Worker issues dogging Smith Senate campaign

File photo of Sen. Gordon Smith
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Story Published: Oct 18, 2008 at 8:31 PM PDT
By Associated Press

WESTON, Ore. (AP) _ Who picks the peas and carrots have stayed up there with hot dogs, office furniture and golf clubs as issues in the tight U.S. Senate race between Republican incumbent Gordon Smith and his Democratic challenger, Oregon House Speaker Jeff Merkley.

Smith Frozen Foods provides about 10 percent of the nation's frozen peas, carrots and corn. It processes up to 1,300 tons of vegetables and hires up to 400 workers for two-week stints.

Many workers lie low. Their legality has been made an issue as Smith campaigns for a third term. No hard evidence has been produced of Smith knowingly hiring substantial numbers of undocumented workers, although opponents suggest otherwise and his firm doesn't use a verification system judged by the government to be highly accurate.

Oregonians have been shelled with ads over the worker issue, whether one candidate was better at eating hot dogs than explaining foreign policy, the propriety of paying north of $1 million for antique golf clubs and questions about new furniture for legislative offices.

"There is no company in Oregon under greater scrutiny," Smith says. "I'm proud of my company."

Smith says all his workers are documented. But the company does not use a federal electronic program called E-Verify.

Company officials question its accuracy although Smith voted three times in the Senate to fund the program.

Mike Lesko, who oversees hiring for Smith Foods, provided The Oregonian with a copy of a 2006 Social Security Administration Inspector General report that found E-Verify to have a 4 percent error rate. Department of Homeland Security officials give E-Verify a 99.5 percent accuracy rate.

The system is voluntary, and a bill requiring all Oregon companies to use it was derailed in the Legislature last year - ironically by Merkley.

Federal law doesn't require companies to keep copies of documents offered by workers or to check their authenticity, and high-quality bogus documents are easily obtained.

Smith Foods executives decide whether they are legitimate.

Wallace Huffman, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University, says research suggests that more than half of the nation's farming and related industries employ illegal immigrants and have since 1986, when Congress gave 2.7 million illegal workers citizenship amnesty while making it illegal to hire undocumented laborers.

The unintended consequence was a boom in a phony documents industry.

Two years ago, business groups joined President Bush and others in lobbying Congress to again grant amnesty to illegal immigrants in exchange for tightening borders and other sanctions.

But both parties in Congress resisted it, some Republicans because of proposed amnesty and labor Democrats who argued that it would depress wages.

"E-Verify takes all the worry out of verifying someone," says Sharon Rummery, spokeswoman for the nation's Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency under the Homeland Security Department. "If the person is not confirmed, they have the right to show us they are authorized to work." Verification takes a few seconds, she said.

Smith's campaign spokeswoman, Lindsay Gilbride, said Smith voted to fund the system but that it remains a "slowly improving program that someday may be a solution."

In Oregon, 646 businesses use E-Verify at 2,400 places of employment, federal records show.

"This program tells you who you are hiring. If you don't want to know who you are hiring, you don't use it," said Janice Kephart, director of national security studies at the Washington nonpartisan think tank Center for Immigration Studies.

Merkley has criticized Smith in the worker issue but helped kill a bill in the 2007 session that would have required Oregon companies to use E-Verify after Merkley's office pulled it out of committee, saying it had glitches but has since been improved.


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