Thread: Bobby Chambers' place just after sunup.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4285575.html

Oct. 25, 2006, 1:08AM
Our Town — The Fields
Workers for all jobs — and all season

By KIM COBB
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

LOWLAND, TENN. — The air is thick and sweet at Bobby Chambers' place just after sunup.

His tangled farm land, fat with tomatoes and green beans by summer's end, winds around a hill overlooking the Nolichucky River. Ground fog brushes the edge of the main road with sticky fingers and burns off by mid-morning most days.

In this moist air, the Latino workers in his fields move through the rows methodically, snapping beans off the vines and thunking them into plastic buckets. The juice paints their hands and clothing a tell-tale green. Sweat bees circle their bent heads and shoulders.

The work is pretty much the same as it was in the 1970s, when Chambers' mom and dad hired some of the first Latino migrant workers in the area.

"I can remember the (neighboring) farmers got mad. But they started coming and stealing workers to cut tobacco," he said.

Thirty years later, the Latino workers who used to come and go with the seasons are now a fast-growing, permanent population in nearby Morristown.

You hear harsh words aimed at the Latinos, but Chambers thinks most people are really ticked off at the factories and other businesses that give the workers a reason to stay.

Nodding at workers stooped between rows of green beans as high as their waists, Chambers said it's common for them to work two jobs.

"They'll work here from 7 to 1, then go work 3 to 11 at U.S. Fence."

Neri Bartolon, 20, was working in Chambers' fields during his vacation from the fence company. He arrived in Morristown about a year ago from a shantytown outside Mexico City.

"They live better here," Bartolon said, grabbing fistfuls of beans. "They have better work. There's not a lot of crime."

He lives with three other men to keep expenses low. Bartolon's parents depend on the money he sends home every few weeks, but he plans to go back home in a year or two.

'Looking for white people'
Chambers said his vegetables would rot in the fields without immigrant workers.

Most Anglo people, he said, have raised their children to think it's degrading to do hard, manual labor.

The farmer twisted his mouth in a crooked, "dare-you-not-to-believe-me" kind of smile:

"I meant to run us an ad this year (that said) 'Looking for white people to pick beans.'

"White people, the local people, won't do it any more," Chambers said.

Well, maybe they would if the money was good enough, Bill Kidd countered.

The retired Immigration and Naturalization Service supervisor spent 15 years trying to enforce the law in Tennessee.

You can still hear the frustration in his voice when he talks about his staff's investigation of the Morristown chicken plant before it was purchased by Koch Foods.

"We put two agents in there. They bought (phony) documents from people the (plant) employment office told them to see, they arrested illegal aliens we'd arrested three times at the plant before — (but) the U.S. attorney's office found problems with the case."

Phony green cards and Social Security numbers are so common and easy to produce now, Kidd said, that many employers are being truthful when they say they don't know whether they are hiring illegal workers.

Hamblen County jailers usually call the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office if they suspect someone they have arrested on criminal charges may be an illegal immigrant, too. The "hands-off" policy of other communities doesn't fly here.

Public defender Ethel Law Rhodes meets with her immigrant clients on Thursdays for what county officials call Hispanic Court Day. A translator is available to help explain the proceedings to suspects who speak little or no English.

Rhodes warns her clients they may face deportation once their state case is resolved.

But if ICE has run out of leased jail space in Maryville, about 70 miles away, immigrants who were never deported may be released in the United States while awaiting a deportation hearing.

"I have to explain that the immigration charge is different from the state charge," Rhodes said. "Then I have to say, 'Even though they (ICE) tell you they're going to take you to Mexico, they may only take you as far as Maryville and set you out. So you better have enough money on you to make a phone call so someone can come pick you up.' "

In addition to being vexed by a shortage of detention space, the immigration agency has only eight agents covering Knoxville, Chattanooga and the rest of East Tennessee, a total area approaching 10,000 square miles.

Hostility from growers
Farmers, chambers of commerce and other employers show no interest in trying to stop illegal immigration, Kidd said.

He's still raw about the hostile reception he said he got several years ago after he spoke about immigration law to a nursery growers association.

"What they really wanted to do was tar and feather me," Kidd said. "They said, 'Do you realize it's a $12 million industry you're messing with?' "

But the federal government nabbed a big fish in July, obtaining indictments of the owner of a Morristown-based agency supplying temporary workers to factories and farms throughout the region on charges that he operated a "large-scale illegal-alien-employment and money-laundering scheme."

Prosecutors charged that Garcia Labor Co. Inc. knowingly hired about 1,000 illegal immigrants for an air cargo company in nearby Ohio and brought some of them from Mexico to take the jobs.

Max Garcia and two other company executives pleaded guilty this month, agreed to forfeit $12 million in company earnings and face up to 10 years in prison.

Now there is an obvious question: Did Garcia have a personnel pipeline running between Mexico and Morristown, too?

Loyal to mother and son
Standing next to one of his tomato greenhouses on a weekday morning, farmer Chambers, 43, answered the chirp of a cell phone tucked in his shirt pocket. It was Joaquin Lopez, his crew supervisor.

"How many did you get?" he asked.

Lopez's voice was a low rumble through the cell phone. Chambers grunted his approval, then said, "We need to pick those ugly tomatoes."

Chambers' mother helped Lopez fill out his successful application for immigration amnesty back in 1986, and his loyalty extends to her son:

"Bobby is a good man," Lopez said.

Lopez lives with his girlfriend in a trailer perched next to the hillside road leading to Chambers' farm. It's his land, he makes enough money to put his son through technical school and he's satisfied.

Looking past the roosters and assortment of rough-looking dogs that roam the place, Lopez sees nothing but green hills, trees and peace.

"I tell my son, this is my place," Lopez said. "He says, 'Me, too.' "

Chambers and Lopez know each other as only two men who work side by side for years can. The farmer said he's never knowingly hired an illegal worker.

But there are questions Chambers simply doesn't ask Lopez, like where his never-ending and frequently changing supply of workers comes from, much less whether they are in the United States legally.

"I don't know where or how he gets these people," Chambers said. "Evidently, he knows every Mexican in East Tennessee."

Someone should turn that son of a bitch in and have his land confiscated for 30 years of flouting the law! That's what is ruining this country---people like this ignorant NC curd! And he has the balls to say no "whites" will do the work! What a criminal----JAIL HIM, and take all of his property! Redistribute it to hardworking legal citizens!

The farmer said he's never knowingly hired an illegal worker.

But there are questions Chambers simply doesn't ask Lopez, like where his never-ending and frequently changing supply of workers comes from, much less whether they are in the United States legally.

"I don't know where or how he gets these people," Chambers said. "Evidently, he knows every Mexican in East Tennessee."

you will never know if you don't ask. that is an admission of guilt, he should be arrested pronto!

"They'll work here from 7 to 1, then go work 3 to 11 at U.S. Fence."

U.S. Fence needs an ICE visit.

Someone should call ICE and let them know about it. They are very effective once they know about the problem. Their policy is that they need someone to actually call and complain in order to do soemthing. I called them about the people cleaning my condo complex. Some of those people were teenagers who should be in school and not working. I guessed many of them were 16 and 17. It didn't take ICE long to pay them a visit. The vans that would drive them to work have no longer been here and only a few employees have been seen in the complex.