Posted on 07/23/2003 3:45:42 PM PDT by oceanperch
Illegal workers lead shadowy existence
By JENNIFER HEMMINGSEN of the East Oregonian
Roselia's husband planned his crossing for weeks. He had come to work in the United States nine years ago. This time, he told Roselia, he'd probably be gone a long time. He asked if she and the children wanted to come too.
The idea made Roselia nervous, she said through a translator. But the last time her husband was gone it had been difficult — there were times when he couldn't find work so she had no husband and no income. Better to all be in the same place, she finally decided.
"She just came like that," Roselia's translator said. "She just left everything so they wouldn't leave her behind. She'd been through it before and didn't want to go through it again, with her husband gone for so long."
Nearly half the nation's 2.5 million farm laborers are undocumented workers. Most are unlikely outlaws like Roselia and her children who had never left their home state of Michoacan, Mexico, until this spring when they crossed the border to find work.
Experts estimate there are almost 8 million people in this country illegally, but that number can be misleading since it includes people that overstay student, work or travel visas, said Maria Andrade, managing attorney for the Oregon Law Center in Ontario. There are now about 5.3 million undocumented workers in the United States. About 58 percent of those workers are from Mexico. Getting here:
When it was time to go, Roselia asked a neighbor to take care of her horse and house. She left in the morning, without luggage, direction or any idea what would happen from one moment to the next.
It cost Roselia's family $5,800 — $1,200 apiece — to cross the border with the help of smugglers, sometimes called "coyotes." From the United States, they had to pay other people to get to Milton-Freewater. Poor subsistence farmers with little savings, they borrowed most of the money, hoping to pay off their debt with American wages.
But financial hardship isn't the biggest struggle for undocumented workers crossing into the United States, said Diego, also from Michoacan, who crossed the border illegally dozens of times from 1976 until he received working papers in 1988. Mexicans risk their lives to cross the border, wading rivers or walking through mountains and deserts, he said. Though he is no longer an illegal alien, Diego asked not to be identified when talking about his past.
"It's always been dangerous. They'd cross rivers and they'd drown," Diego said. "The river would take them."
Since the Border Patrol increased its presence along the 2,000-mile border in the past decade, more than 300 illegal immigrants have died each year while attempting to cross — most from exposure or drowning, according to the Associated Press.
Getting work:
Workers like Diego and Roselia risk the crossing because they can make more money working in the United States than in Mexico. In most cases, the worst penalty they will receive is deportation back home. When that happens, they just try again until they can cross, Diego said.
Getting a job once they get here is not a problem, he said. Diego got his first farm labor job in the United States through other migrant workers he knew. Once he found a job, he returned to it each year. In his experience, undocumented workers can have an easier time finding work than those with working papers.
"The person hiring them doesn't really care if they (papers) are real or not," he said. "They just want the job to be done."
Though it is illegal to hire workers without documentation, employers such as farmers who are likely to have undocumented workers on their work crews rarely have the time, inclination or skill to spot illegal aliens, Andrade said.
Employers usually don't worry much about immigration violations, she said. Immigration officials have limited resources and are unlikely to check workplaces. If they do raid a place of employment, they are more likely to round up the employees than to fine the employer.
The nature of business in Eastern Oregon also makes it unlikely for employers to spot undocumented workers, she said. In agriculture, farmers hire a lot of short-term employees to meet seasonal deadlines.
"That creates a lot of anonymity between the employer and the applicant, and not a long employment relationship," she said. "It makes it easier to not really look very closely because this person isn't going to be around very long."
Employers can't accept work documents that are obviously falsified, but they are also prohibited by law from discriminating by race or national origin, she said.
"If you present a legal permanent resident card, and I say to you, 'I don't believe this is yours because you have brown skin or speak with an accent or whatever,'" it is a civil rights violation, she said.
In practice, only United States citizens are likely to call an employer to the carpet for discrimination, but the law still puts employers in a difficult situation, she said.
"All of those factors taken together create a situation where it's easier to accept the documents and not be keyed in when something isn't right," she said. Getting by:
Just as any person is subject to U.S. laws when they're in this country, any worker in the United States has the same rights and protections under employment law: the right to minimum wage, safe housing, to be paid based on accurate time records and so on.
The theory behind the single standard is it keeps employers from "a race to the bottom" in terms of salary and business expense, Andrade said. Without equal protection, some employers might use an undocumented labor force to cut costs.
"That's in addition to all the policy reasons and moral reasons and humanistic reasons for ensuring minimum standards for treatment of workers," she said. But undocumented workers are often unaware of their rights or reluctant to seek aid, she said.
Most local agencies don't serve illegal populations. Some, such as Legal Aid, that receive federal funds are prohibited from assisting undocumented workers.
Even private organizations such as transient aid or community action programs are unlikely to serve undocumented workers, representatives from those agencies said.
Undocumented workers are reluctant to trust people they don't know with personal information and unlikely to know how to navigate sometimes complicated aid networks.
While she waited for her husband to find work Roselia's family didn't get public assistance or help from charitable organizations. They relied on Hispanic neighbors for clothes, dishes, other necessities and advice. Without that social network, undocumented workers wouldn't be able to survive here, said Rita Monahan, manager of Orchard Homes farm labor camp in Milton-Freewater.
"If they don't have friends or family, they are lost," she said. "There's no company that wants anything to do with them."
It is a lot more difficult for non-citizens to get assistance from government agencies than most people believe, Andrade said. Even legal residents have to live in the United States five years before qualifying for housing assistance, food stamps and other benefits.
The Oregon Law Center was created after 1996 legislation barred Legal Aid offices from assisting undocumented people. The center, run completely without federal assistance, represents undocumented people in court — mostly on work-related issues, she said.
There are only five Law Center offices in Oregon, the closest one in Ontario. But work schedules and lack of available transportation mean most undocumented workers can't make office visits anyway.
Andrade and her coworkers usually travel to high schools, Head Start parent meetings, law enforcement agencies and labor camps to tell workers about their rights and resources.
Even then, undocumented workers can be reluctant to trust strangers with personal information and legal status, she said.
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