Posted on 10/19/2018 7:14:14 AM PDT by gattaca
With new enforcement priorities under the Trump administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are taking aim at employers that knowingly hire unauthorized immigrants. The most recent — and largest — bust happened at a trailer manufacturing plant in northeast Texas.
Business had been booming at Load Trail LLC, about two hours northeast of Dallas, as customers bought the black trailers to haul hay bales, topsoil, construction refuse and oilfield equipment. Then came the ICE raid in late August.
Inside Load Trail's huge production building, welders turn raw steel into trailers, amid cacophonous clanging and showers of sparks. It's brutish labor — cut the heavy black metal, lug it into place, arc-weld it, repeat — but the production floor is nearly half empty because of an acute shortage of welders.
Load Trail CEO Kevin Hiebert remembers the morning of Aug. 28, when a helicopter thumped overhead and 300 ICE agents swarmed into his yard. "It looked like something you would typically see in the movies," he said, "not something you ever planned on living out in real life."
ICE rounded up more than 150 employees — nearly a quarter of Hiebert's workforce — loaded them into buses and booked them for working in the country unlawfully. A criminal investigation of the company continues.
So far this year, ICE agents have stormed 7-Eleven stores, a meatpacking plant, dairy and vegetable farms and a feedlot.
Jake Thiessen's family founded Load Trail in Tigertown, Texas, which is home to a half-dozen major trailer manufacturers. Shortly after the Load Trail raid, ICE began auditing employee records of every trailer manufacturer in the community to find out which workers have fraudulent identity documents. John Burnett/NPR "Businesses that knowingly hire illegal aliens create an unfair advantage over their competing businesses. In addition, they take jobs away from U.S. citizens and legal residents," said Katrina Berger, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in the Dallas ICE office.
But you won't hear those complaints in Tigertown, Texas. This flyspeck community situated between cotton fields near the Oklahoma border is home to a half-dozen major trailer manufacturers — all competitors. And they all employ undocumented workers.
"I think the manufacturing industry in Texas, any kind of steel fabrication construction, depends on illegal immigrant labor," Hiebert says.
ICE Targets 7-Eleven Stores In Nationwide Immigration Raids THE TWO-WAY ICE Targets 7-Eleven Stores In Nationwide Immigration Raids The head of a competing trailer-maker down the road agrees, saying they all use workers who are in the country illegally. He asked not to be named in hopes of staying off ICE's radar.
It's too late for that, though: ICE is auditing the employee records of every trailer manufacturer in Tigertown to find out which workers have fake identity documents. Some unauthorized employees are so rattled they're not showing up for work.
What the industry needs are legal guest workers, says Load Trail CEO Hiebert, "Especially now that they're cranking up on the enforcement. Everybody hopes that there'll be some kind of real immigration reform before what happened at Load Trail happens to them."
Load Trail has been in trouble before
In 2014, the company was fined $445,000 for employing more than 170 unauthorized immigrants at its plant. Hiebert says they hire whoever walks in the door, and they pay decent wages — $20 to $25 an hour. Still, they've always had a hard time finding welders.
"The trailer industry is growing well," Hiebert says, "but manufacturers are unable to keep up with demand. It has to do with the inability to produce the product."
So the work is done by men like Ignacio Barrios, a sturdy, 36-year-old welder who came here illegally from Oaxaca, Mexico. He worked at Load Trail for 17 years before getting swept up in the ICE operation.
Texas has always been knowingly duplicitous when it comes to illegal immigration.
Cal Jillson, political scientist
He wears an American flag T-shirt, and sits in the church that's helping to support his family of five now that he's out of work. Barrios paid a $5,000 bond to get out of detention, and is waiting for his day in immigration court.
"You have to work hard," he says in Spanish. "Lots of times you get injured, burned, you break your fingers. It gets over 100 degrees in the there. I've seen that Americans don't want to do the kind of work that we do."
Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, says "Texas has always been knowingly duplicitous when it comes to illegal immigration."
On the one hand, Texas is a staunch law-and-order state where conservatives support Trump's immigration agenda; on the other hand, Jillson says, if ICE is too successful, "employers are wondering where they're going to find people to man their businesses if American high school graduates aren't going to do it."
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations agents arrested more than 150 workers at a trailer-manufacturing business in North Texas. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Lamar County, where the trailer manufacturers are headquartered, is crimson Trump country. Yet, to hear the trailer bosses tell it, the administration's immigrant roundups threaten a lifeblood of the county. Locals who voted for Trump are nonetheless sympathetic to the hard-working, undocumented welders.
Every morning, a group of retirees meets at the Dairy Queen in the county seat of Paris to drink coffee and mull over the state of the nation.
ECONOMY Worker Shortage Could Dampen Economy "This country will not survive if we don't straighten the way [immigrants] can come over here and work. Because I guarantee you Americans are not gonna do it," says Alan Helberg, a former hospital administrator. His buddy, retired dentist Jerry Akers, chimes in, "Congress needs to get off their duff and pass some meaningful legislation to where people can come here and work legally and not have to be afraid of getting uprooted."
Comprehensive immigration reform is, so far, dead in the water in the gridlocked Congress. And back at Tigertown, some trailer manufacturers say that if they can't find enough welders, they would consider moving their entire operations to Mexico.
Flimsey Grahamnesty has repeatedly said he will keep working for amnesty for illegal aliens and their employers until he is removed from office.
He has stated numerous times that a vote for him is a vote for amnesty.
I hear you. But apparently the prevailing wage isn’t high enough.
What if you paid $1000 per hour? Could you get the workers then? Of course you could.
But you don’t have to go that high. Start your offers at $32/hr and see who you get. You’ll find your floor. And it will be the REAL value of that employee.
Yes your service will cost more. Slavery keeps prices low.
See my post #38.
Is the author a homo?
As long as immigration reform is held hostage to amnesty there will be no immigration reform.
Well, then that is more argument to deport them all and bar the illegals from ever becoming legal. Also, companies who are repeat violators should be put out of business and their owners put in prison for a very long time.
“You have to work hard,” he says in Spanish
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
17 years and he has not bothered to learn the language.
This is not immigration.
This is colonization.
Was he collecting Welfare too?
Hopefully they can hire Beat-O after the Election.
I wish Project Veritas would check that out for us.
Let em move to Mexico, pay the cheaper wages there, deal with drug cartel violence, and pay high tariffs. And hopefully another company will set up in Texas and operate legally.
Sounds like the shoplifter who cries about how unfair it is when the cops handcuff him.
Exactly why the Bush League Republicans and Democrats are so desperate for amnesty for the 30 million people they invited here against the will of the citizens through their 30 year bipartisan policy of non-enforcement.
Remember, amnesty for illegal aliens is amnesty for their employers as well.
Ohmygosh….does this mean that businesses will have to follow the law to acquire foreign labor, but only when it’s necessary? Will they have to train workers who demand a living wage, rather than take workers away from countries that need these trained people to turn their own economies around? I’m sure if they’d try hard enough they’d find top-tier HS graduates who would choose job training for high-paying jobs instead of college debt.
USMCA doesn't go far enough in undoing the damage done by NAFTA. We ought to have a tariff on Mexican imports as high as those on Chinese imports.
“I wonder if these ***holes would consider hiring Americans.”
Not if they have to pay them American wages.
Our once venerated “captains of industry” are now globalist pirates.
Karma. Hire illegals, deal with the consequences. Pay American wages for replacement employees. Else, go out of business and good riddance.
The author calls it “brutish labor.” These pathetic snowflakes would wet their panties if they walked through a steel mill or shipyard.
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