Worker fights

BIGLERVILLE, Pa. – Toiling methodically in a vast green orchard, Saintasia Elysee reaches into the branches of dwarf apple trees and pulls out rosy winesaps. Her husband, Kenol Laurent, drives a tractor that lifts the heavy bins of harvested fruit.

The next day at Hollabaugh Brothers Farm, they were picking pears.

Haitian immigrants, Elysee and Laurent keep a home in the Caribbean nation and return annually to rural Adams County, Pa., for the summer and fall harvests. About 25 other immigrant workers, mostly from Haiti and Mexico, also come back year after year, laboring about five months for $15 to $20 an hour.

Kay Hollabaugh, who keeps the books for the 500-acre farm, said she complies with the federal law on immigrant employment. She fills out the required paperwork. She inspects their identity documentation. And unless a visa, driver’s license, Social Security card, birth certificate, or other acceptable ID is obviously bogus, she accepts it.

“But we are not police. We are not psychics,” she said. “There are people who make a good living falsifying documents” that look real.

She hopes all are legally authorized to work, she said. “But I don’t know that.”

Though some farmers privately admit as much, Hollabaugh, 55, is among a few speaking out now as lawmakers propose stricter screening through “E-Verify” – a government-run, Internet-based system that cross-checks names and Social Security numbers and spits out mismatches. Employees then have eight working days to settle the discrepancy or be fired.

The system has been available to employers since 1996; an estimated 3 percent of the nation’s 6.5 million businesses use it, with 1,000 joining every week. Now, E-Verify proponents want to make it mandatory for all employers.

The impact on any industry heavily reliant on unskilled labor – from manufacturing to hospitality – could be significant. But agriculture in particular would be hit, said Nelson Carrasquillo, of El Comite de Apoyo a Los Trabajadores Agricolas, a farmworker support group in Glassboro, N.J., and Kennett Square, Pa.

From the tomato and vegetable farms of South Jersey to the mushroom houses of Kennett Square to the “apple capital” of Biglerville, uncounted thousands of immigrant pickers – some documented, some not – have long kept the machinery of farms in the region running.

Quite simply, farmers fear the loss of at least a portion of their experienced workforce and the potential dearth of nonimmigrant labor to replace it.

Family-owned since 1955, Hollabaugh’s farm is 100 miles north of Washington. There, congressional Republicans led by Lamar Smith of Texas are putting their weight behind the Legal Workforce Act, H.R. 2885, which would mandate universal participation in E-Verify.

It would be “an important safeguard for American workers who continue to lose jobs and wages to illegal aliens,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a nonprofit group that opposes illegal immigration.

“U.S. employers need to be able to hire with certainty,” the American Council on International Personnel wrote in a memo supporting E-Verify.

President Barack Obama also expressed support for it, but only in conjunction with reforms that would create a path for undocumented immigrants to gain legal status.

E-Verify’s opponents contend the system will destroy agribusiness by driving up costs, shrinking the workforce, and wreaking havoc on food production.

When Hollabaugh hears a legislator say E-Verify will save American jobs for Americans, “I just want to throttle him,” she said. “There are no domestic workers who want to do this work.”

Although farmhands do menial labor, she said, skills that experienced migrants have cannot be duplicated by just any cross-section of the unemployed. Don’t get her started on the common suggestion to hire paroled ex-prisoners.

“The insinuation that just anybody can do this work is not true,” Hollabaugh said, and when a harvest hits, “we don’t have time” for training.

About 20 states require E-Verify for some or all employers.

Before 1986, employers were not subject to federal penalties for employing unauthorized immigrants. But starting with the federal Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, they have had to use the I-9 paper form to verify eligibility of all new hires, including U.S. citizens.

In 1996, Congress authorized three pilot programs for electronic verification. The one that survives is E-Verify.

Its critics say it offers the false promises of stopping illegal immigration and preserving tax-paying jobs.

“Eight million undocumented workers are not going to leave the country,” Tyler Moran, of the National Immigration Law Center, said in congressional testimony. “They and their employers will simply move off the books into the cash economy.”

The result is a net loss for the government, Moran said, because two-thirds of undocumented workers pay payroll taxes, adding about $12 billion a year to the Social Security trust fund.