Washington Monthly points to a year-old clip from Peter Laufer's Wetback Nation.
Very timely reading pertinent to the immigration debate. The book has been in print for a couple of years, but Laufer was ahead of the curve examining the "illegal immigrant railroad", functioning "guest worker" arrangements and looking closely at how America has come to depend heavily on a steady supply of mostly Mexican workers to keep labor-intensive segments of our economy working.
David Coffey lives in a revitalized Victorian home on a tree-lined main street in Bowling Green. Coffey, ever jolly, middle aged, and definitely white, is an agricultural sociologist at Western Kentucky University, and he's found plenty to study in his rural home state, where he's watched the Latino population grow at an astounding rate, nearly tripling between the 1990 and 2000 census. “They're working in tobacco, landscaping, horse farming, poultry processing, fruits and vegetables, and forestry,” he told me. “These are the people who roof our houses, mow our lawns, paint our houses, wash our dirty dishes in restaurants, and clean our dirty laundry in hotels.” Coffey estimates that only about 15 percent of the Latinos now living in Kentucky have legal immigration status.“They come across in trucks,” Coffey says he's learned, “usually in eighteen wheelers. They have fish or fruit or ice or something, and the people are in the middle. We're talking forty to eighty people in a truck.” Once these trucks are well north of the border, the human freight is transferred to smaller vans that fan out across the country. A couple of years ago, worried about relationships getting testy between native Kentuckians and the newcomers, Coffey got a grant to teach English to the Mexicans and Spanish to the Americans, in the same classroom. This has only increased knowledge of how the illegal immigrant railroad works. Since then, he's come to understand the patterns of immigration to this part of the world, how Hispanics (nearly all of them Mexicans) get here and why. “They usually drop them off at a truck stop in St. Louis or Memphis. They give them $60, and then they call for someone to pick them up. Family members. We have one I'm concerned about who should have been here Saturday, and he hasn't arrived yet. I don't know what happened. He may have been picked up. But eventually they get here, regardless of the law.”
Got a lot on your plate?
Okay, then. Get busy. Either read it carefully or give it a scan and move on.
But don't miss a couple of details...
Not all employers rely on illegals. Some of them, like Joe Elliott, struggle against all odds to play by the rules. Elliott is a fourth-generation Kentucky farmer with a spread in Owensboro, an hour-and-a-half's drive from Bowling Green....The Elliott farm is 90 acres of tobacco and 1,800 acres of corn and soybeans. Fifteen Mexicans work the place, all in the United States legally on H2A visas. “They're really very good,” Elliott says. For some of them it's a regular, if seasonal, job. Elliott has been hiring them and bringing them to Kentucky for several years....Under the federal government's H2A visa program for temporary workers (one of the programs President Bush wants to expand), Elliott's responsibilities include transportation and lodging for his workers. He hires a farm labor broker in Kentucky who works with contacts in Mexico to find workers, handles the logistics of bringing them to Kentucky, and satisfies the U.S. government rules and regulations. The broker arranges for visas and passports at a cost of a couple of hundred dollars for each laborer....H2A workers can only stay in the United States for nine months at a stretch. On the Elliott farm the goal is to finish the tobacco work by the Christmas holidays. “We work our butts off to make that happen, because we understand that any family man that ain't seen his family for four months, it's time for him to go see his family. That's just how it is. We pay their bus ticket all the way back to their house.” Elliott is required to buy a ticket only to the border. “They're not going back” Joe Elliott bought his farm in 1965.In those days he hired American hands. No longer. “They're not here to hire.” It's been several years since he's employed American laborers. “It's not all that bad [for American-born workers], because they got better jobs.......Employers such as Elliott who want to play by the rules have to get H2A or H2B visas for their Mexican workers—and the process for obtaining either one is forbiddingly complex. To obtain an H2A visa, a grower like Elliott must show that no U.S. citizen wants the work, then solicit workers in Mexico, usually through an intermediary who acts as a fixer. Once a deal is made, the worker goes to the American consulate and secures the visa. The grower must provide transport from the border to the job site and back, along with food and housing during the period of employment. The worker cannot change jobs and must return home when the crop is harvested. A tiny minority of Hispanics working in the United States do so with H2A visas, well under a hundred thousand among the millions. These complications mean most employers don't bother seeking the legal route that Joe Elliott has taken, and most workers don't wait for a legal job, but simply jump the border and join the underground economy.
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