High-Tech Firms Find Edge in Use of Illegal Aliens
The popular image of high-technology firms is one of modern plants, a cerebral and highly motivated work force and state-of-the-art production facilities, including the latest in automated equipment.
But as a raid by immigration officers at a Chatsworth electronics plant last week demonstrated, the reality sometimes is quite different.
Of 85 production workers at Senior Systems Technology Inc., 61 were detained as suspected illegal aliens. They were taken from an assembly line that one observer described as “not much more than a conveyor belt that goes around a big room.”
The raid, and similar forays last fall by immigration officers in the Silicon Valley around San Jose, have highlighted the trend among some high-tech firms to meet price competition from overseas plants by using only those workers willing to accept the lowest wages, industry analysts say.
Work for Simple Tasks
Generally, illegal aliens are hired to perform simple tasks such as assembling the electronic circuit boards like those produced at the raided Chatsworth plant.
Interviews with industry analysts indicated that the trend toward illegal-alien labor--mostly drawn from Mexico and Central America--is occurring at a faster pace in the high-tech community of the West San Fernando Valley-Ventura County than in the Silicon Valley or in Orange County, the state’s two other centers of high-technology industries.
Carl Warren, West Coast editor of Mini-Microsystems, a magazine that covers the computer industry, said West Valley employers are more likely to use illegal aliens than are their counterparts elsewhere because of the Valley’s “proximity to Los Angeles’ barrio” and the absence in the Valley of significant numbers of Vietnamese workers, who often perform assembly tasks for minimum wage.
Similarly, Jeff Parietti, director of the American Electronics Assn. in Palo Alto, said many Silicon Valley and Orange County firms have been able to hold labor costs down without turning to illegal aliens by hiring from large local Vietnamese communities, which he said provide legal workers who “work hard, don’t mind repetitive jobs, are reliable and in general are great employees.”
Valley Numbers Unknown
Immigration and Naturalization Service officials in Southern California, who only recently focused enforcement efforts on high-technology firms, said they were unable to estimate the percentage of illegal-alien workers in the local computer, aerospace and electronics industries.
But in the Silicon Valley, which most industry observers agreed has a smaller proportion of illegal aliens than does the San Fernando Valley, the local INS supervisor estimated that illegal aliens are 8% of the high-tech work force.
“Eight percent might not sound like a lot, but it amounts to about 25,000 workers in Santa Clara County alone, and at some firms the workers are 100% illegal,” said John Senko, officer in charge of the San Jose office of the INS.
“We don’t know how widespread the practice of hiring illegal aliens is in high-technology firms,” said Joe Flanders, spokesman for the Los Angeles INS office, which conducted last week’s raid. “But we have become aware that it is growing.”
Under federal law, he said, “it is not illegal to knowingly hire an illegal alien.”
Five Raids a Month
Flanders said that the Los Angeles INS office, which deports about 60,000 aliens a year, conducts an average of five factory raids each month in Southern California and that the Chatsworth raid represented a decision to step up enforcement in high-technology industries.
Industry analysts said the use of illegal labor is more prevalent among small firms, such as Senior Systems Technology, that supply parts to larger firms than it is among industry leaders.
An economic downturn in the computer and electronics industries that began more than three years ago squeezed small firms harder than their high-tech big brothers, which were able to produce overseas or contract with overseas firms to supply parts, said Warren, the Los Angeles-based analyst.
A year ago, Qume Corp., a subsidiary of International Telephone & Telegraph Corp., transferred its computer-making operations to Taiwan, laying off 800 workers at its San Jose plant.
Operations Shifted to India
And Tandon Corp., the Chatsworth-based maker of computer disk drives, last year laid off 1,400 of its 3,000 workers in Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley and transferred most manufacturing operations to its plants in India, where assemblers work for as little as 5 cents an hour.
Warren asked, “How can an American firm compete with overseas plants that pay what we consider starvation wages, although workers in those countries are often overjoyed to get the jobs?”
“The small firms are caught in a price squeeze of the worst sort,” said Parietti. “They are looking for every opportunity to cut costs, because their customers have the option of going overseas and many have been exercising that option.”
Automation is not an option for such firms, the analysts said, because it takes up to five years to show a profit from an automated facility, and small firms turn out products that change as often as every few years.
Firms Deny Practice
“By the time you started to see cost reductions sufficient to offset the cost of automation, the rest of the industry would have gone in a different direction,” said Warren.
In telephone interviews, officials at several larger high-tech firms in the West Valley emphatically denied that they employ illegal aliens.
“We ask for a birth certificate, naturalization papers or green card for everyone,” said Gary Bernard, vice president of Woodland Hills-based Dataproducts, which has 1,600 employees and produces computer printers at seven plants in and around the Valley.
“You never know for sure,” he said, “but we make every effort to weed out any illegal workers.”
Connie Friedman, vice president of Micropolis Corp. in Chatsworth, which produces computer disk memory storage systems, expressed doubt that any of the firm’s 600 employees are illegal aliens because “our policy is to investigate all employees. We make every effort to determine that an employee is legal.”
Documents May Fool Firms
But the INS’s experience in Northern California, as reported by Senko, suggests that firms often are wrong in assuming that documents produced by employees to prove their right to work are authentic.
He cited the case of California Circuit Assembly Corp. in San Jose, which last fall submitted the names of 250 non-citizen employees to the INS for verification of work papers.
“They were very cooperative and told us they suspected about 20 or 30 of them could be using forged papers,” he said.
“But when we checked, we found that 187 of the 250 were illegal aliens using forged documents.”
Cooperation Stressed
Because the firm cooperated, Senko said, the INS stuck to its previously announced policy of giving a company several months to replace illegal aliens with legal workers in order to minimize disruption of production.
The policy of seeking cooperation was preceded by several highly publicized raids last year at Silicon Valley high-tech plants. In those raids, the percentage of aliens taken into custody was greater than 50% of the work force, Senko said.
The raids “showed employers the consequences, so now we are hoping they all will cooperate,” he said.
INS spokesman Joe Flanders said last week’s Chatsworth raid was aimed at “opening up jobs that Americans would like to have.”
On Wednesday, the day after the INS raid, an employee at Senior Systems Technology said the firm was “swamped” with applications in response to a small newspaper ad that announced “immediate openings” for assemblers.
Rush of Applicants
Company officials refused to comment on the raid or its aftermath.
Interviews with applicants indicated most had not worked for some time and had rushed to the plant after hearing news reports of the raid.
All insisted they were legally entitled to work in this country.
They quoted Senior Systems Technology interviewers as saying workers would be paid between $3.35 and $4.25 an hour, depending on experience.
Speaking though a friend who translated into English, 43-year-old Amando Trivizo of Pacoima said he had not worked for four months and needed money to support his wife and three children in El Paso, Tex.
“I will take any work,” he said, “as long as they pay me.”
‘Anxious to Get Hired’
Victoria Furlanetto of Pacoima, a native of Ecuador, said she would “take any work they give me. I don’t care about how much pay.”
Rose Garcia of Glendale arrived with three other middle-age mothers who hoped to get work to supplement their husbands’ income.
“She’s very anxious to get hired,” said her husband, Jose, who translated. “This could work out very good for us.”
One who was unimpressed with the openings created by the raid was Scott Schwan, 21, of Burbank, who responded to the raided firm’s ad in hopes of securing a job with a wage of at least $5.25 an hour.
Schwan, an unskilled helper in a Burbank electronics plant, toured the plant and talked with production bosses “who didn’t seem to speak any English.”
He said he decided he “would not fit in there very well. Besides, I think they’re looking for minimum-wage people, and I’m not willing to work for that. I think my starting wage of $5.25 an hour turned them off.”
Union Takes Note
The trend toward using illegal aliens at high-tech assembly plants has been noted by officials of District 727 of the International Assn. of Machinists in Burbank, which represents 15,000 employees at Lockheed Corp. and several other local aerospace firms.
“We haven’t tried any organizing at these West Valley firms in years,” said Neil Vandercook, union spokesman. “But we view the trend to hire illegals as a terrible thing for employers to do when there are Americans who want work.”
Vandercook said the union is “beefing up at this moment to begin organizing at several of these plants.”
He said an attempt by the union to organize an electronics plant in South-Central Los Angeles two years ago was thwarted when the employer “threatened to have anyone who joined the union deported.”
Although the threat of deportation “strikes fear into the heart of illegal aliens and was very effective against us,” Vandercook said, the union plans to deter West Valley plant managers from using the tactic by “notifying them we will be putting the public spotlight on them if they try that sort of thing.”
61 Suspected Illegal Aliens
In the aftermath of the raid, INS officials said that of the 65 men initially detained, 61 were later determined to be suspected illegal aliens.
Of the 61, 50 were Mexicans, nine were Salvadorans, one was Colombian and one Guatemalan, Flanders said.
He said that 40 voluntarily accepted deportation and were returned to their native countries within 24 hours and that the remainder were held in custody pending a judge’s determination of their status.
Flanders said most suspected illegal aliens eventually agree to be deported rather than remain in custody for up to three months while awaiting a hearing.
