http://www.bizjournal.com/content/article.php?id=249

Published May 8, 2006

The New Immigrants
By Don Simmons Jr.

Ann Carter understands people's frustration with the hidden school and health care costs attributed to legal and illegal immigrants. But the last time she took out a three-day advertisement looking for lawn care workers, only three American citizens bothered to apply, she says. They set up appointments. One of those never showed. And the one she hired never came to work.
"If it wasn't for my Hispanic workers, I wouldn't be able to stay in business," says Carter, who has operated Total Lawn Care in Blacksburg for 27 years.

For a decade or so, she was able to get by with local folks and students, but dealing with "hung- over kids got really frustrating after a while."

For the past six years, Carter has turned to the federal government's H2B guest worker program to fill about 10 positions a year. Many of her Mexican workers have been with her for several years, recruited by a Richmond firm that navigates all the red tape and guarantees the proper documentation. "I have one family-three brothers and their uncle-who have worked for me for six years," says Carter. "I love them like my brothers. They come to work. They show up 15 minutes early every day, six days a week.

Nobody is getting rich on what Carter pays. And that's part of the reason she has trouble finding local help. But the government sets her minimum pay rate of $6.88 an hour for the guest workers. She also helps them find apartments, which they share four or five to a room.

They get 10-month work visas and come across the border around March 1, staying through November or early December. Even though the pay seems meager to most people in these parts, it's about six times what her workers could earn back home in Mexico, says Carter.

Ethnic variety

While Congress debates immigration reform, the number of foreign workers continues to grow, even in the Blue Ridge Region of Virginia.

According to the 2000 census, Roanoke City and County had about 2,200 Hispanic citizens in the area with close to 70 ethnic groups, including everyone from Vietnamese to Lebanese to Ukrainians. And that doesn't include non-citizen immigrants and undocumented visitors. In Lynchburg, where just 1.3 percent of residents are Hispanic (it's 4.7 percent in Virginia), according to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are an equal number of Asians. Households speaking a language other than English in the Hill City account for 5.6 percent of households.

The Washington Post says there are about 175,000 undocumented foreign workers in Virginia, triple the number from just 10 years ago. Virginia's foreign-born population is about 680,000, or a little over nine percent of the population of the state.

In Pulaski County, the census recorded almost 200 Hispanics, or 2 percent of the town's 9,473 people. In Galax, where there is a Spanish-language radio station and newspaper, Hispanics represent 11 percent of the population, according to census figures. Most employers and officials throughout the region say those numbers have increased in the last six years, though Lynchburg has not seen the same kind of increases in Hispanic immigrants that the Roanoke and New River valleys have.

"I have a theory that it's partly because we're not on a major Interstate [highway] and most of our economy is based on highly regulated, high-skilled manufacturing like food processing and pharmaceuticals," says Lee Cobb, executive director of Virginia's Region 2000 Economic Development Council. "We have some immigrants in the agricultural and construction areas, but the numbers just aren't the same as in Roanoke or the New River Valley."

Cobb says that in the past the tobacco industry hired a number of migrant workers, but since that sector has been shrinking in recent years, the immigrant workforce has shrunk with it. "New immigrants tend to gravitate toward lower-skilled trades at first and that's just not a big part of [Region 2000's] economy now," he says. The guest workers don't just populate the bottom rungs of the workforce, though: many are Ph.D.'s and work in the higher levels of some of the region's most stable and largest companies. They are academics at the region's colleges and universities and high-tech workers with specific skills. They come with foreign-owned companies to the region or are recruited by American-owned companies for their specific knowledge.

Barbara Smith, regional director of the Refugee and Immigration Service of the Catholic Diocese of Richmond, says the number of Hispanics in the Roanoke and New River Valleys is probably closer to 6,000. She estimated a third of those are probably undocumented.

Congress seems to have formed two basic approaches to dealing with the prickly issue of illegal immigrants: call them felons, round them up and send them back; or offer those who have been here for years a chance to pay back taxes, fines and begin the slow 11-year process of gaining legal status while continuing to work at rates most Americans simply won't accept.

"We seem to want it both ways," says Smith. "We want gardeners and maids who will work for $5 or $6 an hour, but we complain that they're coming here illegally. We need legislation that's sensible to both sides. Most of these people would love to be legal."

Fake ID

And contrary to popular belief, most of the visiting workers pay taxes. It's just that the system of fake or duplicated Social Security numbers means that millions of tax dollars end up in a big undeclared pool. "If you can get a picture ID and a fake Social Security number you can go to work," says Smith. Most employers check for those two things and don't find out for months or years later that the numbers were fake and their workers illegal."

The Virginia Employment Commission has a more fool-proof system directly connected to the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service, says Roanoke's Virginia Employment Commission Manager Bruce Johannessen, who also uses local translators and agricultural agents to assist with and find employment for migrant or immigrant workers.

"Oh, we sometimes get people who aren't legal, but we can't help them," Johannessen says. "We're definitely seeing a lot more Hispanic people using our services. I think around 25 percent of the recently laid-off Gwaltney workers were Hispanic.

"Immigrants are willing to work hard and learn," he says. "And with a 3.1 percent unemployment rate in the Roanoke metropolitan area, the labor market is tight. Nobody around here is paying $5.15 an hour [the federal minimum wage]. Most are paying at least $7 to $8 and the living wage is really about $10.50 an hour. It's hard to find workers."

Sixth District Republican Congressman Bob Goodlatte, a former immigration lawyer, says he realizes the labor market is tight, but insists that anyone working in the United States must be here legally.

"Some sectors simply can't find Americans to do the work at the prevailing wage," says Goodlatte. "But if you don't have to go back, go through the consulate and come in legally, it says you can flaunt the law. The solution is a system where employers can swipe a tamper-proof ID card. I don't object to having guest workers, but it has to be done legally."

Lynchburg Delegate Kathy Byron, a Republican, was recently quoted in The Washington Post as saying, "They are coming into the country illegally. They are being hired illegally . . . Why are we allowing all this illegal activity to take place, as lawmakers?" Winchester Republican Russell Potts took issue with Byron (again, according to The Post): "I haven't had one call from any constituent [about immigrants] being a problem. Where are these so-called victims?"

Tough words

To the 200 or more farm owners in Wythe Morris' four-county Virginia Cooperative Extension Service territory, the words of Goodlatte and other tough-reform congressmen remain unsettling.

"They're scared to death about the debate and worried they could put crops in this spring and may not be able to find the help to harvest in the fall," says Morris, who taught agriculture and horticulture for 26 years in Pulaski and Wythe counties before joining the Extension Service two years ago.

He says 75 to 100 percent of the planters and pickers in Carroll, Wythe, Smyth and Grayson counties are Hispanic migrant workers who work in teams of five to 12 men for two or three days per farm, moving with the growing season. They get about $8 an hour on average through the INS H2A agricultural guest worker program, says Morris. The rates are negotiable though, if the farmer provides living quarters during the brief work period.

"We've now got about 1,200 acres of pumpkins in Carroll and Grayson counties and when they have to be picked, they have to be picked quick," says Morris. "These workers are good people trying to make a living and their work ethic is second to none. Did you know it takes 69,000 sets per acre to plant sweet onions and it all has to be done by hand over a couple of days? We're just not producing the workforce to do it anymore. The fact is it takes all types: engineers, brain surgeons and laborers."

Band of Brothers

Archie Brooks, a supervisor for McNeil Roofing Co. in Roanoke, calls his group of 13 Hispanic workers his "band of brothers." They make up about a third of his work crew. "All the fuss seems to be focused toward Mexicans or Hispanics, but they're the ones that come here and bust their butts every day," says Brooks. "I can't say enough good about my guys, and in my younger days I used to be pretty prejudiced. These days I try to judge people by what they do and say, not by their color."

Brooks says he and company owner John Williams decided a couple of years ago to start giving the Hispanics showing up at their door a chance, especially as the pool of local applicants began to thin out.

"I tell my skilled guys to give them a chance and teach them and they'll probably turn out to be the best workers they've ever had," says Brooks, whose company pays its immigrant workers between $9 and $13 an hour.

As for the immigration reform debate, Brooks says, "I don't agree with making the undocumented guys felons. As long as they're here working and they're not breaking laws while they're here, I think everybody deserves a chance to make a better life for themselves."

Brooks figures his family came to these shores before there were any immigration laws. "That Statue of Liberty stands for a lot of things to a lot of people," he says. "Most of these workers are simply trying to make a better life for themselves and their families. I love them."

Quality first

Sam Lionberger Jr., whose family has operated its Roanoke construction management company since 1923, doesn't hire many immigrants, but his subcontractors do. "The average age of skilled craftsmen is around 45 years old now," he says, acknowledging the dwindling supply of new, young construction workers. "I'm interested in the quality of the work, not the color of the worker. It's supply and demand. I even have some of my supervisors taking basic Spanish at Virginia Western [Community College]."

Phil Sparks, executive director of the Roanoke Valley Economic Development Partnership, says Hispanics have surpassed most other immigrants in raw numbers, though there is no firm data for the region. "We've got an incredibly diverse community here and you find immigrants in every sector, from hospital workers to fruit pickers to engineers to construction," Sparks says. "Their impact on the region's economy can be seen everywhere you look."

(Don Simmons Jr. is a Pulaski-based freelance writer.)