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Mushroom industry fears it will lose workers
Local farms rely heavily on immigrant laborers
By ANDREW TANGEL
The News Journal

04/08/2006
KENNETT SQUARE, Pa. -- J. Guadalupe Mendiola, who works on a mushroom farm in southeastern Pennsylvania and lives in Elsmere, yearns for an immigration policy that would allow his wife and three children to relocate legally from Mexico.

Diana Rarig, human resources manager at Phillips Mushrooms in Kennett Square, hopes Congress passes immigration law that would give legal status to workers who have supplied vital labor for the area's agricultural industry.

And Colin Hanna, a former Chester County, Pa., commissioner, wants a border fence and tougher workplace enforcement to help stem illegal immigration. He also wants the United States to allow many undocumented workers to stay.

Southeastern Pennsylvania may be hundreds of miles from the Mexican border, but the national debates about reform and border security echo in southeastern Pennsylvania and Delaware, where many of the mushroom industry's immigrant workers live.

As Congress weighs possibly deporting immigrants, increasing criminal penalties for or giving amnesty to illegal immigrants, any policy it produces could have a profound affect on the lives of thousands of immigrants, local agriculture and the economies of local communities.

Mendiola, who entered the United States illegally in 1979 but earned citizenship in 2000, said the industry relies heavily on undocumented workers.

"If they send them back, the mushroom business is broken," he said.

Prospects for fundamental changes in immigration law in this election year dimmed Friday, when a compromise proposal allowing many immigrants to stay in the United States collapsed in the Senate. The Senate was heading in a different direction from the House, which had voted to make illegal residency a felony and to level hefty fines for employers with illegal immigrants.

Laura Phelps of the American Mushroom Institute, a trade association with offices in Washington and Avondale, Pa., said the House bill's provisions could have a "devastating" affect on the industry.

"The labor supply has gotten tighter with the increase in border security," Phelps said. "I have a feeling if the House bill passes and they put the enforcement behind the employer sanctions, then unfortunately they're going to be places that shut down because of a lack of labor."

Mushroom workers plan to join other immigrant laborers, including Sussex County poultry-farm workers, for a rally Monday in Philadelphia that is part of a 10-city effort called "A Day Without an Immigrant."

"People just feel really afraid," said Serafina Lombardi Youngdahl, a representative for the Kaolin Workers Union of Chester County mushroom farm workers who is helping organize demonstrators.

"Almost all these people have friends, family members, co-workers who are undocumented, so if they are in any way involved with them, they then become criminals," she said. "And what's even scarier to them is that the general public will just see all of them as criminals."

Maria Perez, whose husband came from Mexico to pick mushrooms, thinks Congress should help illegal immigrants who work hard for their families.

Perez, 36, a native of Moro, Mexico, came to Jennersville, Pa., about three years ago to live with her husband, four children and pit bull named Dollar.

Speaking through a translator, Perez said her husband works seven days a week, 6 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., though on Sundays he gets off early. He earns roughly $350 a week, she said.

Rocio Lopez Nunez, 24, said she wants the government to do what it can to help immigrants find opportunities in the United States. She suggested setting up a school to teach English so immigrants could earn legal status.

"The truth is, one is happy here in the United States because of the work," she said through a translator.

At Kaolin, workers generally earn relatively high wages for jobs no Americans seem to want, said Elaine Girod Marnell, the company's labor relations director.

Kaolin workers can earn about $9 to $17 an hour, plus benefits, for picking, packing and sorting mushrooms 40 to 50 hours a week, Marnell said. She said the company requires workers to provide proper documentation proving their legal work status.

Many immigrant workers come from agricultural backgrounds or have experience working with textiles, she said. There seems to be an American preference against manual labor.

"The United States has become more and more elitist as far as what jobs people want to do," she said.

If restrictive immigration policies squeezed the mushroom industry's labor force, Phelps, of the American Mushroom Institute, said, some companies might close or shift production to Mexico.

"You can grow mushrooms in Mexico just as easily as you can grow them here, and ship them here in a day," she said at a recent conference on immigrant health.

Larger farms, like Phillips and Kaolin, check workers' legal documentation, Rarig said, but smaller farms may not have the resources to do so.

Many workers at Kaolin, which employs about 750, mostly Mexican, employees, have undocumented family members who are stressed because they have to "live in the shadows," said Marnell.

Allowing legal status to families of documented workers "certainly promotes longevity with the company, stability with the company," she said.

Contact Andrew Tangel at 324-2888 or at atangel@delawareonline.com.