Agricultural Personnel Management Program
University of California

10/17/00 News Report -- Lincoln (Nebraska) Journal Star

There they stood, all in a row, in Gov. Mike Johanns' flag-draped hearing room: Beef producers, pork producers, meatpackers, Hispanic activists, advocates for immigrant rights.

One by one, representatives of groups that have clashed in the past voiced their united objections to a federal crackdown on illegal workers in Nebraska meatpacking plants and their support for friendlier immigration rules.

Lt. Gov. Dave Maurstad and a 25-member task force revealed 14 recommendations Monday for resolving criticism of Operation Vanguard, the Immigration and Naturalization Service's controversial effort to weed out illegal workers through checks of federal records.

"I presented the report to the governor this morning," Maurstad said, "so he now has it to review."

Task force members also offered their diverse reasons behind the recommendations, a year in the making:

Because Nebraska needs to find an acceptable way to add to its labor force, said former IBP meatpacking executive Dale Tinstman of Lincoln.

Because the INS stepped over the enforcement line with Operation Vanguard, said Lourdes Gouveia, a sociologist at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Because the state was unfairly singled out for workplace disruptions that hurt the agricultural economy, said Arlington beef producer Paul Ruwe.

"The problem is nothing new," Tinstman said. "We just don't have enough people in Nebraska and Iowa to process the food we raise."

But Gouveia said it's not quite that simple. "From the point of view of the government and industry, this is primarily a labor issue," she said, "but it doesn't end there."

She cited workers' right to privacy and a blurring of the lines that should separate federal, state and local law-enforcement roles as examples of concerns that go beyond pocketbooks and perceptions of a worker shortage in the state.

Immigration attorney Milo Mumgaard of Lincoln was quick to underscore the disruptive impact of a 1998 INS pilot program that was supposed to replace packing plant raids with a diligent electronic search for discrepancies between payroll and federal records. Instead, workers fled work settings to avoid INS contact.

He called it "a dragnet over 27,000 people in the state, dozens of communities in the state."

Maurstad said he worked hard to produce a consensus on all 14 recommendations, and Omaha businessman Virgil Armendariz Jr. urged that "something more than just a study gets done with this."

But Gouveia warned there may be limits to the seeming unity among task force members and signs of disunity could emerge about as quickly as various levels of government try to settle on changes in immigration policy.

"We need to be careful not to fall into any sinister tradeoffs," Gouveia said.

Past wage and working-condition exploitations of workers, through such strategies as "guest worker" programs, must not be repeated, she said.

Task force member Kevin Ruser, a law professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, agreed. "I think about the things that caused Cesar Chavez and his folks to organize in the early 1960s, and I worry about some of those things," he said.

In other comments after the task force's press conference, Mumgaard said unity might last longer if new meatpacking workers are dealt with fairly and responsibly. To him, that means "jobs that pay a decent wage, that have decent working conditions, that are jobs that have benefits or a community that knows how it's going to provide those benefits."

Noticeably not in attendance in Lincoln Monday were representatives of the Omaha-based INS, who had served in an advisory role. Asked to explain their absence, INS District Director Jerry Heinauer replied: "We were not a voting member. I don't think it was anything more than that."

Heinauer said that absence should not be viewed as either total agreement with task force findings or as a retreat from the objective of a stable, legal work force.

"We believe very strongly that, if Operation Vanguard had been allowed to continue, it would have been an incredible success in terms of efficiencies, in terms of impact on employers and to communities and to employees. We think it made an awful lot of sense."

How about amnesty, one of the task force's recommendations?

"Our position," said Heinauer, "is that it would be contrary to our nation, which is a nation of laws, for us to adopt a hands-off, sort of a sanctuary policy, which is sort of being espoused in these recommendations."

For now, Operation Vanguard remains in the same status it has held for months -- under review by INS Commissioner Doris Meissner in Washington, D.C.

"It's unfortunate," Heinauer said, "that we're unable to go to a second and third phase of Vanguard -- which would have had us going back to the plants on a couple of occasions."

Meanwhile, United Food and Commercial Workers, a prominent union presence in meatpacking plants, weighed in with a news release saying "Nebraska Governor Mike Johanns called (Monday) for amnesty for undocumented workers."

Johanns spokesman Chris Peterson called that "factually incorrect," and Maurstad, addressing the amnesty idea at the earlier press conference, said the governor "would probably be reluctant" to endorse that part of the task force's recommendations.