Tyson Case Illustrates New Focus of INS Crackdown

The worker-smuggling indictment handed down last week against the nation’s largest meat processor was a dramatic advance for federal authorities, who have sought since the late 1990s to crack down on employers that collaborate in schemes to recruit illegal immigrants.

At the same time, the investigation of Tyson Foods Inc., which involved wiretaps, paid informants and 2 1/2 years of undercover work, illustrates the massive effort and resources required to probe employer culpability in the widely acknowledged practice of employing undocumented workers.

Critics of current immigration policy argue that although the charges may alter hiring practices temporarily, in the long run, such investigations, even if they are successfully prosecuted, will be no more effective than previous approaches at preventing unscrupulous employers from circumventing the law.

The national anti-smuggling strategy by the Immigration and Naturalization Service is the agency’s latest effort to reduce the flow of undocumented workers into American workplaces. It de-emphasizes traditional work-site raids and instead focuses on employers believed to be conspiring with smugglers to transport and house the workers.

The INS estimates that 7 million illegal immigrants are in the United States today. “It’s admittedly a large problem in this country,” said Joseph R. Greene, the INS assistant commissioner in charge of investigations. He said the tight labor market of the late 1990s accelerated illegal immigration, in some cases with employer assistance. Using smugglers, he said, “was a way of obtaining an unfair advantage in a highly competitive labor market.”

Meatpacking and poultry processing have been of particular concern to the immigration agency, which estimated two years ago that one-fourth of the workers in the industry were undocumented. During the last decade, the INS has tried a series of approaches, including high-profile raids, audits of company records, and computerized checks of employee IDs, to reduce the dependence of packing houses on illegal labor.

Mass deportations usually followed each enforcement effort. But unions and human rights groups complained the disruptions unfairly punished workers while failing to change employer behavior. And business groups, in tacit acknowledgment that many workers were illegal, lobbied to stop the efforts because they often shut down production lines while replacement workers were sought. The industry groups said they tried their best to hire only authorized workers but were sometimes fooled by fake documents.

The indictment for conspiracy to smuggle illegal immigrants was handed down in Tennessee on Wednesday against Tyson and six current or former executives, who allegedly paid smugglers to bring workers north from Mexico to 15 poultry plants in the South. The charges could result in heavy fines, asset forfeitures and jail time.

Tyson said the alleged practices were “limited to a few managers who were acting outside of company policy.” The Springdale, Ark.-based company is the nation’s largest meat processor, with 120,000 employees and annual revenue of $10.5 billion, and is by far the largest to be named in such a case.

Speeding Up Production

Many packing companies relocated to rural outposts in the Midwest and Southeast during the last two decades as they moved to a more mechanized approach to processing beef, pork and poultry. Production was speeded up by dividing the work once performed by skilled butchers into many tasks that could be done by unskilled laborers.

The combination of speed and repetition led to an epidemic of injuries in meat and poultry processing, which are among the most dangerous jobs in America. According to federal statistics, each year, one in four meatpacking workers is injured seriously enough to seek medical attention.

Nationwide, about 400,000 production workers are employed in meatpacking and poultry processing, according to federal statistics. The jobs increasingly have been taken by immigrants from Mexico, Central America and Asia, and even industry trade groups concede that many of them are in the country illegally.

Mark Grey, a sociologist at the University of Northern Iowa, who has long studied employment practices in the meatpacking industry, said the number of undocumented workers may be as high as 80% at some plants, although there are no official records to substantiate that figure. “The thing is, even if you went through the records in those plants, you still couldn’t tell. No one knows,” he said.

Union officials, who once represented a majority of packing employees, said those without documents are most vulnerable to exploitation. Transcripts of conversations contained in the indictment showed that some Tyson managers seemed to prefer illegal workers because they were easier to work with than legal U.S. residents.

The immigration agency’s first attempt to combat the proliferation of undocumented workers in meatpacking was in the mid-1990s, when it launched a series of raids under the name Operation Vanguard.

Grey recalled the raids as sensational media events involving helicopters, dogs and dozens of uniformed officers. “They descended on the plants, rounded people up in large numbers, hauled them off to the National Guard armory. Most were deported the next day,” he said. In the haste, some children were left behind unattended. Most workers were back within two weeks, Grey said.

Critics of the approach said employers, though usually fined, were not penalized severely enough to change their practices. Tyson Foods was cited five times for employing illegal immigrants in the 1990s, according to an INS database on employer sanctions.

Greg Denier, a spokesman for the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents poultry and meatpacking workers, said that while disrupting workers’ lives, authorities ignored evidence that some employers were active participants in the process. “This is not a natural migration of workers looking for jobs,” he said. “This is induced migration, and the onus should be put on the employer.”

A Call to End Work-Site Raids

Business groups officially repudiated immigrant-smuggling, but they also lobbied against the disruptive enforcement efforts and urged the INS to be more selective in its targets.

The American Meat Institute, a trade industry group, warned the INS that many legitimate U.S. citizens would lose work if production lines were forced to shut down suddenly. And in a letter to then-President Clinton in November 1998, the National Pork Producers Council urged an end to INS raids on work sites.

“Many pork producers are virtually unable to hire and maintain an adequate labor force to operate at full capacity,” wrote Donna Reifschneider, the council president. “We fully support the hiring of only legal workers. However, at this time our industry cannot withstand any disruption such as this investigation would cause in the labor pool at packing plants.”

American Meat Institute spokeswoman Janet Riley said the meatpacking and poultry-processing industries make good-faith efforts to ensure that employees are authorized to work in this country. She said they also support the recent enforcement strategy by the INS, along with the agency’s pilot program to electronically verify the authenticity of employees’ work documents.

“We want to ensure a stable and legal work force, and we want to ensure stability in our plant communities. So, it’s in everyone’s interest to work cooperatively with the INS,” she said.

“Our industry has relied on immigrants through the past century, and we continue to rely on immigrant labor,” Riley said. “It’s a great first job for immigrant workers. The wages are relatively high for unskilled labor coming to the U.S. The average wage in a packing plant is $10.81 an hour.”

The practice of knowingly hiring an undocumented worker was outlawed in 1986. But employers are not responsible for knowing if a job seeker’s documents are valid. As long as they check identification, and fill out the paperwork properly, they meet their legal obligations, said Carl Shusterman, a Los Angeles immigration attorney who once worked for the INS.

“There is almost a game-like quality to this,” he said. “Everybody knows the rules. You show up with these two pieces of paper and say, ‘Tengo una mica’ [‘I have ID’]. We sign here, you sign there, and everything is legal, even if the employer has doubts.

“But when you go beyond that,” Shusterman said, “and either you know the people are illegal or are facilitating their entry into the United States, you’ve moved way across the divide. When you step over that line, you’re clearly breaking the law.”

Although the Tyson Foods case is the biggest so far, federal authorities during the last five years have investigated a variety of other employers suspected of participating in immigrant-smuggling schemes.

Just last month, four officials of Nebraska Beef Inc., a small meatpacker in Omaha, were indicted in connection with an alleged conspiracy to smuggle unauthorized workers from Mexico to the company’s Omaha plant.

Greene of the INS said the focus on worker smuggling began with a case involving a Georgia-based T-shirt manufacturer, Atlantic Finishing. The company and its president, Fred Parrish, were accused of enlisting smugglers to secure what the INS said was “an easily obtained, exploitable work force.”

Under the scheme, more than 50 workers from central Mexico were smuggled across the border into New Mexico, and then taken to Atlantic Finishing’s factory in northwest Georgia. In April 1998, Parrish pleaded guilty to harboring illegal immigrants and was sentenced to one year in jail.

Farm owners and farm labor contractors also have been linked to smuggling rings. One of the most notorious cases was that of Edwin M. Ives, a Ventura County flower grower who pleaded guilty in 1994 to transporting and harboring illegal immigrants, and paying them less than the legal minimum wage. He paid $1.5 million in compensation to more than 200 former workers from Mexico.

INS Strategy ‘a Big Deal’

The strategy is “a big deal,” said Paul W. Virtue, who served as general counsel for the INS from 1998 to 1999 and is now a lawyer with a Washington firm that represents the American Meat Institute. “The Justice Department and the INS are satisfied with bringing perhaps fewer, but higher-quality, cases that will have an impact and a deterrent effect.” Virtue said he thinks the INS will have more support from employer groups “because it really goes after the bad guys.”

The INS’ Greene said that his agency must weigh the costs and benefits of investigations before going ahead with more. The agency looks at such issues as whether the employment of illegal immigrants unfairly depresses wages. “Are [employers] conspiring and working with organized criminals? Are they putting people at risk in terms of their lives or their health and safety? Those,” Greene said, “are the kinds of questions I have to ask before we’re going to commit the limited resources that we have.”