Agricultural Personnel Management Program
University of California

6/7/03  News Report -- The Houston Chronicle

PALMETTO -- The morning routine seldom varies around here, as long as tomatoes cling to the vine.

Seven days a week during an almost endless growing season, vans and buses spread out at sunup to pick up the men and women who harvest the hard, green fruit in the fields outside of town. The workers trickle back to a motley assortment of labor camps, motels and trailer parks later in the day, hot, tired and stained with tomato juice.

This was supposed to be the end of the road for Hector Ramirez. The 34-year-old father of four could earn about 45 cents for every bucket of tomatoes he stooped to fill. For an average picker, that works out to about a hundred buckets or $45 a day, money Ramirez could send home to his wife and children in Pozos, Mexico.

But Ramirez never made it past Victoria. He was among the 19 people who died in May after being locked in the back of a sweltering tractor-trailer rig hauling people north from the Mexican border.

The Victoria episode for many was a dramatic reminder of the dangerous lengths to which immigrants will go to find work in the United States. The incident re-ignited a call for legally regulating the flow of workers across the Mexican border, a move Mexican President Vicente Fox and President Bush were investigating before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, put border security under a much harsher light.

But analysts at opposite ends of the political spectrum say the Victoria deaths are unlikely to effect a change in U.S. immigration policy.

The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Control estimates that about 7 million illegal immigrants were living in the United States at the time of the 2000 census, with 4.5 million concentrated in California, Texas, New York, Illinois and Florida. From coast to coast, illegal immigration is a political conundrum shaped by regional concerns:

In Los Angeles County, health department officials estimate they spend $340 million annually to treat illegal immigrants. The county is considering hospital closures to deal with a budget shortfall, but community health care advocates say the financial crisis is unfairly being blamed on illegal immigrants when the county has no accurate way of determining a patient's citizenship status.

In Arizona, armed vigilantes patrol the arid ranchland, looking for immigrants making illegal border crossings. Last month, one such group launched a remote-controlled spy plane outfitted with cameras and a global positioning system to help locate and apprehend illegal immigrants.

The Border Patrol detained almost 345,000 people along the Texas border during the last fiscal year, and countless more came through the state and vanished via the nexus of interstate highways. Those who make it as far as Houston can shop for a ride on the East End's Harrisburg Boulevard among an assortment of van and bus companies that specialize in hauling immigrants to American cities and fields where they can find work, as well as to destinations in Mexico.

Several states that had relatively few illegal immigrants in 1990 experienced rapid growth in that population during the past decade, particularly states in the South and Southeast. Georgia, North and South Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee saw exponential growth in the number of illegal immigrants living there.

And the stories of death and abuse are unabated: Tuesday, three men who entered the United States illegally from Mexico were found dead in a train car near Baytown. The same day, 29 illegal immigrants were discovered packed into a decrepit Houston building used as a smuggler's way station, some locked behind bars without food or water.

The trip into the United States was Hector Ramirez's first, and he told his wife he was headed for work in Palmetto. But the path he was on was well-worn. He and three other Pozos men were traveling with neighbor Serafín Rivera, a veteran of the migrant trail who was returning to the Florida tomato fields after a four-month visit with his family.

Few employer sanctions

Palmetto, a coastal community southeast of St. Petersburg, is a place of disparate populations.

Sun-baked seniors live an easy life in tidy mobile home parks and condominiums. People who spend long days in the sun by necessity are less visible -- the farmworkers who tend the tomato and strawberry fields.

Tomato grower Jay Taylor said that when he saw the report about the Victoria immigrant deaths on the television news, he turned to his wife and said, "I bet some of them were headed here."

Taylor estimates that perhaps 60 percent of the people who work for Fulton and Taylor Farms, picking and packing tomatoes, probably are in the country illegally. He knows the other 40 percent are legal residents, he says, only because the family-run business has been in Palmetto so long he knows which workers were born there.

Taylor said he's not deliberately hiring illegal workers: All of his workers provide the kind of identification federal immigration laws require to prove legal residency. But Taylor's been in the business a long time and says it's widely known that reasonably convincing fake identification documents can be found for about $50 at any flea market.

"Remember how the law works," said Rob Williams, a lawyer who directs the Migrant Farmworkers Justice Project in Florida. "The ID only has to pass the laugh test."

Congress overhauled the nation's approach to illegal immigration with the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, calling for sanctions against employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. But the same law spelled out types of identification (easily obtainable through fraudulent means) that must be accepted by employers and prohibited employers from discriminating against employees based on appearance.

Ten years later, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, funding several hundred additional federal agents to investigate employers hiring undocumented workers, as well as document fraud and immigrants who overstay their visas.

The agency then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service directed resources to employer investigations after the reform acts of 1986 and 1996, but immigration analysts of all stripes call the program a failure. In Florida, as in most states, illegal workers occasionally are rounded up and deported -- but employers who don't actively recruit illegal labor or mistreat their workers remain insulated against prosecution.

Of more than 167,000 convictions secured by the federal government in the past decade for immigration and naturalization violations, only 364 were against employers who hired undocumented workers, statistics from the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services show.

"This does not reduce our commitment to removing unauthorized workers when necessary, but rather enables us to focus on and aggressively prosecute employers who engage in illegal activity to sustain an undocumented and exploitable labor pool," INS field operations administrator Joseph Greene told a congressional subcommittee last year. He also said the 2001 terrorism attacks had redirected the targets for workplace investigations to industries with a national security interest, such as airports.

The most visible immigration case mounted against a major employer in recent years ended badly for the federal government. In March, Tyson Foods and several managers of its poultry processing plants were acquitted of charges that they conspired to recruit and smuggle undocumented workers.

Some Florida growers deliberately cede the hiring and management of all farmworkers to contractors. By putting an additional layer of bureaucracy between themselves and an immigration review, these employers can claim they had no knowledge of whether their workers were properly documented.

Contractors without enough management oversight often are where the abuses are found, said Taylor, who says his company, rather than a contractor, keeps the payroll for its workers.

Sometimes a van of workers will be ordered up from the border by a contractor in Florida, migrant advocate Williams said. Under another arrangement, the "coyote" who delivers them comes back to the job site on payday and collects his fee directly from the people.

"It's also fairly common that the contractor ... essentially buys the people from the coyote and the debt is transferred to the contractor, who takes it out of their pay until they've paid it off," Williams explained. If the crop fails or if workers want to seek more lucrative work elsewhere, some contractors will refuse to release their workers to other jobs until the debt is paid.

Price of going home

Heladio, a 34-year-old Mexican man who prefers to keep his surname private, has settled into the life America affords him. He works for Fulton and Taylor, considered to be a progressive company in its treatment of farmworkers, and lives in Palmetto in housing the company provides him for a few dollars a week. The concrete apartment is tattered and small, and the complex is crowded, but the plumbing works and the roofs are whole -- not necessarily the norm for farmworker housing in the area.

At the end of a long day in the tomato fields recently, the weary man was picking up his 2-year-old daughter at a local Head Start center. Tomato-picking season is just about over in Palmetto, and many of the workers will be heading north to Virginia, where another crop is maturing.

But Heladio is thinking about going home in a few months, certain that the United States and Mexico will work out an agreement that will ease his next trip. He has three children under age 10 living with his father in Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, and he aches for them.

"I want to go back and see them," Heladio said. "It's been three years."

He understands the implications of his decision. His previous trek with his wife and teenage son was traumatic. The coyote he'd hired to help them across the border near Palomas, Mexico, told him they would walk about eight hours to Deming, N.M.

But their smuggler apparently was inexperienced. They walked for 40 hours.

Still, "he was a good coyote," Heladio said. "He bought us water and food in Deming."

He paid the man $300 to bring his family across the border, and then paid another man in Texas $500 to take them the rest of the way to Florida.

Heladio says he and his wife are determined to make the journey home, though he's unsure about exposing his children -- especially his toddler, who was born in Florida -- to the dangers involved in the return trip. And they will come back, because the $400 he sends home every month keeps the family in Mexico fed.

"Yes, I'm worried," Heladio said. "I'm scared. There's animals and snakes in the desert. As soon as you hear it rattling, it's right there on you."

But Heladio repeated his hope that the United States will have worked out a new immigration accord with Mexico by the time he is ready to come back to Florida. He is aware that Bush was at least contemplating a liberalization of the border until the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon put border security and terrorism under the same spotlight.

"I want to get a visa," Heladio said. If he could come back legally, he said, he might be able to board an airplane instead of paying a coyote $1,000. He's heard that coyotes are a lot more expensive than they were when he came to the United States the first time.

Will anything change?

Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda resigned in January, saying he was frustrated by his inability to progress in implementing new immigration ideas with the United States. He said U.S. "immigration policies have failed to stem illegal immigration from Mexico and, in exchange, have fostered a dangerous and sometimes lethal black market for human beings."

Mexican President Fox began lobbying anew for an immigration accord soon after the Victoria smuggling deaths. His failure to negotiate these sticky border issues is considered a liability for his political party as Mexico prepares for congressional elections July 6.

But immigration analysts in the United States, whether they support a loosening of the border or oppose it, say they don't expect the incident in Victoria to measurably affect U.S. immigration policy.

"I wish I could say I did, but I don't," said Jeffrey Passell, an immigration expert with the liberal-leaning Urban Institute.

"It's not just a matter of Fox and Bush getting together and saying, `We'll do it now,' " Passell said. "As horrible as (the Victoria incident) was, I'm not sure it's going to motivate the politicians to move on this."

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the more conservative Center for Immigration Studies, agrees.

"It's not likely to do much in the long term," Krikorian said. "The reason is that the kind of opening up of immigration that would be needed to reduce the likelihood of these kinds of tragedies would be beyond anything the American people would tolerate."

Still, Heladio is optimistic in the way of someone who has few choices.

"To come back walking would be a lot of suffering," he said. "With documents, I wouldn't be afraid."