INS’ Fight on Illegal Labor Is Big Jolt to Yakima Valley

For 10 years, Claudia and her husband have worked as fruit packers in Washington’s abundant apple orchards. Since slipping illegally across the border from Mexico, they have had three sons and acquired a car, two houses--and a neighborhood full of memories.

Last week, however, a decade in suburbia careened into a wall when Claudia’s boss at the Monson Fruit Co. called her in and told her that an Immigration and Naturalization Service audit had found her documents were forged. The firm would have to let her go. Her husband got a similar summons--as did about 1,700 workers in the packinghouses of central Washington.

Immigration raids are not new to the state’s fruit industry. But this time the INS didn’t sweep in and scoop up the illegal immigrants. It had them fired.

The strategy is one of the newest in the INS’ arsenal against the rising tide of illegal labor streaming across America’s borders. In the last year, the agency has targeted meatpackers in Nebraska, restaurant workers in Seattle, hotel workers in Florida and large numbers of illegal workers in San Francisco in hopes of eliminating the job magnet that attracts immigrants while saving the thousands of dollars it would cost to deport them.

And now Washington’s rural Yakima Valley, which for years has survived on the cheap wages paid to undocumented workers and already was experiencing one of the highest seasonal jobless rates in the state, is left with the prospect of as many as 1,700 unemployed fruit workers. And the immigrants are ineligible for unemployment, welfare and medical benefits.

The result is a potential economic and social crisis in the Yakima Valley, as city and county officials struggle to determine whether any public aid might be available to help the newly destitute.

And as large numbers of citizens in the politically conservative region voice fears that the jobless families will be brought onto the welfare rolls, some analysts say the INS policy ultimately could have the effect of souring sentiments in a community that has traditionally welcomed Mexican immigrants.

‘No Benefits . . . No Help’

“While on the one hand, this procedure seems to be less punitive than for the INS to be deporting these people back, it leaves them here in a state of limbo,” complained Yakima City Manager Dick Zais.

“There’s got to be some other answers, some other choices beyond just casting adrift a generation of workers to fend for themselves, with no benefits, no agencies, no help,” Zais said. “To simply say there are legal replacement workers to take their jobs, that’s not enough. We’re a better country than this.”

The INS order, first issued in early February, follows an audit of 13 central Washington fruit packinghouses that turned up 1,700 workers without legal immigration documents. Of those, between 700 and 1,000 were still working after a round of seasonal layoffs.

The initial firing notices were issued last week, and on Thursday hundreds of Latinos rallied at the state Department of Labor and Industries in Tumwater, shouting at Democratic Gov. Gary Locke and demanding a new round of amnesty for undocumented workers.

“I don’t support what the INS is doing,” said Locke, a Chinese American born to an immigrant family, as the protesters gathered for an annual legislative strategy session stood and screamed “Amnestia!”

“I think it’s just compounding the problem,” Locke said later in an interview about the INS action. “These are individuals who are supporting families. There must be other ways we can reduce illegal immigration without penalizing the families who are already here.”

INS officials said documentation audits like those conducted in the Yakima Valley last year resulted in 21,217 firings in the seven-state Western region. Only 3,929 of the workers were arrested and subjected to deportation proceedings.

“This is a little bit different way of doing it,” said Bill Strassberger, spokesman for the INS regional office in Laguna Niguel. “Previously, we would go in, conduct these operations, take people into custody and remove them. They would turn around and come back because they would know there is a job waiting for them. In this type of situation, they know there is no job available because we’ve made sure access to the job is cut off.”

The strategy became a preferred enforcement tool only during the last year, he said.

“Ultimately,” Strassberger added, “the hope--and I don’t believe it’s necessarily an unrealistic hope--is that the workers would return to their country.”

‘Go Where? Back to What?’

But few in central Washington expect the fired workers to return home, which for the majority of them is the state of Michoacan in west-central Mexico. Many have been here for years, and, rather than give up their lives and homes, they are more likely to seek new forged documents and hire on with a smaller orchardist or packing company.

“Go where? Back to what?” scoffed Luz Bazan Gutierrez, executive director of the Washington Assn. of Minority Entrepreneurs.

“My older son [born in Mexico] is in high school,” Claudia said. “How can I leave and take him back to Mexico now? He wouldn’t fit in there. It would affect him greatly.

“We don’t know what will happen to us. We don’t want to depend on welfare or anything. But I’m not the type of person who gives up. I’ll sell tamales or something. I’m scared, but I’m willing to do whatever it takes.”

“We’ll start selling food if we have to,” said Mireya Chavez, who quit her job at a packing plant out of fear that the INS would detect her illegal documents. Chavez said she and her husband, also undocumented, are afraid that they would have to leave their two young children, both born in the United States, if the INS targets them.

The Roman Catholic Diocese and other churches in the Yakima Valley are setting up aid programs for the newly unemployed, and a Native American pig farmer has donated 10 sows.

The Chicano/Latino Coalition is organizing an economic campaign, calling on Latino residents to curtail their buying in a move to demonstrate their economic clout. Latinos make up 23.8% of the population in Yakima County.

Next, the coalition plans to ask supermarkets and discount stores patronized by the Latino community to join the political campaign for blanket amnesty to the estimated 5 million undocumented workers in the United States, along with providing donations of cash, clothing and food to the unemployed workers. Those who do not cooperate will be boycotted, said Hector Franco, who is leading the campaign.

He predicted that the extent of the economic impact would be felt later, should the INS audit several dozen other fruit packers in central Washington that together employ an estimated 10,000 undocumented workers.

“It’s going to be a huge upset on top of the already depressed rural economics of the area,” Franco said. “And there is total disregard for the social impact.”

“They have basically put economic sanctions on people, so they don’t have food, they don’t have support,” said Polo Aguilara, head of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “Everybody is still asking the same question: Why did they do it this way? I don’t think anybody has the answer to that.”

Pool of Workers Is Challenged

State officials say there are unemployed citizens and legal residents in Yakima County that are theoretically available to fill jobs vacated by the undocumented immigrants. But Mark Mochel, area administrator for the state Job Service Center, admitted that many were presently on the welfare rolls and had little or no work experience.

“There are some jobs in the warehouses that are a little more skilled, and the more skills and the more experience they’re looking for, the smaller the pool of workers might be,” he said.

“The emotions are running very high in the community, and they’re all over the board in terms of community values and how people are feeling about this,” Mochel said. “But from the respect of the Immigration Reform Act, the INS does have a job to do. They have taken what action they feel is necessary to enforce the immigration rules they’re bound by, and as a community we’re going to have to work through this issue.”.

The powerful fruit growing industry has lobbied in recent years for a guest worker program to fill jobs it says have not been taken by domestic workers.

The INS action will leave many growers with a serious labor shortage and likely will not contribute to resolving the immigration issue, said Mike Gempler of the Washington Growers League.

“Because the employees won’t be deported, it really just shuffles people around. The people will probably find employment elsewhere with false documents,” he said.

“If they were to either deport people or use the strategy on a business-by-business basis, the social safety net in this area would be better able to handle it. But the enforcement strategy that’s being used is causing tremendous disruption in the lives of the workers in this small city, and of course in our industry, with no apparent benefit for the American people.”