Agricultural Personnel Management Program
University of California

7/16/00 News Report -- Omaha World-Herald

A year after it was put on hold, a controversial immigration program in Nebraska and Iowa remains buried in a federal review with no official word on when it might resurface or whether it will be changed beyond recognition.

Operation Vanguard, which was supposed to revolutionize the way the country removes undocumented workers, was cast into federal limbo before its effectiveness as a deterrent could be measured.

"To evaluate the success of Vanguard, we would have had to go through two or three cycles," said Jerry Heinauer, an Omaha immigration official who helped launch the pilot program in late 1998. "It never really made it through one cycle."

Vanguard was sidelined last summer when the Social Security Administration, citing privacy concerns, objected to the Immigration and Naturalization Service's plan to continually mine Social Security records in search of questionable workers. The political tide began to turn even before that, though, as employers, livestock producers and labor unions joined advocates for immigrants in attacking the operation as unfairly targeting the meatpacking industry and Latinos.

Still divided on the program's worth, supporters and opponents do agree that Vanguard forced constructive discussion about how to deal with the flow of immigrants into worker-starved industries.

Among the spinoffs were: a governor's task force to study immigration enforcement; a state position to ensure compliance with a Workers Bill of Rights for meatpacking employees; and a legislative mandate to study the impact of immigration on local communities.

Russ Bergeron, spokesman for the INS in Washington, D.C., said Vanguard reviewers are considering ways the INS might work more cooperatively with employers and communities. They are examining privacy concerns cited by the Social Security Administration and exploring alternatives. Underlying the review, Bergeron said, is the question of making Vanguard more palatable locally as well as in other regions and industries.

"It's simply a matter of taking a look at a program that certainly showed promise and then determining whether it can be improved and whether it is viable to be implemented nationwide," he said.

Under Vanguard, the INS subpoenaed employment records from packing plants across Nebraska and western Iowa. They cross-referenced information on about 24,000 workers with national databases and identified nearly 4,500 as having questionable documentation. About 3,500 quit their jobs rather than face federal agents to verify their status. The INS does not know what became of those workers. Of the rest who sat through the interviews, 34 were arrested and returned to their homeland.

The INS planned to revisit the plants every few months, but that did not happen with the review of Vanguard. Heinauer, head of the INS in Nebraska and Iowa, said follow-up checks were key to Vanguard's goal of deterring undocumented workers from seeking jobs. If the program is not reactivated, he said, the Omaha INS office likely will return to more costly, sporadic raids on plants suspected of employing illegal workers. That method, he noted, also drew fire from advocates for immigrants, who saw it as inhumane, and from employers, who said raids disrupted production.

An INS cost analysis showed that Vanguard, during the six months it was most active, cost about $ 528,000. About 3,500 jobs were vacated. In comparison, the government spent about $ 234,000 to raid a single plant, Monfort Inc., in Grand Island. That 1992 operation resulted in 307 arrests.

Tim Counts, an INS spokesman in Dallas, said Vanguard in the long run was expected to be a cheaper, more effective way to rid companies of undocumented workers. In raids, he said, many of the job vacancies presumably were filled with other undocumented workers.

Opponents of Vanguard believe there are other alternatives to workplace raids. Cecilia Olivarez Huerta, director of the State Mexican American Commission, supports legal reform that would allow the immigrant work force to stay.

"Whether it's Vanguard or a raid, work-site enforcement disrupts families," she said. "It concentrates on a work force we really need."

Milo Mumgaard, director of the Nebraska Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest and a member of the governor's immigration task force, said one of the group's recommendations will be the pursuit of programs to legalize workers.

"No one is going to disagree that there are undocumented workers in our midst," he said. "Why are they here? It is in our interest to think about facilitating legal status for people who are here and coming here."

Mumgaard acknowledged, though, that amnesty for illegal workers would not be likely soon. A more realistic approach, he said, would be to develop a screening process that uses reliable databases to screen individual applicants at the hiring stage.

Vanguard's data checks apparently were flawed, he said, because they wrongly tagged about 1,000 people as possibly illegal workers. Heinauer believes that had Vanguard been permitted to run its course, other undocumented workers would have gotten the message that Nebraska meatpacking plants were not the place to be.

While INS officials say Vanguard will be back in some form, some opponents doubt they'll see the politically charged operation again.

"This particular fish has been chewed on pretty good," Mumgaard said.