Apr. 16, 2006 - 22:05 MDT

SEE IT RUN

In the business section of The Denver Post Sunday edition is an article that truly illuminates what our problem is and what exacerbates it. By Julie Watson and Olga R. Rodriguez of the Associated Press. In a note following the article it says, "Associated Press writer Julie WAtson reported this story from Mexico City and AP wroter Olga R. Rodriguez reported from Sasabe, Mexico. In full, italics and bolds mine :

JOBS WAITING FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

U.S. employers tap underground network to recruit workers

SASABE, MEXICO -- "When Pedro Lopez Vazquez crossed illegally into the Unite States recently, he was not heading north to look for a job. He already had one."

His future employer even paid $1.000 for a smugglerr to help Vazquez, 41, to make his way from the central Mexican city of Puebla to Aspen."

"We're going to Colorado to work in carpentry because we have a friend who was going give us a job," Vazquez said."

"Vazquez was interviewed on the Arizona border after being deported twice by the Border Patrol. He said he would keep trying until he got to Aspen."

"His story is not unusual. A GROWING NUMBER of U.S. EMPLOYERS AND MIGRANTS ARE TAPPING INTO AN UNDERGROUND EMPLOYMENT NETWORK THAT MATCHES ONE WITH THE OTHER, OFTEN BEFORE THE MIGRANTS LEAVE HOME."

"It continues to become clear who controls immigration: It's not governments but rather the market," said Jorge Santibanez, director of the Tijuana-based think tank Colegio de la Frontera Norte."

"As debate over immigration heats up in the United States, more and more U.S. companies who want cheap labor are turning to undocumented employees to recruit friends and relatives back home, and to smugglers to find job seekers."

Darcy Tromanhauser, of the nonprofit law project Nebraska Appleseed, said companies in need of workers rely on the networks to "pass along the information more effectively than billboards."

"It started more explicitly, where (meatpacking) companies used to have buses to transport people to come up, and they would advertise directly in Mexico," she said. "Now I think that happens more informally."

At the same time, it has become less risky for companies to reruit illegal migrants. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, U.S. prosecution of employers who hire such workers has dwindled to a trickle as the government puts its resources toward other forms of national security."

"The few cases that are prosecuted, however, highlight how lucrative a business recruiting undocumented workers has become. In one case, a single smuggler allegedly earned $900,000 over 15 months placing 6,000 migrants in jobs at Chinese restaurants across the upper Midwest."

" Shan Wei Yu, a 51-year-old Chinese-American, was sentenced in December to nine years in federal prison on charges involving the transportation of 40 of those migrants. Investigations involving the others continue."

"Rick Hilzendager, special agent for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Grand Forks, N.D., said Yu connected 6,000 migrants from Latin America with jobs in Chninese restaurants in Illinois, MIchigan, Northh Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin."

"Based in Yu's home in McKinney, Texas, the Great Texas Employment Agency placed ads in Chinese-language newspapers in the Chicago area offering cheap labor from Latin America, investigators said."

"Yu sent a recruiter with Spanish interpreters to find migrants in Dallas willing to be fry cooks and dishwashers, Hilzendager said. A team made up mostly of illegal Chinese immigrants rented cars and drove them up."

"Yu allegedly charged a $150 finder's fee for each migrant while the drivers earned $300 per worker. Restaurant owners deducted the $450 from workers first-month paychecks of $1,000."

"It was just so easy," Hilzendager said."

"The employees, housed in cramped apartments provided by employers, worked 14-hour days and had little outside contact. The case broke open in August 2004 after two Mexican migrants working at the buffet House in grand Forks fled poor conditions and were picked up along a highway by Border patrol agents."

"Two North Dakota restaurant owners were sentenced to four months each for harboring illegal immigrants."

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When I was younger, I had to prove my citizenship of this country by supplying my birth certificate to a prospective employer. What in the heck is wrong with that ? How dare employers do this despicable thing ? It is quite obvious that those at the helm here in our country are cutting away at the income of our citizens by hiring cheap labor. And it is the greed of corporations, companies and independent employers who refuse to pay a decent wage to citizens but want to pay starvations wages to employees while keeping their prices high.

No way in the world do I criticize people who are coming up here looking for work - - - - - that's life as it is lived. I remember during our depression folks migrated from one state to another, one city to another looking for work. That was citizens of our own country.

As I said before, this is a problem that started building before I was born in 1921 when locally illegal immigrants were brought up to Colorado to work in the beet fields and the sugar factory that processed those beets. If I remember history correctly the beet sugar industry also caused a tariff to be raised on cane sugar so that beet sugar was cheaper. As a kid I knew that cane sugar was sweeter and nicer.

Of course around the beet fields and sugar factory were many other farms that employed the illegals also.

So I say, don't felonize the immigrants, but slap a felony sentence on the employers -- as far as I am concerned they deserve it.

That article gives the idea of the machinery involved, working under our permissive government . . . . SEE IT RUN . . . . . . . . . .

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