Illegal Immigrants Drawn to Midwest Jobs

When a team of immigration agents swooped down on the slaughterhouse at 7 a.m., handcuffs and search warrant in tow, word spread fast on the killing floor. So did the panic.

Some workers dashed outside to an adjacent gravel lot, hunkering down among skittish cattle thrashing about in pens. Some climbed into dark recesses of the plant’s rafters, forcing flashlight-toting agents to ferret them out of hiding.

It was the beginning of the end.

A journey that had begun months or for some years ago, furtively, desperately, hundreds of miles away in dusty villages in Mexico, across the border, across the vast expanse of rippling wheat fields to this corner of America’s heartland, was about to give way to one more journey.

Destination: back to the border. Then, across the Rio Grande to Mexico.

This one-way ticket would come courtesy of the U.S. government.

The roundup of more than 80 workers this summer day at the slaughterhouse and at a second plant, both owned by Greater Omaha Packing Co., was just one more trickle in the widening stream of illegal immigrants migrating to--or being smuggled though--the Midwest.

At times, the flow of undocumented workers has overwhelmed federal agents, strained county jails and exhausted authorities struggling to keep pace with a problem--a perpetual pipeline of illegal immigrants--once considered largely the domain of states like Arizona and California.

For Jerry Heinauer, who has led dozens of raids as head agent of the Omaha district of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, there’s a message behind the crackdown:

“It can’t be that once you’re past the border you’re home free,” he says. “You can’t have that kind of mentality.”

His district--which includes Iowa and Nebraska--has deported a record number of illegal immigrants this fiscal year: about 2,400, a sixfold increase since 1994. The Greater Omaha raid marked the 20th local raid agents have conducted since January in what has become a routine:

Raid a work site, round up undocumented workers, fly them to the border, watch them leave the country. Then hope they don’t come back.

In December, agents raided the city’s garbage hauler. In January, it was a liver-processing plant. In February, a meatpacker. In April, a foundry. In May, a metallic industry. And on and on.

This July day, every cubbyhole, every meat carcass in the chilly slaughterhouse was checked for stragglers. Every worker was questioned. Every suspected undocumented worker was identified, then escorted out, some still wearing floppy rubber boots and bloodstained shirts. Two were just 16 years old.

As they all climbed aboard a chartered bus, the first leg of an 877-mile flight to El Paso, some smiled, others waved jauntily to TV crews. The lumbering vehicle belched a smoky farewell, seeming to defy the name etched on its silver grille: “Good Life Coaches.”

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For most illegal immigrants, the Midwest is a magnet for one simple reason: the promise of a good life.

With Nebraska and Iowa boasting two of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation, this is a job mecca. Restaurants, construction companies, factories and foundries all are hungry for anyone with a strong back, steady hands and a willingness to work. English is not required.

“In Los Angeles, they apply at 30 places and nothing,” says the Rev. Damien Zuerlein of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Omaha. “Here, they apply at two places; right away there’s a job.”

Unlike states like California, where grape- or strawberry-picking is seasonal, there’s steady work here, paying $7, $8, even $10 an hour, a solid day’s wages in Mexico. Tack on benefits and modest living costs and it becomes even more inviting--so much so that word quickly spreads south of the border.

Nowhere is the ‘help wanted’ sign out more than in meatpacking.

Iowa and Nebraska have about 220 meatpacking plants, and it doesn’t take much math to figure out that in an industry where experts estimate turnover as high as 100% a year--strenuous, blood-and-guts work and high injury rates are contributing factors--job openings are frequent.

Often, local residents shun these jobs, leaving them to those near the bottom rung of the labor ladder--legal immigrants, including Mexicans, Laotians, Vietnamese and, most recently, Bosnians.

But despite denials by some companies, Heinauer estimates that up to 25% of the meatpacking work force in the two states is illegal.

It’s part of a shifting trend, says John Martin, special projects director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a nonprofit group in Washington.

“It used to be the Mexicans and Central Americans coming across illegally were primarily getting jobs in agriculture,” he says. “There’s been a transformation over the last 10 years that increasingly the illegals are going into large plants that employ unskilled workers.”

Sometimes they blend in with legal immigrants; other times they replace them, knowing they have no options.

“They’re the ones who take the risk their fingers will get cut off, the ones who will work in cold temperatures,” says Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington.

They’re also the ones who are most powerless, says Mark Grey of the University of Northern Iowa, who has studied the impact of meatpacking plants on local communities--an issue being explored by General Accounting Office investigators.

“I’m sure there are many in the industry who have already figured out when you have illegal immigrants in your plants, they’re far less likely than other workers to complain, to go to police, to go to OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration], to go to the district attorney,” Grey says.

Meatpackers insist they don’t hire undocumented workers intentionally, they don’t have expertise to detect bogus documents, and they’re hamstrung by laws that limit questions they can ask applicants.

“We pay the price,” says Ken Kimbro, vice president of human resources at IBP Inc., the meatpacking giant raided in recent years in Texas, Iowa, Illinois and Nebraska. “We hire these people believing they are authorized. We spent time, money and energy training them. Some have been with us nine years.”

In June, a raid at an IBP plant in Joslin, Ill., netted more than 140 workers.

“When you lose 100 people, particularly in the tight job market that exists in the heartland, we will be four, five, six months replacing these people,” Kimbro said.

The company is working with the INS in a pilot program that gives the meatpacker access to a government database to help verify whether applicants are authorized to be in the United States.

Greater Omaha says it, too, does all it can to ensure workers are legal; after the raid, INS agents helped train the company to spot bogus documents.

But the company also questions the INS crackdown.

“How much was spent putting that raid on?” asks Bill Ramsey, a spokesman. “You would think that the company would have had the opportunity to cooperate before being raided.”

Ramsey also said Greater Omaha feels vindicated in receiving a warning--but no fine.

In fact, despite dramatic, TV-friendly raids, the INS’ Omaha district has levied only about $100,000 in fines in the last 18 months.

Heinauer says fines aren’t the point; the real financial squeeze comes from shutting down production.

He defends the raids. Undocumented workers, he says, are depressing wages and taxing small communities by competing for low-income housing, jobs and limited social services.

But some critics are skeptical of both sides and say workers are the pawns.

“If the INS really, really wanted to take care of this problem, they could,” says Grey, the university expert. “If these plants really wanted to take care of the problem, they could. . . . It’s obvious it benefits enough sectors of our economy to have them here. When they’re no longer needed, or whenever it’s politically expedient, they’re thrown out.”

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After seven years and almost as many jobs, Juan’s grand plan to make it in America is over. For now.

He sits hunched over in an armory a few miles away in Council Bluffs, Iowa. INS agents are photographing, fingerprinting and interviewing their quarry, then hunt-and-peck-typing the responses into laptop computers.

Juan waits to be called. So do scores of men and women staring vacantly or sprawled out on rows of green cots, where they will spend their final night in the United States. Some clutch plastic bundles stuffed with sweat-stained work clothes. Others stand in line, waiting to make phone calls.

They will not be allowed to leave this room.

They will leave behind cars, furniture, homes--and, in some cases, family members who are U.S. citizens.

Juan’s wife and 5-year-old son will remain behind the next day when his hands and legs are shackled as he boards a government plane to the border checkpoint.

Juan, 25, a wiry, mustached man, says he came to Nebraska after bouncing from California to Oregon to Iowa, working in restaurants, the garment industry, auto parts and construction. He had been at the plant three months.

“They take advantage of us,” he says, a knot of his curly brown hair protruding from the hood of his black sweatshirt, which he wears to conceal part of his face--despite sweltering summer temperatures.

“They pressure us a lot to do more work to the point where we can’t complain about anything,” he says through a translator. “If we do, they threaten to fire us or say, ‘If you don’t want to work, we’ll call immigration.’ ” The company denies the charge.

Juan’s future is uncertain. “If my family doesn’t want to leave,” he says with a shrug, “I’ll make one more attempt to come back.”

Matilde has no such plans. A 32-year-old mother of three, she paces in purple pants and ankle-high work boots, nervously making plans to take her children back home to Jalisco, Mexico.

Matilde liked working at Greater Omaha’s fabrication plant, where meat is boxed. “I had to lie to get my job. I had to lie about my papers,” she admits through a translator, her lips quivering as she blinks back tears behind her glasses. “You have to do that.”

She paid $150 to a smuggler to cross the border. She won’t try again. “For what?” she asks, lifting her callused hands in surrender. “I don’t have any papers. I won’t be able to find work. What, to be locked up again?”

Pablo is not deterred, even though he, too, is caught.

“No, I was not scared,” the stocky 24-year-old from Guanajuato, Mexico, says with a laugh. “I came out smiling. I knew I was going to be back.”

After returning to Mexico, Pablo--not his real name--had his fiancee wire him $700 he had been saving to rent a hall for their wedding. He used it to help a smuggler arrange his return, traveling from Texas to Arizona, then by air back to Nebraska.

He claims he even tried to get rehired at Greater Omaha, where he had earned $9 an hour, but was rejected.

“Three years ago, it was easy to use fake papers,” he says. “Now, they don’t take me.”

But he found work elsewhere.

He was out of Nebraska just eight days.

*

Heinauer says revolving-door stories are the exception, not the rule.

But the caravan continues. In September, 91 illegal immigrants were stopped in six days on highways in Nebraska; local jails were so crammed that the nearest place to detain them was 220 miles away.

In recent months, the INS has been so busy it has not been able to respond to some calls from state police who have stopped vans filled with undocumented immigrants, almost all of them Mexican. They were allowed to continue on.

The tips keep coming in too--from law enforcement agencies, plant co-workers and, on occasion, informants,

“I’ll be busy for the next year just from the phone calls I’ve gotten this month,” says Gerald Noland, INS special agent in charge of the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, office that opened in January.

Heinauer says the high-profile strategy has put employers on notice.

“The companies see we’re committed to this,” he says. “If we’re not knocking at your door this week, we might be there next week.”

But Zuerlein, the minister-activist, calls it “a royal waste of time.”

“It’s a good show,’ he adds. “They want to say to the American public, ‘We’re doing our job.’ In their eyes, they are. The INS is playing their little role in the whole charade.”

And the illegal immigrants?

“They also know the game is being played. They’re not depressed or upset. They’re saying, ‘Well, this is what we have to do. They ship us home. But we will come back.’ ”