Sting of New Immigration Law Felt in a Labor-Short County : Landscaping/Yards, Companies Will Go to Seed, Businesses Predict

High prices, worker shortages and an unkempt Orange County are in the cards if the new immigration regulations are heavily enforced against commercial landscape contractors, business owners predict.

Allan Curr, president of Vandergeest Landscape Care in Santa Ana, estimated that at best, just half of the existing labor force of gardeners in Orange County will remain available for hire after the full effects of the law are felt.

Curr said he believes that about 80% of his 150 employees are documented or eligible for documentation. The other 20% are “questionable.”

“It is going to be an interesting, wild situation,” he said. “About half the landscapers will go out of business, and half of the landscaping will go to hell.”

As labor becomes more expensive to obtain, the prices charged by maintenance landscaping companies to homeowner associations could increase 20% to 50% in the next two years, he said.

Takashi Shimomura, a commercial landscaper in Garden Grove, said he decided to get out of the business partly because a Mexican family that had provided him with reliable, hard-working laborers is ineligible for legalization under the new law and has decided to return to Mexico.

While homeowner associations may shoulder the added cost of labor in the long term, landscape contractors are expected to feel the pinch first as they try to gradually adjust their prices.

“There are going to be a lot of people caught by the seat of their pants when existing contracts cannot be performed at anticipated labor prices,” said Tiera Verde of Western Landscaping in Santa Ana.

One owner of a custom landscaping firm in Santa Ana said that if he runs short of documented labor, he will suggest that would-be employees receive their papers through illegal channels. He said he is sure that trade in counterfeit documents is “quite a racket now.”

Craig Pauley, owner of a residential landscaping company in Tustin, said he doesn’t know how to determine whether documents used to prove legal residency are authentic. “I have already heard you can buy green cards for $20 to $30 apiece,” he said.