Businesses need immigrant workers but extremists 'are stirring the pots of hatred'
By Tom Harvey
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 02/10/2008 07:06:28 AM MST

A little over a year after an immigration raid on the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Hyrum, businesses across a wide swath of Utah's economy find themselves in a political limbo.

On the one hand, they want a legal immigrant work force in order to prosper or even to survive. On the other, they have been steamrolled by an opposition that crushed the recent proposal in Congress to reform the nation's immigration laws.

The federal raids took out about 10 percent of Swift's work force in Utah and five other states in December 2006. If that were a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I moment for other Utah businesses, the reality is that the nation's wink-wink system of employing illegal workers has changed little since then.

Indeed, that was unscored Thursday when immigration agents raided Universal Industrial Sales, Inc., in Lindon, and detained 50 undocumented workers, charged the metal fabrication business with haboring illegal aliens and arrested its human resources manager.

In the Swift case, court records show that the company dutifully filled out required forms known as I-9s when hiring employees. The company also had used a federal program under development called Basic Pilot, which was meant to help identify the illegal use of Social Security numbers. Workers were required to present a Social Security card and another form of government-issued ID with a matching photo. Beyond that, Swift was legally required only to keep the information in its files.

Records show that undocumented Swift workers simply purchased SSNs and IDs on the street for about $800, which easily got them work.

JBS Swift & Co., the new name of the company bought by the Brazilian meatpacker JBS S.A. in July, turned down several requests for interviews.

But experts argue that a meatpacking company the size of Swift had to have known whether it hired workers without proper documents.
"It stretches credulity to state they had no idea they had these workers," said Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

For businesses such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, hospitality, meat processing and food services, hiring immigrants has become a matter of course. But with strenuous opposition to "amnesty" for the 12 million undocumented people already in the U.S. (an estimated 100,000 in Utah) stalling federal immigration reform or other reforms that might create a guest-worker program, Swift's labor problems are now widely shared by others.

"It's now much bigger than a meat-processing issue," said James Mintert, professor of agriculture economics at Kansas State University.

And if the Swift raids exposed the meatpacking industry's practice of hiring low-wage immigrants who used stolen or fake IDs to get jobs they could not have gotten legally, the aftermath also has raised plenty of questions about immigrant labor in Utah - and there appear to be few answers. Normally, business interests in Utah and nationally are politically powerful, but in the case of immigration-reform legislation they backed in Congress this year, they've found themselves overwhelmed. Utah's senators received perhaps 100 calls in opposition for every 10 in favor of the immigration-reform bill that failed to pass the Senate in June, said Clark Ivory, CEO of Ivory Homes, the state's largest home builder.

"The reason that immigration reform has failed is that extreme elements are stirring the pots of hatred. [They] are anti-Hispanic, very vocal and very vindictive with these politicians," Ivory said. "A moderate, thoughtful and quiet voice that comes from business is not heard over that extreme voice that comes from the far right wing."

The business community wants to abide by the law, and it wants the nation to control its borders, he said. But that community also wants reform that provides an adequate skilled and unskilled work force, which has been a constant challenge in recent years.

In the past two decades, Utah's economy has gone through changes that have created a greater need for more low-skilled workers than a native-born population could or would want to fill, said Pamela Perlich of the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Utah.

During that span, Utah saw a huge boom in commercial and residential construction - projects such as the LDS Church conference center, facilities for the 2002 Winter Olympics and the rebuilding of Interstate 15 and construction of TRAX light rail.

In addition, a demographic shift to a higher percentage of workers with four-year college degrees (10.2 percent in 1960, compared with 26.1 percent in 2000) meant more Utah-born workers landed higher-paying jobs.

"As more of our native-born population moves up the ladder, we still continue to have demand for people in tortilla factories or meatpacking plants or people to clean buildings or make beds in hotels," Perlich argues.

But there are plenty of people inside and outside the business world who don't buy that argument. Robert Wren, for one, thinks something more sinister is in play.

Wren is chairman of UFIRE, a Utah group advocating enforcement of the nation's existing immigration laws, and although he agrees that "business needs a work force," he argues that "what has happened is that having an illegal immigrant work force allows them to get a cheaper employee.

"They aren't willing to pay what the job should be paying to get an American to do it," he said. "And by hiring more and more illegal immigrants, we basically depress the wage rates in America."

Ivory and Perlich counter that it's not that simple and that there is no way to fill available jobs without resorting to immigrant labor. Economists, too, generally agree that the nation as a whole has benefitted from immigrant labor - but disagree on how much native-born, low-skilled workers who directly compete with immigrants have been hurt economically by the influx.

Regardless of who's right, Utah businesses have been lobbying Congress for reforms that would expand the number of visas available for workers, not only those in entry-level jobs but also those in highly skilled positions, such as the high-tech sector.

"Without effective immigration reform, there's going to be a huge shortage of labor for the construction industry," said Scott Parson, president of Staker & Parson Cos., a Salt Lake City sand and gravel, concrete and road construction company. He has been involved in the immigration question on behalf of the Salt Lake Chamber.

Ivory and others worry that with federal legislation stalled and a new presidential administration still a year away, the Utah Legislature might step into the void the way its counterparts have in a few other states, where laws against hiring illegal workers have been tightened and immigrants' use of public services has been restricted.
http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_8185716