http://wvgazJune 18, 2006
In new territory

Undeniable signs show immigrant population surging


By Joe Morris
Business Editor

NEWELL — By official government counts, West Virginia’s immigrant population is declining. But there are manifest signs that the number is actually growing as fast here, especially in the panhandles, as it is in the rest of the country.

“There’s been such an influx,” said Alicia Moreno, a social worker at the Telamon Corp. immigrant outreach agency in Martinsburg. “We’ve been so overwhelmed.”

The Eastern Panhandle’s apple orchards, poultry plants and construction boom have drawn waves of mainly Hispanic immigrants over the past three years or so.

“I saw it develop before my eyes,” said Moreno, 27, who grew up in Jefferson County, the daughter of Mexican immigrants. “I went away to college and I was in culture shock when I got back.”

Many of these new workers are fully documented, but many aren’t, she says. “They can find work standing on the corner ... and the two counties [Berkeley and Jefferson] will always have work, as far as I can see.”

According to a recent analysis of U.S. census data, only about 8,000 foreign-born people reside in West Virginia, about half as many as in 2000. The study, carried out by the Center for Immigration Studies policy research organization in Washington, D.C., ranked the state last in the nation in immigrants per capita.

But West Virginia’s decline contradicts the center’s survey of nationwide trends, which found that the country’s immigrant population surged by 7.9 million from 2000 to 2005, more than in any other five-year span in history.

The state tally also flies in the face of estimates compiled by state government officials and evidence from law enforcement officials and others such as Moreno in close contact with immigrants.

On any given day, there may be between 30,000 to 40,000 immigrants working illegally in West Virginia, said Karl Angel, a spokesman for the state Division of Labor.

Tracking immigrant populations is notoriously difficult, Angel acknowledged. The Labor Division’s estimate is based on its own inspections and on reports it gets from trade organizations, he said.

Amid such population surges, lawmakers in Congress have been debating immigration-control legislation. Two bills in the House and Senate would build walls along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico and stiffen the fines for employers hiring undocumented workers.

The main point of contention between the two measures involves treatment of illegal aliens already established in the United States. Where the House would make being in the country a felony, the Senate wants to let illegal immigrants who have lived here five years or longer remain in the country and apply for permanent status after paying fines and back taxes.

Whatever the eventual solution, it’s clear that immigration laws now on the books are not being enforced.

“With enough manpower, we could spend all day long doing nothing but” policing illegal immigration, Angel said. But little enforcement actually takes place, he admitted.

That’s the case with federal immigration officials, too.

Arresting illegal aliens has become a routine affair for Ohio County Sheriff Tom Burgoyne, he said, and part of the routine is standing by helplessly as federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers subsequently release them.

“There’s just not enough manpower to handle these cases,” Burgoyne said. “There’s not enough money to cover the problem.”

Since May 2005, Burgoyne’s deputies have arrested 76 people for being in the country illegally. “And we haven’t even been looking for them,” he said.

The arrests often occur as the result of routine traffic stops along a 14-mile stretch of Interstate 70, and typically the immigrants appear to be passing through West Virginia on their way to jobs in states such as New York and California, Burgoyne said.

‘Solely about cheap labor’

Employers that would hire undocumented workers may be just as likely to skirt safety violations and tax requirements, says Steve White, director of the state Affiliated Construction Trades Foundation, a Charleston-based construction labor umbrella group.

“Ordinarily these are very low wages and terrible conditions, with no benefits and long hours,” he said. The employers would have no problem finding qualified legal workers if they played by the rules, White argues.

“They’re not doing jobs that West Virginians won’t do,” he said. “There’s no job that Americans won’t do; they just won’t do them for $2 an hour.”

White said he has seen more and more apparently undocumented workers on construction sites over the past three or four years, particularly in cities such as Charleston, Huntington, Morgantown and Beckley, as well as the Eastern Panhandle.

“When I talk to people in the field, they say that on any day they can find one or two immigrant workers on construction sites,” he said.

White said he can point to any number of buildings around the state that were built in part by illegal workers.

Work on Charleston’s Embassy Suites hotel, for instance, came to a halt in 1996 when 11 workers were arrested for being in the country illegally.

“With the globalization of the economy comes people who want to take advantage of it,” he said. “We have nothing against workers trying to support their families — this is solely about cheap labor.”

Living in two worlds

Of course, employers are not the only ones who want to take advantage of globalization. The demand for cheap labor may be fueled by avaricious employers, but the supply tends to come from true exemplars of industry.

Reinaldo Martinez comes from Zacatecas, a small silver-mining town in central Mexico. His three children live there with his pregnant wife and his parents. But Martinez’s job is 1,800 miles away in West Virginia, grooming horses at Mountaineer Race Track and Gaming Resort in Newell.

Through the day he and about 30 other grooms clean the track’s horse stalls, prepare horses for the track and bathe them and walk them back to the stalls after the races. Eight to 10 of the grooms — who are employed by horse owners, not by Mountaineer — are immigrants, and most of them live in dormitory housing on the track grounds. They stick close to the track when they aren’t working.

Once a year, Martinez, 34, travels back to Mexico for three or four months to renew his visa, not to mention his family ties. That’s the way it has been for six years now, and that’s how it will be for the foreseeable future, he said.

“I feel happy down here,” said Martinez, who worked at the Thistledown track outside Cleveland before moving to Mountaineer. “People are so nice down here.” But he admits he misses his family and hopes to become a citizen and move his wife and kids here.

Like most of the immigrant grooms at Mountaineer, Martinez found his job through a countryman who had landed the same job before him. In Martinez’s case it was his younger brother who made the connection. They both had a way with horses, having grown up around them on a farm, and could never find work in Mexico at a comparable rate, he said.

In fact, Martinez said it would be hard to compare his pay as a groom to the pay he got in Mexico, because he worked mainly for his bean-farmer father.

But another Mexican groom at Mountaineer, Jose Garcia, said he earns four to five times what he made at home in Michoacan, south of Guadalajara.

“It’s much harder in Mexico,” said Garcia, also 34. “You don’t make that much money and you don’t have work all the time.”

Embracing the influx

Migrant farm workers on the Eastern Panhandle’s apple orchards usually earn about 30 cents per bushel, or around $5.15 per day, said Moreno, whose nonprofit organization provides a range of services, including housing assistance, aid through the National Farmworker Jobs Program and substance-abuse prevention to legal immigrants.

They often lead rather austere lives, too, quartered in migrant farm housing or in large groups in trailer parks, she said.

Last November, she and other social workers, along with representatives from area schools, churches and nonprofits, opened the Eastern Panhandle Hispanic Advocacy Coalition to help Hispanic immigrants find housing and work and do translations for them.

Right now it’s run by volunteers, drawing its funding from nonprofits, but organizers are trying to get it classified as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, making it eligible for tax breaks as a charitable organization.

The organization is already getting calls from employers looking for workers, she said.

“The work ethic with these folks is phenomenal,” Moreno said. “They do field or factory work for 12 hours a day, work that the majority of Americans are not going to do.”

Companies such as Mountaineer are even training their employees in Spanish so they can communicate with Hispanic workers. The classes have been held in both panhandles, through the West Virginia Workplace Education Program, a workplace training initiative organized by the state and housed at its Regional Education Service Agencies. Funding comes from proceeds from job-research services that the RESAs sell to businesses.

“More and more, Spanish is becoming a basic skill,” said Beverly Baccala, the regional coordinator for adult education and workforce development at Martinsburg’s RESA.

“The population, employment numbers and human resources managers are telling us that they need to be able to communicate with these workers,” she said.

The printing company Quebecor Inc., which has a plant east of Martinsburg, the temp agency Randstad Holding NV and Allstate Insurance Co. have all enrolled employees in Martinsburg classes.

Other companies that have asked to enroll in the classes come from the construction, health-care and tourism industries, said Robin Asbury, director of the West Virginia Workplace Education Program.

The classes demonstrate the Eastern Panhandle’s willingness to embrace its immigrant population, Moreno said.

“Jefferson and Berkeley are doing pretty well” adjusting, she said. “The community here has embraced it, and I’m very proud.”

But more and more undocumented workers could start to strain the system, she said.

“A lot of them are unauthorized to be here,” said Moreno. “They aren’t paying into the system.”

Moreno said she agrees with sentiment in Congress that there needs to be tougher containment at the borders. But requiring illegal workers who have been here for years to go back to their home countries to apply for papers is just not realistic, she said. “They’re here planting roots already.

“We are dealing with this now, but there’s more to come,” Moreno said. “Seven to eight years down the road, we’ll look like a town outside Baltimore or Washington.”

To contact staff writer Joe Morris, use e-mail or call 348-5179.


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