Posted on 06/30/2004 11:17:16 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
GREENFIELD, Calif. (AP) - One hundred farm workers are beginning the second day of a five-day march up the Salinas Valley, stopping in small farming towns like Greenfield, to protest immigration raids in Southern California and the intimidation they said affects immigrant workers all over the state. The workers are also trying to build support for a bill which would allow undocumented field laborers to earn work permits after years of farm work, organizers said. The federal AgJobs bill is also backed by the agriculture industry.
The United Farm Workers are leading the march, which started in King City on Tuesday and will end in Salinas on Saturday.
Many of the farmworkers have work schedules that only allow them to attend evening rallies, so the number of protesters doubles by nighttime, said Jocelyn Sherman, a spokeswoman for the UFW.
Border Patrol agents have carried out sweeps in recent weeks in Southern California, arresting more than 420 people around Temecula.
But immigration authorities said they are not staging raids on undocumented immigrants in the Central Valley, although reports of raids continue to come in.
On Tuesday, for the second time this week, the San Joaquin Valley Border Patrol denied that there have been immigration sweeps in the area, and warned people to be aware of government agent impostors.
"We have not been in that area, period," said Mario Villareal, a spokesman for the Border Patrol, told the Modesto Bee.
The U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement - the agency that incorporates what used to be the Immigration and Naturalization Service - also denied staging any raids on undocumented immigrants in the area.
"We're not doing anything of the sort," Mark Shaffer, resident agent in charge of the investigations office in Stockton, told the Modesto Bee. "There's been nothing going on."
Still, rumors continue to crop up, and immigration and border patrol offices are getting many calls on the subject, officials said.
"People are going around really scared," said a 33-year-old woman who reported some kind of raid at a Riverbank construction site last week. She wanted to withhold her name because she does not have legal permission to work in the United States.
She said "people started shouting" that an immigration raid was under way. "The carpenters started to run," she said.
Since then, she told the Modesto Bee, she has been too scared to go back to her $7-an-hour job cleaning the finished homes, though she doesn't get paid while she's away.
He's kind of the top dog of the crew because he's the crane operator, but there's no AC in the cranes and no heat in most of them either. Summer means clothes wringing wet with sweat and winter means Carhartt coat, wool socks, insulated coveralls, etc. He's tougher than I am. I couldn't do it. I like my AC in the summer and my nice warm pellet stove in the winter. I thank God every day that I have a husband who's willing to pull long hard days to provide for me and our kids, and I make sure he knows how much I appreciate him.
:) Needs to be repeated to a lot of politicians, doesn't it?
Amen.
Excuse me .. I thought the raids ended 2 weeks ago ..??
Those same carpenters who are taking jobs from American carpenters by working for less. To hell with them.
I'd settle for two hours without liberals.
It would be akin to the government shut down a few years ago if libs shut up for a few days *LOL*
Sounds like your husband is an ironworker. What he does is one tough job and it take a lot of skill. No illegals are going to waltz across the border and do his job. My brother-in-law is a tile setter and I've worked with him a couple of times. Thats a tough job, too but he does work indoors mostly.
If it weren't for illegal aliens, a currently unemployed American would probably be doing this job.
Our elitist have done an end run around the American middle and working class by using illegal alien labor thus taken the wage element out of supply and demand economics.
Actually, he's a crane operator. He drills the holes down in the ground to support the columns on large bridges and then he runs the crane that lifts the beams up to the ironworkers. He has a lot of respect for iron workers and they have a lot of respect for him. They're never afraid to ride the mancage if he's the one operating the crane because they trust him and know him to be a safe operator. Yep, it's a highly skilled occupation and so far illegals haven't been able to horn in on it.
I'm not familiar with the employment picture in the St. Louis area. Are there a lot of illegals over there yet? Here in rural Southwest Missouri there aren't yet, unless they're hiding out on some of the big farms and ranches around here.
Employment isn't too bad right now. There is still a lot of manufacturing going on in the area for Boeing and other defense contractors. That is the field I'm in.
Up until recently the flow of illegals has been slow. Hispanics are easy to spot here in North County since its practically all black and white and I've lived here all my life. Its now starting to change somewhat.
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