Journalism
America's Border: Who Left the Door Open?
Elkins has been the police chief in Bisbee for 12 years, on the force for 30. Dever has been the sheriff of Cochise County—which includes Bisbee and encompasses an area almost the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island, with 84 miles along the Mexican border—for eight years and a deputy before that for 20 years. The two lawmen handle the same kinds of citizen demands made on local law-enforcement agencies everywhere—from murder to drugs to reports of abandoned cats. But never have they seen the likes of today's work, in which their time is monopolized by relentless reports of alien groups making their way through the area. The entries from Bisbee police logs speak for themselves, these a sampling from Friday, May 7:
9:05 a.m.: "[Caller] advised UDAs [undocumented aliens] on foot, west [of] high school on dirt road. At least 10 in area. U.S. border patrol advised of same. 38 UDAs turned over to U.S. border patrol."
4:31 p.m.: "[Officer] located three UDAs walking on Arizona and Congdon. All three turned over to USBP [U.S. border patrol] Naco."
4:32 p.m.: "[Officer] copied a report of a silver-in-color van loaded with approximately 30 UDAs left Warren. Later copied vehicle went disabled at mile post 345 on Highway 80. Thirty to 35 UDAs were located with vehicle. UDAs turned over to U.S. border patrol."
7:52 p.m.: "[Officer] located a group of UDAs in the area [of Blackknob and Minder streets]. Fifteen UDAs turned over to BP."
10:02 p.m.: "Reported a group of UDAs gathering on the bridge on Blackknob at Minder. Officers located six UDAs. TOT [turned over to] USBP."
On and on it goes. "Every day we deal with this," says Elkins. "People don't feel safe. The smugglers are dangerous people ... I find it hard to believe we can get 80 to 100 people in our neighborhoods. They come across in droves." Transporting them requires fleets of stolen cars, which explains why Arizona ranks No. 1 in cars stolen per capita, with 56,000 ripped off last year. "This is a lot of work for us. We're a small department," says Elkins, who has 15 officers. "So much of our time is spent on federal issues. We should be getting money for this [from the Federal Government]. But we don't."
The kinds of crime found in most communities are interwoven with the illegal-alien traffic on the border. "Our methamphetamine problem is alarming," Elkins tells TIME. "The last three homicides here were related to meth. Kids doing meth will take a load of UDAs to Tucson or Phoenix for a couple of hundred dollars."
Sheriff Dever says more than a quarter of his budget "is spent on illegal-immigration activities," and he points to the ripple effect through the criminal-justice system: "The illegal aliens can't make bond, so they spend more time in jail. They're indigent, so they get a public defender. If they have health problems, they have to be treated."
Dever feels overrun and doesn't mind who knows it. He relates a story about a recent visit by a television crew that arrived in his office and asked whether he was aware that a group of presumably illegal aliens was camped out in a drainage ditch next to the sheriff's headquarters. Sensing a story, the crew wondered if he was embarrassed by the aliens' presence. A plainspoken man, Dever said he was not the least bit embarrassed. Their presence, he said, illustrated quite pointedly just how pervasive the problem was.
The people who probably should be a little embarrassed are the folks up the road at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., home of the U.S. Army's top-secret Intelligence Center. The facility, which trains and equips military-intelligence professionals assigned around the world, also happens to be a thoroughfare for illegal aliens and drug smugglers, with mountains on the base providing a safe haven.
Using some of the same routes as the people smugglers, the drug runners are well armed, equipped with high-tech surveillance equipment and don't hesitate to use their weapons. That's what happened earlier this year, when law-enforcement officers and Mexican drug runners engaged in a fire fight at the border in front of a detachment of Marines just back from Iraq, who were installing a steel fence to prevent illegal aliens from driving through the flimsy barbed wire. The Marines, unarmed, watched placidly. None were injured.
The situation across southern Arizona has spun so far out of control that many on the border believe a day of reckoning is fast approaching, when an incident—an accidental shooting, multiple auto fatalities, a confrontation between drug and people smugglers—will touch off a higher level of violence. And the nightmare scenario: some resident frustrated by the Federal Government's refusal to halt the onslaught will begin shooting the border crossers on his or her property. As a rancher summed up the situation: "If the law can't protect you, what do you do?" Everyone, it seems, is armed, including nurses at the local hospital, who carry sidearms on their way to work out of fear for their safety.
How Corporate America Thrives on Illegals
Popular belief has it that illegals are crossing the border in search of work. In fact, many have their jobs lined up before they leave Mexico. That's because corporate managers go so far as to place orders with smugglers for a specific number of able bodies to be delivered. For corporate America, employing illegal aliens at wages so low few citizens could afford to take the jobs is great for profits and stockholders. That's why the payrolls of so many businesses—meat-packers, poultry processors, landscape firms, construction companies, office-cleaning firms and corner convenience stores, among others—are jammed with illegals. And companies are rarely, if ever, punished for it.
A single statistic attests to this. In 2002 the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) issued orders levying fines on only 13 employers for hiring illegal aliens, a minuscule portion of the thousands of offenders. Nonenforcement of employer sanctions, which is in keeping with the Federal Government's nonenforcement of immigration laws across the board, has been the equivalent of hanging out a HELP WANTED sign for illegals. Says Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonpartisan think tank on immigration issues: "They're telling people, 'If you can run that border, we have a job for you. You can get a driver's license. You can get a job. You'll be able to send money home.' And in that context, you'd be stupid not to try. We say, 'If you run the gauntlet, you're in.' That's the incentive they've created."
For nearly 20 years, it has been a crime to hire illegal aliens. Amid an earlier surge in illegal immigration, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which provided that employers could be fined up to $ 10,000 for every illegal alien they hired, and repeat offenders could be sent to jail. The act was a response to the widespread belief that employer sanctions were the only way to stem the tide. "We need employer sanctions to reduce the attraction of jobs in the U.S.," an INS spokesman declared as Congress debated the bill. When President Ronald Reagan signed it, he called the sanctions the "keystone" of the law. "It will remove the incentive for illegal immigration by eliminating the job opportunities which draw illegal aliens here," he said. Making it a crime for a company to hire an illegal was seen as such a dramatic step at the time that many worried over the consequences. Phil Gramm, then a Republican Senator from Texas, said the legislation "holds out great peril, peril that employers dealing in good faith could be subject to criminal penalties and in fact go to jail for making a mistake in hiring an illegal alien."
But companies had little to fear. Neither Reagan nor subsequent Presidents or Congresses were eager to enforce the law. The fate of just one provision in the 1986 act is revealing. As part of the enforcement effort, the law called for a pilot program to establish a telephone-verification system that employers could use when hiring workers. It would allow employers to tap into a national data bank to determine the legal status of a job applicant. Only those who had legitimate documentation would be approved. With such a system, employers could no longer use the excuse that they had no way to verify a potential worker's legal status.
To this day—18 years after passage of the immigration-reform bill—a nationwide telephone-verification system has yet to be implemented. A small-scale verification project was established in 1992, but it covered only nine employers in five states. In 1996, Congress enacted yet another immigration-reform bill, and it too provided for a telephone-verification program. Called Basic Pilot, it promised to provide employers with an easy way to verify a prospective employee's status. An employer who signed up for the system could call an 800 number and provide the name, Social Security number or the alien ID number of a new hire. The employer would receive either a confirmation that the number and name were valid or an indication that called for further checking.
The system is fatally flawed. Basic Pilot is voluntary. Employers aren't required to sign up. Imagine what compliance with tax laws would be if filing a 1040 were optional.
For all the rhetoric about the perils of illegal immigration, Congress shows no interest in cracking down on employers. When the INS attempted in the past to enforce the law, lawmakers slapped down the agency. In 1998 the INS launched Operation Vanguard, a bold attempt to catch illegals in Nebraska's meat-packing industry. Rather than raid individual plants to round up undocumented workers, as it had done for years, the INS aimed Operation Vanguard at the heart of illicit hiring practices. The agency subpoenaed the employment records of packing houses, then sought to match employee numbers with other data like Social Security numbers.
The INS subpoenaed some 24,000 hiring records and identified 4,700 people with discrepancies at 40 processing plants. It then called for further documentation to verify the workers' status. Nebraska was seen as just the first step. Plans were in the works to launch similar probes in other states where large numbers of illegals were known to be employed in the meat-packing industry. But the INS never got the chance. A huge outcry in Nebraska from meat-packers, Hispanic groups, farmers, community organizations, local politicians and the state's congressional delegation forced the INS to back off.
Not surprisingly, the INS's employer-sanctions program has all but disappeared. Investigations targeting employers of illegal aliens dropped more than 70%, from 7,053 in 1992 to 2,061 in 2002. Arrests on job sites declined from 8,027 in 1992 to 451 in 2002. Perhaps the most dramatic decline: the final orders levying fines for immigration-law violations plunged 99%, from 1,063 in 1992 to 13 in 2002.
As might be expected, employers got the message, albeit one quite different from that spelled out in the 1986 and '96 legislation. Now many corporate managers feel emboldened to place orders for workers while the prospective employees are still in Mexico, then assist them in obtaining phony documentation and transport them hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles from the interior of Mexico to a production line in an American factory.
This notion was supported by evidence introduced during an alien-smuggling trial in 2003 involving Tyson Foods Inc., which describes itself as "the world's largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef and pork." In this secretly recorded conversation, a federal undercover agent posed as an alien smuggler who was taking an order from the manager of a chicken-processing plant in Monroe, N.C.:
FEDERAL AGENT: [After explaining that he was a friend of a mutual friend] He said you wanted to talk to me?
CHICKEN-PLANT MANAGER: Yeah, about help ... Now I'm going to need quite a few ... Starting on the 29th, a Monday, we are going to start. How many can I get, and how often can you do it?
FEDERAL AGENT: Well, it's not a problem. I think [the mutual friend] told me that you wanted 10?
CHICKEN-PLANT MANAGER: Well, 10 at a time. But over the period of the next three or four months—January, February, March, April, probably May, stuff like that—I'm going to replace somewhere between 300 and 400 people, maybe 500. I'm going to need a lot.
FEDERAL AGENT: ... I can give you what you need.
CHICKEN-PLANT MANAGER: Now let me ask you this. Do these people have a photo ID and a Social Security card?
FEDERAL AGENT: No ... these people come from Mexico. I pick them up at Del Rio. That's in Texas, after they cross the river, and then we take them over there, and they get their cards. [The mutual friend] gets them their cards, I guess.
CHICKEN-PLANT MANAGER: I need to talk to him about that.
FEDERAL AGENT: About the cards?
CHICKEN-PLANT MANAGER: Yes, some of them that's got the INS card, and if they put it in a computer ... if it's not any good ... Something happens, and we have to lay them off. But if they just have got a regular photo ID from anywhere and a Social Security card, then we don't have to do that.
Securing phony paperwork was part of the scheme, and corporate plant managers often knew in detail how the illegals got their papers. This was apparent in the following exchange between the undercover federal agent arranging for illegals and the manager of a Tyson facility in Glen Allen, Va. The manager is talking about a go-between named Amador who had delivered workers in the past.
TYSON MANAGER: When I went to Tyson and I met Amador, we had very few Spanish-speaking people. With Amador's help, in a couple of years, we went from very few to 80%.
FEDERAL AGENT: My job ... is to get the people in Mexico to come to the border. When they cross the river, I pick them up, and then I take them to Amador. And he says he can get them, you know, their cards—their IDs and their Social Security cards, and they can go to work that way.
TYSON MANAGER: Excellent. That's what we're needing.
Two Tyson managers later pleaded guilty to conspiring to hire illegal aliens. Three other managers were acquitted of the charges, as was the Tyson Corp. itself. The company insisted that it did not know that illegals were being hired at some of its plants. A company spokesman said the charges were "absolutely false. In reality, the specific charges are limited to a few managers who were acting outside of company policy at five of our 57 poultry-processing plants."
One of the arguments that is regularly advanced to justify hiring illegal workers is that they are merely doing jobs American workers won't take. President Bush echoed the theme earlier this year when he proposed the immigration-law changes that would allow millions of illegals to live and work in the U.S.: "I put forth what I think is a very reasonable proposal, and a humane proposal, one that is not amnesty, but, in fact, recognizes that there are good, honorable, hardworking people here doing jobs Americans won't do."
While there is no doubt that many illegal aliens work long hours at dirty, dangerous jobs, evidence suggests that it is low wage rates, not the type of job, that American workers reject. That also surfaced in the Tyson case. The two Tyson managers who pleaded guilty contended that they had been forced to hire illegals because Tyson refused to pay wages that would let them attract American workers. One of those two managers was Truley Ponder, who worked at Tyson's processing plant in Shelbyville, Tenn. In documents filed as part of Ponder's guilty plea, the U.S. Attorney's office noted, "Ponder would have preferred for the plant to hire 'local people,' but this was not feasible in light of the low wages that Tyson paid, the low unemployment rate in the area from which the plant drew its work force, and the general undesirability of poultry processing work when there were numerous other employment opportunities for unskilled and low-skilled employees.
"Ponder made numerous requests for pay increases in Shelbyville above and beyond what the company routinely allowed, but Tyson's corporate management in Springdale rejected his requests for wage increases for production workers. This refusal to pay wages sufficient to enable Tyson to compete for legal laborers, plus the limited work force in the local area, dictated Ponder's need to bring workers in to meet Tyson's production demands." Needless to say, hiring illegals had benefits for Tyson. A government consultant estimated that the company saved millions of dollars in wages, benefits and other costs.
When asked whether the company has any illegals on its payroll today, a Tyson spokesman said, "We have a zero tolerance for the hiring of individuals who are not authorized to work in the U.S. Unfortunately, the reality for businesses across the country is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine just who has proper authorization. The tangle of laws and the increasing sophistication of those providing false documentation puts employers in a very tough position ... Given the scope of undocumented immigration to the U.S., we and countless other American businesses face a very difficult task in trying to figure out who is eligible to work."
The impact of the below-market wage earners tends to fall hardest on unskilled workers at the bottom of the wage pyramid. "Any sizable increase in the number of immigrants will inevitably lower wages for some American workers," says George Borjas, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Borjas calculates that all immigration, by increasing the labor supply from 1980 to 2000, "reduced the average annual earnings of native-born men by an estimated $ 1,700, or roughly 4%." Borjas says African Americans and native-born Hispanics pay the steepest price because they are more often in direct competition with immigrants for jobs.