alone for the most part.

"I really think the INS looks the other way because of the labor needs here,'' he said. "I chuckle when INS comes in and picks up 700 people -- that's nothing. If they get serious, they'd shut down the nation."

INS officials say they are not looking the other way; they are just looking elsewhere. Searching construction sites and businesses has taken a back seat to combing jails and prisons for immigrants who have committed crimes, who can then be deported once their sentences end.

The INS has just more than 60 agents to cover Austin, San Antonio and the rest of a district that stretches over 78 counties from the border to as far north as San Angelo and Waco. The Austin office has nine agents, and they "are totally committed to the removal of criminal aliens,'' said Ray Dudley, the INS spokesman in San Antonio. "Every INS office, including us, that's their top priority, enforcement-wise." During the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, INS agents removed 62,359 criminal aliens from the country for crimes ranging from drug possession to murder. Agents process about 2,000 criminal aliens a year in Austin, said Tom Homan, the assistant district director of investigations for INS in San Antonio.

The INS has conducted periodic raids in Central Texas -- agents arrested 650 illegal immigrants in 1995 and 1,100 illegal immigrants in the summer of 1996 -- but in the past year, the agency has done no work site investigations in the Austin area, said Jones, the INS special agent.

Homan said the San Antonio office saw its budget drop by 40 percent in the past year because the INS, which oversees immigration enforcement within the country and on the border, is devoting so many resources to expanding the Border Patrol. But he said San Antonio agents soon will be spending more time looking for illegal workers in Austin.

Since transferring from Arizona six months ago, Homan has created a 10-agent work site enforcement unit that he said will target workers and employers around the district's sprawling territory. "It's coming, and it's coming real soon,'' he said.

Homan said his office plans to teach employers how to spot counterfeit documents and hopes to have them participate in a pilot program that allows them to call an 800 number to check documents.

From raids to audits

The INS acknowledges its interior enforcement has been lacking.

"I think there are some serious questions about how effective the interior enforcement by INS has been over the years,'' said Greene, the INS official in Denver. "There was a recognition even within our own agency that a new strategy was called for."

The old strategy involved sending INS agents to raid farms, construction sites and businesses in search of illegal workers. Raids often brought blistering criticism from the public, and in recent years, the INS has backed off that technique and focused almost exclusively on finding and deporting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes.

Greene was tapped to help come up with a new interior strategy. The agency has turned to a less intrusive technique, making appointments with businesses and auditing employees' work documents. When they used this strategy at meatpacking plants in Nebraska and Iowa -- calling it Operation Vanguard -- thousands of workers quit on the spot.

The exodus led to plant slowdowns, which cut demand for pigs and cattle. Nebraska Cattlemen, a state trade association, estimates cattle producers lost $17 million to $20 million during the operation, "and I'd say that's a conservative number,'' said Greg Ruehle, the group's executive vice president. "By no means are packing plants back up to speed."

Vanguard was put on hold earlier this year when the U.S. Social Security Administration balked at giving INS further access to its records, citing privacy concerns. The operation remains in limbo.

The INS has also formed dozens of so-called quick response teams to find and deport illegal immigrants around the nation. But Greene said INS investigators are trying to root out an estimated 5 million illegal immigrants with a fraction of the money the Border Patrol receives.

"With the Border Patrol it's been, 'You need another thousand agents? Here,' '' he said. "And we've never seen that kind of generosity for the interior. Until we can start showing that kind of success, I think it's naive to think we're going to see those kinds of resources."

U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, a San Antonio Republican who chairs the House immigration subcommittee, says the new interior enforcement strategy may cause illegal immigrants to leave their jobs when they see INS coming, but it does nothing to catch and deport them. Smith has championed the Border Patrol expansion but said reducing illegal immigration also requires strong interior enforcement.

During a June committee hearing, Smith called the new interior strategy "a bright flashing sign that says to potential illegal immigrants: 'Come to the United States. Once you make it past the Border Patrol, you are home free.' ''