"No shortage of people"

[Migrant Health Promotion]

MHP Immigration News Service

November 19, 2011

This will be the last edition of Immigration News Service; a project of Migrant Health Promotion. We feel that with several similar newsletters available that we should no longer continue this service. To continue following Migrant Health Promotion, please "like" us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MigrantHealth.

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Table of Contents

1. Why Americans Won't Do Dirty Jobs. Elizabeth Dwoskin. Bloomberg Businessweek. November 10, 2011.
2. New US policy causes deportation confusion. Julia Preston. The New York Times. November 13, 2011.
3. Immigrant workers, farmers fearful in wake of Alabama immigration law. Kate Snow. Rock Center correspondent, MSNBC. November 14, 2011.
4. Virtual Campaign Launched to Shut Down U.S. Largest Immigration Detention Center (VIDEO). Hispanically Speaking News. November 16, 2011. 
5. U.S. makes case against Alabama's immigration law. CNN Wire Staff. November 16, 2011.
6. U.S. to Review Cases Seeking Deportations. Julia Preston. The New York Times. November 17, 2011.

1. Why Americans Won't Do Dirty Jobs. Elizabeth Dwoskin. Bloomberg Businessweek. November 10, 2011.

Excerpt: Skinning, gutting, and cutting up catfish is not easy or pleasant work. No one knows this better than Randy Rhodes, president of Harvest Select, which has a processing plant in impoverished Uniontown, Ala. For years, Rhodes has had trouble finding Americans willing to grab a knife and stand 10 or more hours a day in a cold, wet room for minimum wage and skimpy benefits.

Most of his employees are Guatemalan. Or they were, until Alabama enacted an immigration law in September that requires police to question people they suspect might be in the U.S. illegally and punish businesses that hire them. The law, known as HB56, is intended to scare off undocumented workers, and in that regard it’s been a success. It’s also driven away legal immigrants who feared being harassed.

Rhodes arrived at work on Sept. 29, the day the law went into effect, to discover many of his employees missing. Panicked, he drove an hour and a half north to Tuscaloosa, where many of the immigrants who worked for him lived. Rhodes, who doesn’t speak Spanish, struggled to get across how much he needed them. He urged his workers to come back. Only a handful did. “We couldn’t explain to them that some of the things they were scared of weren’t going to happen,” Rhodes says. “I wanted them to see that I was their friend, and that we were trying to do the right thing.”..

There’s no shortage of people he could give those jobs to. In Alabama, some 211,000 people are out of work. In rural Perry County, where Harvest Select is located, the unemployment rate is 18.2 percent, twice the national average. One of the big selling points of the immigration law was that it would free up jobs that Republican Governor Robert Bentley said immigrants had stolen from recession-battered Americans. Yet native Alabamians have not come running to fill these newly liberated positions. Many employers think the law is ludicrous and fought to stop it. Immigrants aren’t stealing anything from anyone, they say. Businesses turned to foreign labor only because they couldn’t find enough Americans to take the work they were offering..

It’s a common complaint in this part of Alabama. A few miles down the road, Chad Smith and a few other farmers sit on chairs outside J&J Farms, venting about their changed fortunes. Smith, 22, says his 85 acres of tomatoes are only partly picked because 30 of the 35 migrant workers who had been with him for years left when the law went into effect. The state’s efforts to help him and other farmers attract Americans are a joke, as far as he is concerned. “Oh, I tried to hire them,” Smith says. “I put a radio ad out—out of Birmingham. About 15 to 20 people showed up, and most of them quit. They couldn’t work fast enough to make the money they thought they could make, so they just quit.”

Joey Bearden, who owns a 30-acre farm nearby, waits for his turn to speak. “The governor stepped in and started this bill because he wants to put people back to work—they’re not coming!” says Bearden. “I’ve been farming 25 years, and I can count on my hand the number of Americans that stuck.”

2. New US policy causes deportation confusion. Julia Preston. The New York Times. November 13, 2011.

Excerpt: A new Obama administration policy to avoid deportations of illegal immigrants who are not criminals has been applied very unevenly across the country and has led to vast confusion both in immigrant communities and among agents charged with carrying it out.

Since June, when the policy was unveiled, frustrated lawyers and advocates have seen a steady march of deportations of immigrants with no criminal record and with extensive roots in the United States, who seemed to fit the administration’s profile of those who should be allowed to remain.

But at the same time, in other cases, immigrants on the brink of expulsion saw their deportations halted at the last minute, sometimes after public protests. In some instances, immigration prosecutors acted, with no prodding from advocates, to abandon deportations of immigrants with strong ties to this country whose only violation was their illegal status.

For President Obama, the political stakes in the new policy are high. White House officials have concluded that there is no chance before next year’s presidential election to pass the immigration overhaul that Mr. Obama supports, which would include paths to legal status for illegal immigrants. But immigration authorities have sustained a fast pace of deportations, removing nearly 400,000 foreigners in each of the last three years. With Latino communities taking the brunt of those deportations, Latino voters are increasingly disappointed with Mr. Obama. White House officials hope the new policy will ease some of the pressure on Latinos, by steering enforcement toward gang members and convicts and away from students, soldiers and families of American citizens.

3. Immigrant workers, farmers fearful in wake of Alabama immigration law. Kate Snow. Rock Center correspondent, MSNBC. November 14, 2011.

Excerpt: As we park and walk toward the fields, Danford talks about how many workers he needs to harvest all the cucumbers. Danford supplies a lot of the major pickle brand names you’d recognize. All those acres represent $20 million in retail pickle sales.

“Americans lose sight about how we get our pickles in a pickle jar in a grocery story. We forget that this is where it comes from,” Danford says as we walk down a long row of tidy green plants.

“People are not informed about what it takes to do these special crops. Now a lot of people aren’t interested. The lawmakers that passed this law, they didn't come out here and interview people. If they had done their homework, they would have realized,” he says..

Up in the state Capitol building, I sat down with Gov. Bentley. It was his first national television interview on this subject.

“I did think that if we signed this bill then we would certainly have to defend the bill. And that's what we're having to do,” he says.

Bentley says he doesn’t want to become the face of an anti-immigrant movement, but by signing this legislation he acknowledges that he put himself at the center of a national storm.

The U.S. Justice Department, under President Obama, has sued Alabama, arguing that enforcing immigration policy is the job of the federal government, not the states.

Bentley says Alabama is just enforcing laws that the federal government has not. But Alabama’s law has gone further in criminalizing certain acts.

“You're not supposed to be here without documentation. You're not supposed to be in the United States,” Bentley argues. “And so that's all we want to do is to make sure that the people that are here, that are working here, do so legally.”..

And that’s why farmers like Jerry Danford say the governor’s notion of “adjustment” will never work.

“The people that you could get locally, they wouldn't -- regardless of what you offered them, within reason -- they wouldn't put in the long hours. It'd take probably three (of them) to do what two of the immigrant workers do,” he says.

“They'd want to be on break all the time, going to the bathroom, going to get a drink, or, you know, something. They just don't have the initiative to work, just plain and simple,” Danford says.

He says he bases this opinion on decades of experience with local workers who show up for a day and then quit, if they apply at all.

4. Virtual Campaign Launched to Shut Down U.S. Largest Immigration Detention Center (VIDEO). Hispanically Speaking News. November 16, 2011. 

Excerpt: On November 18th, Brave New Foundation’s Cuéntame is partnering with a coalition of immigrant and civil rights organizations, in a vigil and occupation outside the Correction Corporation of America’s (CCA) immigration detention facility in Lumpkin, Georgia.

This facility is the largest private detention center in the nation and currently profits close to $50 million a year.

The demand: Shut down Stewart Detention Center now.

The demand for a shutdown is also based on allegation that CCA often cuts costs by denying basic services to detained immigrants and by limiting access to their family members.

CCA charges inmates close to $5 a minute to make a phone call. To pay for this, inmates work in the facility and earn a whopping $1 a day. Five days of hard work gives them just enough time for a one minute phone call say immigrant advocates..

5. U.S. makes case against Alabama's immigration law. CNN Wire Staff. November 16, 2011.

Excerpt: ATLANTA (CNN) -- Alabama's immigration law is unconstitutional and aims to threaten "the most basic human needs," the U.S. Department of Justice said in a court filing.

"The Constitution leaves no room for such a state immigration-enforcement scheme," the department said in a brief filed with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta Monday.

The impact of Alabama's immigration law is "clear and deliberate, designed in the language of the legislation's sponsor, to force aliens to 'deport themselves,'" the department's filing said.

Alabama's law cracking down on illegal immigration is considered the strictest in the nation. The U.S. Justice Department's lawsuit against Alabama over the measure is one of several battles in a nationwide skirmish between state federal officials over who controls immigration enforcement..

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, who signed the law in June, has said it would not have been needed "if the federal government would have done its jobs and enforced the laws dealing with this problem. However, they have failed to do that."

He added, "This law was never designed to hurt fellow human beings."

In its legal briefs to the appeals court, Alabama has noted a 145% rise in its Hispanic population now numbering around 185,000, or 4% of the population. Lawmakers promoting the legislation said it was motivated mainly to protect jobs of the state's citizens and legal residents.

6. U.S. to Review Cases Seeking Deportations. Julia Preston. The New York Times. November 17, 2011.

Excerpt: The Department of Homeland Security will begin a review on Thursday of all deportation cases before the immigration courts and start a nationwide training program for enforcement agents and prosecuting lawyers, with the goal of speeding deportations of convicted criminals and halting those of many illegal immigrants with no criminal record. The accelerated triage of the court docket — about 300,000 cases — is intended to allow severely overburdened immigration judges to focus on deporting foreigners who committed serious crimes or pose national security risks, Homeland Security officials said. Taken together, the review and the training, which will instruct immigration agents on closing deportations that fall outside the department’s priorities, are designed to bring sweeping changes to the immigration courts and to enforcement strategies of field agents nationwide..

In the first stage of the court docket review, which will begin on Thursday, immigration agency lawyers will examine all new cases just arriving in immigration courts nationwide, with an eye to closing cases that are low-priority according to the Morton memorandum, before they advance into the court system..

In a second stage, to begin Dec. 4, the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department will start six-week pilot projects in the immigration courts in Baltimore and Denver, in which teams of immigration agency lawyers will comb through the current dockets of those courts. They will focus on cases of immigrants who have been arrested for deportation, but who are not being held in detention while their cases proceed.