Thread: Migrants, industry hope for a reprieve

maryland news
Migrants, industry hope for a reprieve
By Chris Guy
Sun reporter
Originally published July 9, 2007
HOOPERS ISLAND // Ignacia Lopez has high hopes for her seventh season here on this tendril of marsh and sand along the Chesapeake Bay.

Lopez is focused on the fluffy steamed white meat she will pick from crabs for A.E. Phillips & Son. She calculates that she will earn $10,000 to $15,000 if things go well - 10 times more than she'd make at any job in her dry, mountainous home of Hidalgo, Mexico.





"I can make as much in a day as I would in a week at home," says Lopez, 36, whose nimble fingers can earn her $70 for a day's work here. She sends most of the money home to her elderly parents. "We can live [on that] the rest of the year until I come back."

But it's not clear that she and 600 other Mexican crab pickers working on Maryland's Eastern Shore will be able to return to the United States next year.

Legislation to renew the temporary visa program that has allowed up to 66,000 seasonal workers to enter the U.S. each year, work for several months and then go home was defeated last month, along with the rest of the Bush administration's comprehensive immigration reform package. The workers - and the industries that depend on them - are hoping their supporters in Congress will once again find a way to renew the program even if the larger immigration bill has been shelved.

The visa program, known as H2B, was created in 1990. It has been a lifeline not just for the migrant workers but for seafood processors, landscapers and, in some states, hotel operators who say they otherwise cannot find workers to take low-paying jobs. Employers in seasonal industries are allowed to hire and rehire workers who enter the U.S. each year to work for them.

In Maryland, most of the seafood workers are veterans who have returned year after year and whose employers request them by name. Workers who choose not to return for work are often replaced by relatives who have waited for a job.

"When we hear something about visas, of course we worry," says 35-year-old Candida Resendiz, who left her children with her parents in Hidalgo. "I have to make money for my kids to study and finish high school. I'm just afraid I won't get my visa to come back and work."

Resendiz' children are 19, 15 and 4. She has made the journey from Hidalgo for 12 years with one thought - earning money to give them a better education. She says she misses them terribly, and holds out a glimmer of hope that 4-year-old Alona will be able to join her here sometime.

Tearful goodbyes have been plentiful, but Resendiz says they are not the worst of times. She reserves that for the days when crabs are scarce or the weather is bad and there is no work for the pickers. "The worst is being here and not working," Resendiz said. "If I'm here and not making money, I might as well be home."

She says her girls sometimes beg her to buy them clothes or toys, but it's too difficult to send packages back home. Besides, she's determined to use her money for their education.

After watching the big immigration bill go down, supporters of H2B say they will regroup, looking for a way to extend their program to permit 100,000 temporary workers a year and to allow any worker who has returned for three years and followed immigration rules to return to work regardless of the quota.

"A lot of people worked [on] an immigration overhaul that would have included us," said Jack Brooks, whose family owns the J.M. Clayton Co. in Cambridge, one of the state's largest crab processors. "The bill got whacked, and we're right back in limbo," he said.

"We have pickers through this year, but we're back to pushing for an extension of H2B again before our season gets going next spring. We have to get our workers, or we're out of business. We've been saying that for three years."

Brooks and other industry leaders have lobbied hard for a series of extensions, 11th-hour reprieves engineered by Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, the Maryland Democrat who in 2004 secured passage of a measure called the Save Our Small and Seasonal Businesses Act. Last fall, she added a one-year H2B extension to a Defense Department spending authorization.

"We're right back where we were a year ago," said Mikulski spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz. "The senator is looking for a permanent solution so that the seafood industry doesn't have to go through this every year."

Critics of H2B, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), say the seafood industry and other seasonal employers could attract plenty of American workers simply by paying better wages.

"We're not opposed to guest-worker programs, but only if there's a demonstrated need," said FAIR spokesman Jack Martin. "There shouldn't be jobs in America that Americans won't take."

But industry leaders, who say they've tried for years to recruit American workers for the grueling jobs in Maryland packing plants, insist that cheap crab meat from overseas seafood producers leaves them little choice but to hire low-wage, low-skilled workers from Mexico.

Ironically, the surge in the importation of cheap foreign crab has been championed by the Phillips company, one of the oldest names in the Maryland seafood business and the owner of the plant where Lopez and Resendiz work.

Mexican workers who toil in the company's Hoopers Island plant are unlikely to know about global markets and international trade. Even news about their visa program is spotty, garnered from Spanish-language television they get via satellite.

The workers live in well-maintained but cramped quarters on the second floor of the building that that general manager Jay Newcomb calls "the factory." Fourteen women, including Teresa Perez Perez, live in small apartments. They share a spacious kitchen and a view of the bay over the island's flat terrain.

Perez Perez, 40, who lives near Mexico City, says many of the women attend church on Saturday evening and go shopping once a week in Cambridge, where stores are well-stocked with ingredients for Mexican dishes.

Occasionally, some might travel to Ocean City, if they have a friend with a car. Mostly, she says, they watch television when not working. She says the high point of the week, other than payday, is the phone-card call she places every Saturday at 5 p.m. to her children - ages 18, 16, 10 and 7-year-old twins. Sometimes their conversations last two hours. Sometimes there are tears, she says.

Most of the women paid only vague attention to last month's congressional vote. But then, they are used to the year-to-year uncertainty that has clouded the program the past few seasons.

"I have my visa papers, I'm here. That's all I know," says Perez Perez. "Everything else will work out, I hope."

chris.guy@baltsun.com
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/ ... -headlines

That is the census around the illegal communities. They think that eventually they will get there way and be able to stay. At the same time there children are getting older and are getting more violent.
Today we had a male Hispanic who robbed a pawn shop and stole weapons. That is frightening. These children are becoming weapon packers. 95 percent of our young people do not carry weapons.
I want to keep it that way. I am not for gun control but weapons are getting into hands of people that are not here legally and really they don't exist.
We don't have names, we don't have fingerprints and there crimes were first comitted in Mexico.
I have yet to hear that an illegal convicted of crime in the United States had a rap sheet in Mexico. Chances are they did have a rap sheet but Mexico will never admit it.
Also Mexico does not believe in the death penalty. A Mexican kills someone here, runs back over the border for safety and when the coast is clear comes back again to do it again.
There are so many things wrong with this it is disgusting.