http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepubli ... P03a1.html

State farmers lose workers, profits to border sweeps


Susan Carroll
Republic Tucson Bureau
Nov. 3, 2005 12:00 AM

PEARCE - Ed Curry stood in his chile fields on a Saturday morning in October, his crop three weeks behind schedule for harvest. He had a crew of 40 workers in the field to the south, filling bucket after bucket with ripe red chiles.

In front of him, Curry had two U.S. Border Patrol agents, young guys, who had tracked footprints onto his farm and came up on five of his workers at the edge of the field. The agents were getting ready to take them away, back to Mexico.

Curry, a silver-haired, third-generation farmer, was in a tough spot, and he knew it.

Like scores of farmers and growers across the country, and particularly along the Southwestern border, he is confronting the worst worker shortage in recent memory. With the winter vegetable harvest less than a month away, industry leaders are warning of potential losses of millions of dollars in Arizona alone and are desperate to strike an accord with immigration officials to get workers into their fields and the produce into markets.

Almost all Curry's workers are undocumented, using fake papers. For a guy who has served on the local School Board for 22 years and has raised six children on this land, Curry hates feeling like a lawbreaker, a common criminal, for hiring illegal workers. But, he said, it's not like he had much choice; no legal workers want the work.

"Man, guys, do you have to take them?" he asked the agents.


Land once full of workers


The Curry farm sits about 40 miles north of the U.S.-Mexican border in the middle of Sulphur Springs Valley, a swath of rolling ranch and farm land that doubles as a popular illegal immigration corridor in southeastern Arizona. From the border town of Agua Prieta, Sonora, a steady stream of undocumented immigrants picks its way north through rolling fields of alfalfa, cotton and corn.

For decades, Curry, 49, didn't have to look far for workers. They would just appear during harvest season, showing up one morning at the barn, or find the foreman out in the fields.

That has changed since the late 1990s, when fewer than 10 Border Patrol agents patrolled the valley. Now, the Willcox Border Patrol station has 120 agents to police the border and ranch lands from the state line with New Mexico out west to the San Pedro River, spanning hundreds of square miles including the Dragoon Mountains.

In the middle of his 33rd chile harvest, Curry is hurting. He blames the Border Patrol, saying it used to have a sort of unspoken, gentleman's agreement to allow workers to stay through the harvest. He estimates he has lost about $100,000 so far this year because he can't keep enough hands in the fields because of crackdowns. About 60 to 70 workers are doing a job that traditionally takes at least 120.

The longer the crop sits in the field, as the temperature drops and the chiles frost and dry out, the more money he loses.

There are similar stories about worker shortages throughout this valley: overripe apples falling to the ground in orchards north of Willcox, pumpkins softening in the fields in Cochise Stronghold, a dairy farmer so desperate for workers he applied to import three legally from South Africa.

For Arizona growers, the worst is yet to come. Yuma, in the western corner of the state, grows 90 percent of the winter vegetables sold in the United States from November to March. Growers there lost millions of dollars because of the shortage last year, according to the Western Growers Association, and formally asked the Border Patrol to call off enforcement efforts pinching farmers.

The association says consumers could see some vegetable price increases in the long term if the shortage continues, but it's too soon to say whether there will be any changes in the near future.

This year, the growers association is warning that the shortage likely will be worse. The organization, and others across the country, is lobbying Congress for some sort of emergency guest-worker program to get through the winter.

But the problems are not confined to Arizona. Peach farmers from Oregon are complaining. So are grape growers in California's verdant San Joaquin Valley. The problem, many growers say, is competition with other industries, such as the booming construction business.

"My thought is, 'Somehow, let's stop playing this dumb game, with fake cards they have to get here to stay and work,' " Curry said, " 'And let's get a legalized guest-worker program and be real about it.' I'm tired of being a common criminal to harvest my seed crop."


Unspoken agreement


Paul Bales, a veteran Border Patrol agent who works the Sulphur Springs Valley, has a hard time deciding what to make of Curry. He has no recollection of any sort of agreement to let undocumented workers stay through the harvest, at least not in the past decade or so.

To Bales, who joined the patrol 17 years ago, Curry's complaints to agents about the worker shortage are just a sign that he is doing his job well.

"That's like someone stopping into a butcher shop and saying, 'Your meat is too fresh,' " he said.

It's not that he doesn't understand Curry's predicament, Bales said. Bales runs 60 head of cattle and raises chickens in the same valley, on a ranch homesteaded three generations back by his wife's family. He could use some help on the ranch, he said, but he wouldn't hire anyone illegal. He'd rather mend the fences and feed the cows himself, he said.

"We're not against (Curry), none of us," said Bales, 48, who has worked out of the Willcox station since 1997. "We hope he makes a good crop.

"I'm a farmer, too. But don't rely on illegal help, because the Border Patrol has a job to do, too."

They're not targeting Curry or any other farmer or rancher, he says. They don't go on private property without a reason, like a call from someone reporting suspected undocumented immigrants.

"Personally, I think he's making too big of stink, and I think he ought to just go ahead and hire legal people and pay a little bit more," he said.


Going the legal route


Hiring legal workers just isn't that easy, says Jesus "Jesse" Lopez, Curry's labor broker. Over the years, he and Curry have tried prison labor (the workers just stood in the fields until the guards took them home, they said) and the federal government's H2A program, which imports foreign agricultural guest workers.

A dairy farmer in the Sulphur Springs Valley, Sebastiao Faria, and his son, Nelson, tried the H2A program for the first time this year and imported three workers from South Africa. They have to pay an adjusted wage of about $7 an hour and provide housing and transportation, which actually works out to be relatively cheap, said Nelson Faria, 26.

But getting the visas took hours of paperwork, and he couldn't help but think that the whole situation just didn't make much sense, he said.

"If you've got to go through stuff like getting workers from South Africa, and going through all the paperwork and do all that, to those extremes, it gets really tough," Nelson said.

The reality is that hardly any growers or farmers in Arizona use the H2A program, widely criticized by businesses as bureaucratic and inefficient. In 2004, the U.S. Department of Labor certified the applications of 42 Arizona employers to import a total of 181 agricultural workers, far less than 1 percent of the state's estimated 56,000 seasonal farm workers. Congress has been trying for years to overhaul the program with a series of bills, but none has made it into law.

Curry said when he tried the H2A program in the past, he found that it has "too many snafus."

"The average Americans, they think we're out here getting rich because we're not paying these laborers hardly any money to harvest this crop, and that we could use legal workers, but we just don't," Curry said.

"That's bull crap. If they bring me legal workers, we'll use them, even if we have to pay a bit more, we'll use them. But they ain't here."

This year, at the beginning of the harvest, Lopez said he stopped at the unemployment office in Cochise County and filed paperwork with the Arizona Department of Economic Security, asking for 60 workers.

He hasn't had one worker referred so far, he said.


Losing the best workers


The mornings in the chile fields are cold and damp and start just after sunrise. The workers huddle around a fire at the edge of the field before the picking starts. By afternoon, the sun rises high and flares white across the valley. The clouds float high in the Arizona sky, like the unpicked cotton in the neighboring field to the west.

The workers spend their day bent over buckets. They are paid per load, up to $1 a bucket, with a base pay of $5.48 an hour, just above minimum wage, Lopez said. The best workers fill two buckets at a time and can make $80 to $100 a day when the chiles have to be de-stemmed, more expensive labor, Lopez said.

Lopez, 52, has some workers who have come to these fields since the late 1980s, many from two extended families in a small village in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. "They're just good people," Lopez said. "They don't steal. They don't drink. They don't smoke. They're here for one reason: to work."

This harvest season, he lost some of his best workers in Border Patrol sweeps, he said. About four weeks ago, agents came through the fields, Lopez said. He said he lost half of his workers. And that was before the young agents came to the fields that Saturday in late October.

This year, the quality of workers has also dropped, Lopez said. He has started sending recruiters out to the chile fields in New Mexico and El Paso, trying to get some extra hands, which becomes more difficult as the Christmas season approaches.

Jose Hernandez Hernandez, 45, who is undocumented, has worked for Lopez for three years. He works with his head down, his elbows moving like a pistons, filling two buckets at time. In a day, he typically makes about $60 to $70, he said.

Lopez said a picker like Hernandez is worth twice a typical worker. He shakes his head when he looks over the newer crew.

Angel Guillien Velasco, 18, from Chiapas, Mexico, wears yellow dish gloves out in the field to protect his hands.

Guillien crossed the border illegally with his cousin at the beginning of the harvest and made it through the border gantlet after three tries. The young man makes less than Hernandez because he works slower, taking home about $50 a day, and hopes to move on soon, away from the border.

"There is too much migra (Border Patrol) here," he said. "I want to get away, find (a job in) something better like construction, but I need to save some money first."


Trying to cope


For Curry, the frustration mounts daily. Out in the fields on that Saturday in October, he decided to level with the young agents.

"If you go check the crew, there's 40 guys there. Maybe five of them are legal, truly legal, you know?" he said. "They all got fake cards, but they're not legal, you know what I'm saying?"

The agents said they didn't have much choice; they had a call from someone reporting six undocumented migrants crossing through the farm. They ended up taking only the five workers they had found at the edge of the field. They were being nice, Curry said, but he questioned how long farmers along the border can go on like this.

"I tell you what really chaps me," Curry said, "is when your average city dweller . . . just rails on us and says why are you using them? You're just encouraging people to come up. Well, the truth is, they don't realize they are the direct beneficiary.

"Without them, their vegetables would cost way, way more, if they could even get them. The last thing we want to do as a country is have our food supplied by another country," he said.

"If they think $3 gas is bad, imagine $20 for a head of lettuce, or a $5 peach. We don't have the labor supply. Do you see what I'm saying?

"I'm tired of being looked down on because we use these people. There's nobody out here to do the work."