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Immigration helps fill jobs for many companies
Sunday, June 4, 2006

By HUGH R. MORLEY
STAFF WRITER


Six years ago, Ingersoll Rand suddenly needed 65 welders at its industrial drill manufacturing plant in Texas to meet a surge of orders.

Although the company has a welding school in Shippensburg, Pa., the two-year training period meant Ingersoll couldn't find skilled workers on short notice.

"We did a national search," said Elizabeth Dickson, the immigration adviser for Bermuda-based Ingersoll, which has headquarters in Montvale. "We were calling shipyards, recruiters."

The company found plenty of welders in Mexico, she said. But it couldn't get them U.S work visas and couldn't fill the orders in time, she said.

Ingersoll soon began to lobby the U.S. government to allow more foreigners to work here legally. The move was an early initiative in a push for immigration reform that in recent months has erupted into a national debate.

Immigrants and their supporters have been most visible in their push for reform, through public demonstrations, media campaigns and a nationwide one-day absence from work on May 1. Businesses have kept a low profile, preferring to let Washington, D.C.-based trade associations press their case.

But for Ingersoll and other companies, the debate is not just about the fate of illegal immigrants in the U.S.; it's about ensuring that America's businesses have enough workers to thrive and compete in a global economy.

Ingersoll wants to hire more foreign workers on all skill levels. Hoteliers, restaurateurs and landscapers say they need legal immigrants to remedy a chronic shortage of workers.

Manufacturers like Eugene Coppola, owner of Clifton-based toll-booth maker Meta-Lite Inc., say that immigrants are their best hope of competing against foreign competitors -- and even those in cheaper parts of the U.S. -- who pay a fraction of New Jersey wage levels.

Fate in the balance

Coppola said he tries to hire only legal workers, though he concedes that some of his 30 workers -- about 75 percent of whom are immigrants -- could have false papers.

He said few non-immigrants apply when he places newspaper advertisements seeking welders, machine operators and laborers, jobs that start at $10 to $12 an hour.

"Americans don't come here looking for jobs," he said. Without immigrants, he said, "me and a lot of others are in deep doo doo. ... It would be a severe burden to industry if you took out a percentage of the workforce."

Advocates for strict immigration policies say the country has plenty of workers. The problem, they say, is that wages are depressed by the presence of immigrants -- especially undocumented workers -- and that employers don't pay enough to attract legal workers.

Which view prevails will depend on talks under way between the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, which hold vastly different positions.

Legislation approved May 25 by the Senate would allow many undocumented immigrants to apply for residency, depending on how long they had been in the U.S.

The legislation also would create two new "guest worker" programs to allow more than 200,000 workers to come into the United States on temporary visas, and for 1.5 million immigrant farm laborers to seek residency. President Bush also supports a guest worker program.

The House opposes any effort to create guest worker programs or let undocumented workers become legal.

The House wants to enforce existing immigration laws. Last year, it passed legislation that made it a federal crime for an undocumented immigrant to be in the U.S., or for an employer to hire one.

Few businessmen are close enough to know the details of each proposal. But they know what they need to keep their business going.

Dickson said Ingersoll Rand's position is simple: The company needs employees with diverse cultural and intellectual backgrounds to help compete in the global economy.

She cited the example of an Indian-born finance executive, Amit Shah, who works for the company in Montvale.

Shah, a Drexel University MBA graduate, joined the company in 2000 and entered its leadership development program. Federal authorities granted him an H-1b visa under a guest worker program, which allows highly qualified foreign workers to work in the U.S for six years, after which they must leave.

When the visa expired, the company moved Shah to a job in Italy. That allowed him to return to the U.S. a year later on a permanent visa granted to employees who enter the country through an internal company transfer.

Dickson said Shah's high-level skills made all the bureaucratic shuffling worthwhile.

"This is a highly skilled worker ... a major contributor," she said. "If you are a global company, you don't want to just confine yourself to U.S. workers. We want to be able to hire the best and the brightest wherever they are around the world."

But Ingersoll Rand and other companies -- most prominently Microsoft -- say that's not possible because the U.S. government doesn't issue enough visas. In 2005, for example, federal authorities granted 65,000 visas but received more than 10 times as many applications.

Dickson said that although Ingersoll Rand has about 200 employees -- less than 1 percent of its workforce -- in the H-1b program, it wants the government to make more visas available.

"If we can't get the workers that we need in the United States, a company like Ingersoll Rand will go abroad," she said.

'Don't ask, don't tell'

Companies seeking less skilled workers often turn to those already on their doorstep: undocumented workers.

The Pew Hispanic Center, a Washington think tank, estimates that there are 7.2 million undocumented workers nationally. And where they work offers some insight into which industries would most benefit if undocumented workers could become legal.

The center estimates one in four of the nation's construction laborers, roofers and grounds, and maintenance workers is undocumented. One in five dishwashers, maids, cooks and parking lot attendants has no work papers, the center said. The center's estimate that New Jersey is home to 4 percent of the nation's undocumented population suggests that about 290,000 workers in the state are undocumented.

Most of them probably have fake work papers instead of no papers at all, said Muzaffar Chisshti, an immigration expert at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. That's because the law encourages a "don't ask, don't tell" policy: It requires an employer to check a worker's documents, but not determine their veracity.

"Employers want them to work. The workers want to work," he said. "If you checked their documents, you have discharged your responsibility under the law."

Michael Kukol, legislative chairperson for the New Jersey Landscaper Contractors Association, said his industry employs many undocumented workers.

"If you want to stop undocumented workers, go and stop any landscaping truck," said Kukol, adding that his company, Horizon Landscape of Wyckoff, hires only legal workers.

He and other landscapers said one reason undocumented workers are so prevalent in the industry is the difficulty of securing visas -- called H-2b visas -- that allow foreign workers into the United States to do seasonal jobs. In 2005, for instance, the guest worker program got more than 130,000 visa applications for the 66,000 visas available.

A laborious process

Kukol, 51, said he first applied to bring in workers under the program in 2004 because he couldn't find workers locally willing to trim lawns, lug construction materials and plant trees for $10 an hour.

"People here don't want to work," Kukol said. "When I was a kid, I pumped gas, cut lawns. Now everyone wants to get out of college and make $50,000 sitting behind a desk. That leaves our industry with no labor."

He spent $6,000 on the application and was denied. But this year, he got approval. In April, eight Mexicans -- hired through a Texas employment agency -- arrived at his door from Monterrey, ready to work until December.

The bureaucracy involved was extensive, said Kukol said. It cost him about $7,000 to apply for the visas.

He spent four months filling in paperwork and supplying federal labor officials with information about his business, creating an inch-thick wad of faxes.

He also had to show that no American would take the jobs, which the government said should pay $7.90 an hour. That entailed placing newspaper advertisements directing applicants to send a resume to an address in Trenton used by the state Labor Department.

There was no response, he said.

Kukol said the association is pushing for an expansion of the H-2b program, he said. Parsippany-based Cendant Hotel Group also is pushing for an expansion, because of what it sees as the "growing worker shortage."

But some businessmen worry that guest worker programs give too much power to the employer. Employees generally can't transfer to another job; they either work at the job they were hired for or leave the country.

Roger Berkley, owner of Weave Corp. -- a Hackensack-based textile company that uses documented immigrants at its Denver, Pa., plant -- said the country should legalize the undocumented workers already here.

He said temporary visa programs create "indentured servants -- because they have to do whatever you want, or you can fire them and they go home."

E-mail: morley@northjersey.com