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Texas Agriculture Archive

April 21, 2006

By Bobby Horecka
Field Editor

Although himself a descendent of farm workers from the Crystal City area, Congressman Henry Bonilla (R-San Antonio) knows all too well the dilemmas facing law enforcement at the Texas-Mexico border.

Bonilla was one of several Congressional leaders to visit with the more than 180 Texas Farm Bureau members who recently traveled to Washington D.C. on the National Affairs Awards Trip.

The Texas border has long been a gateway for those south of the border seeking entry into the United States, but times have changed drastically over the last couple of decades, Bonilla said.

Although good, honest laborers still find their way across, more and more lawmen are dealing with illegal drug traffickers and what Border Patrol agents term OTMs—Other Than Mexicans.

OTMs raised much attention in post-9/11 America, when it was learned that several Middle Eastern personalities, including many with terrorist ties, were using the southern U.S. border weaknesses to gain entry into the country.

Sifting the good from the bad is indeed a quandary. But for farmers, ranchers and other employers whose operations depend on foreign laborers, determining which is which could feasibly prove criminal if you're wrong.

•••

Even as a dairyman, Don Smith remembers well a simpler time in his profession, especially when it came to finding labor.

The work was still nonstop—seven days a week and 365 days a year—but Smith and those like him at least had a few tools at their disposal.

Local school vocational programs, for instance, would offer up student work programs with the dairies, teaching kids valuable work lessons they could use later in life on their own operations or hiring into other larger dairies. And scarcely a summer went by where Smith said he didn't see kids rigging out whatever old pickup they could find to haul hay for the many farms in the area.

But it has been years since Smith has seen a group of kids drive up to his place offering their hay hauling services, and vocational programs in his area have all but dried up as district purse strings drew tighter to stay abreast of technology and other school programs.

Even among the dairies, times have changed.

When Smith and his father moved to Hopkins County back in the 1960s, Smith said there were around 700-800 dairies in operation. Today, Smith said, his home county holds just 135 dairies. "But we still milk as many or more cows as we did back then," he added.

Like many farming operations, the economy of size has prevailed—operations become larger to become more efficient.

Smith still runs a relatively small operation, milking less than 200 cows twice a day. But many dairymen in his county, including one right up the road from his farm, milk 10 times as many cows three times a day.

For smaller operations, Smith says most people rely on the labors of family members or get by with as few as one or two hired hands. Operations like his neighbors, however, require at least a dozen extra pairs of hands.

And that's where Smith says finding dependable and skilled labor for something as demanding as a dairy can be difficult.

Given the rigors of dairy life, Smith said he and most of his neighbors pay a good wage—up to $12 an hour—plus offer free housing, utilities and some medical care.

"If you get somebody good, you treat them well so they'll stay with you," he said. "It's like any other business."

But sometimes the cost of finding good help is the least of a farmer's worries.

•••

Hiring a person for most any job in Texas usually requires at least two forms of identification. Most of the time, a worker hands his boss his drivers license and Social Security card.

But did you know you could legally be hired with just a voter registration card and birth certificate?

Both are acceptable forms of identification, according to the list of acceptable work documents listed on the back of the Department of Homeland Security I-9 forms, as are a school ID card and for younger employees, even report cards and day-care records.

Smith says his role as an employer becomes more like that of a detective when it comes to determining what forms are legitimate.

"There's no number you can call or office you can contact to verify the documents are authentic," Smith said. "All you can really do is go with your gut."

Still, Smith said he's received that dreaded letter from the Social Security office on more than one occasion informing him the number he's reported doesn't match up to any of their records.

"The bad part is that there's nothing you can do about it at that point," he said. "By all technicality, you have an illegal working for you. But you can't fire them for it. According to the Social Security office, you'd be setting yourself up for a discrimination lawsuit if you tried."

A number of reasons may exist for someone's number not coming up good, Smith said, including as simple a thing as human error in transposing a number when it was reported or verified.

A mistake like that one could mean a fine of up to $5,000 a day for the employer who keeps an undocumented worker on staff, according to one version of the immigration reforms in Washington.

"What are you going to do?" Smith asked. "Those cows still have to be milked regardless of what the paperwork says. And if you have a good employee who tells you he'll get the problem taken care of, all you can really do is give them time."

•••

When the deGroot family opened their dairy up the road from Don Smith back in 1988, it was they—not the help—who were working in a foreign land.

They moved from Holland, selling their dairy operation there and crossing the Atlantic to seek the American dream.

Limited land availability prevented their existing farm back home from expanding, so they sought what was called an investment visa in the United States and decided to try their luck in Texas. As per the stipulations of the visa, the entire family worked the dairy, including their youngest son, then a high school student.

The investment paid off.

In addition to working a successful dairy operation, their son finished school and then went on to trade school to further his skills as a diesel mechanic. Just last year, the elder deGroots finished their naturalization process and became U.S. citizens. Their son, who has now obtained his green card, is also working on his citizenship and hopes to complete the process within the next five years.

A work visa program similar to the one that brought his neighbors to America is one Smith said could be a possibility for folks south of the border seeking employment in the states. Unfortunately, he added, the reality of it is that most could not afford such an option.

As a Texas Farm Bureau state director in the 1980s, Smith said he and a few colleagues traveled to Mexico on a fact-finding trip for the organization.

Smith recalled a farm just north of Mexico City, where hosts of laborers worked the fields of a broccoli farm, always in the shadows of the modern planting equipment the farmer kept parked nearby. Smith inquired about the machinery, only to learn its presence there was more for threat than farming.

Labor was so cheap—$5 a day in some cases—that it was actually more economical to do all of the work by hand, Smith said he was told. If someone complained about their wage, all the farmer had to do was fire up the tractor. The one piece of equipment could do the work of the entire field of workers, and they knew it. So they toiled for a pittance of a salary, just to put food on the table.

"Compare that to what they may earn in any number of jobs in the United States, and it's not surprising they choose to come here illegally," Smith said. "They have families to support, too, you know."

•••

Acknowledging there's a problem when it comes to verifying workers isn't difficult, said Congressman Mike Conaway (R-Midland), another U.S. representative who visited with Farm Bureau members during the National Affairs trip.

But finding a solution isn't simple, either.

One method Congress has looked into involves a national identification card—a photo ID that includes ready identification information an employer can look to determine if the papers offered by a certain person are indeed their's.

Of course, that, too, has its difficulties, Conaway said.

For one, the cost of establishing an all new identification card would be prohibitive. But more important, Conaway added, is that almost as surely as a new identification system were in put in place, the number of forgeries with the new system would rival those already seen in current identification methods.

Reworking visa programs is another option, he said. Thousands are literally given out by lottery each year, visas Conaway said would likely be put to better use within some sort of employer-sponsored work program for immigrants.

Congress has even looked into the possibility of retinal eye scan identification measures—a futuristic approach indeed, but one the common counterfeiter could not easily use to defraud employers.

All are being considered outside of the immigration policies themselves, Conaway said, more as fixes to the existing Immigration and Naturalization Service. Social Security Administration has even batted around the idea of call-in verification of numbers.

But such changes could come too little, too late, Smith said.

In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. Border Patrol agents stepped up border enforcement tremendously, holding some deportees for as long as six months.

"The long-standing punishment for illegals in the United States was deportation," Smith said. "That meant simply a bus trip to the border where most of them simply made a stab at crossing the border again soon afterward.

"But after a few of them wound up behind bars for six months at a time, they simply stayed away," he said. "For someone working on something illegal, that may not seem like much of a jail sentence, but for a man simply trying to earn a living for his family, his time behind bars was probably an eternity. A good honest worker won't likely run that risk again, and I'm not sure that was the deterrent any of us are looking for in this."