America's Criminal Immigration Policy

How U.S. law punishes hard work.

Jesse James DeConto from the February 2006 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

"If we don't have papers, we can't [grow our own trees]," an undocumented worker named Csar told me in Spanish. "It's difficult."

In Ashe County, which leads North Carolina with approximately 2,500 workers harvesting a million trees a year, I've been able to identify exactly four other Latinos cultivating their own Fraser firs: Buca's business partner, Gernimo, has 20,000; Gernimo's wife's cousins Jorge and Bonificio have 40,000 between them; and their friend Silvestre leads the way with 55,000, potentially worth more than $1 million when he cuts them in a few years. All of them arrived in the United States illegally in the late 1980s; all became permanent residents under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which provided amnesty for undocumented workers; and all had come by 1991 to North Carolina, where they learned how to care for Christmas trees. By 1998, all were U.S. citizens. But not Buca. By the time he and Amanda came to the United States in 1993, the amnesty provision had expired.

Bienvenidos a Norte Carolina

With snow on the ground in March 1994, Buca and Amanda arrived in North Carolina from a $1-an-hour job in a Florida orange grove. Their new employer put them up in a two-bedroom cabin with five other guys. They had no winter clothes. One of their roommates, Enrique, asked the boss's truck driver, Lionl, to take them to the local swap shop for some sweaters, coats, and boots. The labor contractor who brought them here from Florida was taking $2 an hour out of Buca's $5.50 wage, so after a year another Mexican, Ramiro, helped him get a new job with no middleman, and later sold them their first car.

What's striking, amid the national media's fascination with cultural conflict--zoning battles over Ecuadorian volleyball, Hispanic drunk drivers on the rampage, immigration raids, the Minutemen at the border--is how the local Anglo community has embraced these immigrants. The Hispanic Baptist mission exists because the local association of more than 250 Southern Baptist churches pooled their resources to hire a Mexican pastor; one tree grower donated an old KFC to serve as a sanctuary, and another paid for 350 Spanish Bibles. In Watauga County, to the south, an Episcopal church founded the advocacy group High Country Amigos, which later opened a second branch in Ashe County and serves as a clearinghouse for translation and other immigrant services. In Alleghany County, to the east, a Colombian Baptist pastor and a Catholic doctor opened a low-cost health clinic for uninsured patients, with a team of volunteer interpreters. Grant-funded aid workers also visit the farms to provide medical care and educational supplements to migrant laborers and their families. The Los Arcoiris Mexican Restaurant in Jefferson is usually packed with a mostly Anglo clientele.

In the late 1980s and early '90s, the North Carolina Department of Labor cited a dozen large growers for nearly 100 migrant housing violations. But conditions have improved since then. A few growers and their families are learning Spanish and have traveled to Mexico to understand where their men come from. There are still growers and landlords who will take advantage of the workers' desperate circumstances, but there are also plenty of individuals eager to share their burdens, as Buca and Amanda happily attest.

Marilyn Riehle, a lay missionary with Ashe County's only Catholic church, helped them find their own rental trailer after Amanda, pregnant, fell through the migrant cabin's bathroom floor while washing all the men's laundry in the bathtub. A woman named Robin, among the few Anglos still working the pines, drove her to the county health department for maternity care. Ramiro's boss, whom I won't name because Buca still works for him 10 years later, co-signed on a loan to help the couple buy their own trailer on an acre of land. He also loaned them about 2,000 Fraser fir seedlings and lets them borrow money to get through the winters, when there's little work to do. The boss's father helped Amanda get a job in a local woodshop, where she learned to speak English (which she does well enough to serve as an on-call interpreter for local health care providers and law enforcement). Richard, a next-door neighbor, offered Buca some land on which to plant his seedlings and later gave him a lawn tractor to start a weekend mowing business.

"It just amazes me, how well they've done," says Riehle. "I wish there was some way they could get their papers."

Ashe County Sheriff Jim Hartley also sympathizes with the illegal workers who gravitate to Ashe County, and he doesn't mince words. "I'd probably try to come across that river too," he tells me. "I'd come across, and I'd probably come across the next time too....Personally, I always said, my family or myself's not going to go hungry as long as they put glass in front of supermarkets. When you get so hungry, you do whatever you need to do."

This entire region depends on foreign workers to energize its leading agricultural industry. Growers say there just aren't enough local workers to fill a labor demand that triples during the six-week period from late October to mid-December. In a North Carolina State University survey, farmers told agricultural agent Jim Hamilton they'd have to cut back or go out of business without Mexican labor, and veteran workers like Buca ensure a steady supply, recruiting family and friends and helping them adjust to life in the North Carolina mountains. "If it wasn't for these guys, we wouldn't even be in business," says Buca's boss's father, who started the family farm in 1959.

"We'd shut down. We couldn't do it anymore," says Mark Johnson, foreman at New River Tree Company, a huge operation that has one of the largest Anglo work forces in the area but still relies heavily on immigrant labor. "We used to work guys from Ashe County. It's not a matter of how much you pay them. Nobody wants to do the work. The work's hard. The Mexicans come from [where] everything they do's hard."

"Mexican Burros"

Johnson's farm recruits workers through the North Carolina Growers Association, the largest source of legal immigrant labor in the United States, bringing about 10,000 men each year into North Carolina to cultivate everything from sweet potatoes to tobacco. But these H-2A workers fill only about one in 10 jobs on Christmas tree farms. Most growers find undocumented workers through their colleagues, independent labor contractors, or their own veteran workers who bring friends and family members back from Mexico. Jackie Copeland, a consultant with the North Carolina Employment Security Commission in Ashe County, says Christmas tree growers rarely ask for legal workers through her office, but they're willing to hire local people if they apply.

"We don't have a lot of people that apply to those orders," she says. "You have to be willing to work from dawn to dusk."

During the Christmas tree harvest, the men--and a few women--work 10- to 16-hour shifts. They each carry dozens, sometimes hundreds of trees a day, depending on the size. A man can haul two of the smaller six-foot trees at once, but those exceeding nine feet often require two to five workers to navigate them through the labyrinths of tender trees awaiting future harvests. Even when they team up, the men sometimes need a few minutes to recover after moving each of these grandes, as they call them. Imagine a crew of 20 men moving all the furniture and boxes from a 30-home subdivision in a single day, carrying them and loading them onto trucks parked not in front of each house but every block or two. Then imagine this neighborhood is on the side of a mountain.