Businesses, Loved Ones Struggle After Raids On Illegal Immigrants Potato-Packing Industry Hit Hard As Huge Roundup Nets 205 People

The region’s biggest roundup of illegal immigrants in years ended with the last of 205 arrested people flying out of Twin Falls bound for Texas and, in most cases, the Mexican border.

While exhausted U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents prepare to head home this week, families separated from loved ones and businesses in the region are grappling with their losses.

The arrests have led a representative of potato-packing plant owners to call for an overhaul of how immigrant workers are handled.

“It seems to me there is a better way to do it than arresting and rearresting and throwing money down a rat hole,” said Dave Smith, president of the Idaho Grower Shippers Association, an Idaho Falls-based trade association representing 58 potato-packing companies.

Owners of potato plants, the target of most of this year’s raids, are upset at losing workers while being left without a way to catch widespread forgeries of work documents, Smith said.

The increased raids come on the heels of Clinton administration calls for a crackdown on illegal workers and an Immigration and Naturalization Service budget that has more than doubled since 1993. The raids have netted more than 400 workers in Idaho alone this year, most in raids of 17 eastern Idaho packing plants.

Instead of more raids or better ways to catch forgeries, Smith said, lawmakers should come up with an easier way to legalize the workers needed at the potato sheds.

“Some way, somehow, we’ve got to find ways for these people to become legal,” he said.

Complaints about the raids have reached Idaho’s congressional delegation.

U.S. Rep. Michael Crapo, R-Idaho, is investigating ways to deal with complaints about an inability to screen illegal workers, spokeswoman Susan Wheeler said. Smith said he is meeting with Crapo Tuesday to discuss the matter.

Potato sheds could solve the problem by raising wages or using an existing program to recruit foreign workers, said Randolph Robinson, assistant director of investigations for the Immigration and Naturalization Service office in Helena. More legal workers could be attracted to higher-paying jobs, leaving less room for illegal workers, he said.

Starting pay at many sheds hovers around $5 an hour, shed owners say. But raising wages would not make up for a lack of workers willing to endure the noisy, strenuous work, Smith said. And he dismissed the government’s foreign worker program as unwieldy.

Robinson said the weeklong operation was a success and opened jobs for legal workers.

The agency arrested 146 people in eastern and south-central Idaho and 59 others in Montana and southwestern Idaho.

No businesses have been cited for knowingly hiring an illegal worker. Robinson said one Idaho Falls landscaping business and an unnamed business in Rupert still are being investigated.