America's Criminal Immigration Policy

How U.S. law punishes hard work.

Jesse James DeConto from the February 2006 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

The hardest work comes at the end of the day, when the workers are weariest. As a bailing crew operates a machine that ties back the branches, forming the trees into tight cylinders, the workers heave them onto flatbed trailers. The trees pile higher and higher, until some workers are standing on top of a 10- to 12-foot pile and tugging on the tops of the trees while others are pushing from below. The trailers haul the trees to storage and loading areas, where the workers reverse the process, leaning the trees against each other inside rope corrals. There, the trees wait for commercial truckers to pick them up.

Once the semis come to collect the trees, the workers use similar teamwork, as one set of men waits inside a trailer while another group sends the trees upward along a mechanized conveyor belt. They work without stopping, sometimes stumbling under the weight of the grandes, until hundreds of trees fill each truck. Crews of about 10 workers load up to a dozen trucks in one day, then wake up the next morning with sore arms, shoulders, backs, and legs, only to do it all over again, every day for five to six weeks. Pay ranges from $6 to $8 an hour for the typical worker.

"Americans don't do this work," says Buca's longtime friend and co-worker Julin, in Spanish. "It's for the Mexican burros."

Ashe County native Kevin Dishman, 22, worked the 2002 Christmas tree harvest. "Ain't never bothered with it again," he said as he waited to file an unemployment claim last January. He'd injured his wrist at a poultry processing plant in nearby Wilkesboro, a job with a base pay of $9.25 an hour plus bonuses. There he had to catch several six-pound live chickens in each hand and carry them upside down by their legs, two between his thumb and forefinger and one between each of the other fingers. He'd do this over and over again, all day.

"It's rough, but it still ain't as bad as the trees," he said. "Pine tree work is harder than catching chickens because of all the lifting that you've got to do."

With so few local people willing to harvest Christmas trees, growers have to rely on migrants who come from tobacco fields in the Carolinas or orange groves in Florida. Out of more than 3,000 Hispanics who live in Ashe County at some point during the Christmas tree growing season, fewer than 1,000 belong to intact families who stay here year-round. About two-thirds of North Carolina's Christmas tree workers are migrant men who come alone for late summer shearing or the fall harvest, leaving wives and children, mothers and fathers back in Mexico to wait for their pay-phone calls and wire transfers. The men live barracks-style, sleeping two or three to a bedroom, with a few more in the living room of a dormitory, trailer, apartment, or old farmhouse. These workers are vital to one of the region's leading industries, yet the current immigration system, the subject of a protracted debate in Washington, keeps their families apart. The H-2A program does not allow workers to bring their families, and as Amanda's story shows, crossing illegally with women and children is often too dangerous. So the men come alone.

Just when many of the migrants are reuniting with their wives and children for the winter break back in Mexico, Buca is leaving his. Last year, Buca's employer offered to falsify a guest-worker contract so Amanda could go with him, but she was afraid something would go wrong, leaving her stuck in Mexico while her daughters live the only life they know in the United States. "I won't do it," she says. "She's afraid she's never going to see [the girls] again," says Buca.

Separation

In 2003 Amanda's younger brother Jorge, 20, came to work on the commercial farm with Buca, but the girls have never met their 13 other aunts and uncles and numerous cousins who still live in Mexico. Part of Amanda's wages go to pay medical bills for her elderly father, stricken with malignant lymphoma. She hasn't seen him since leaving Las Choapas, Veracruz, on June 29, 1993. I visited the family the day after Buca came home in February 2005. As he told us of the mangos and oranges dangling from trees in his parents' backyard, and of his nieces and nephews who sleep on the floor because their parents can't afford furniture, I could see the wheels spinning inside Darby's head. "I've never seen my grandparents," she said simply. Their retired neighbors, Miss Barbara and Mr. H, fill the role of Grandma and Grandpa.

Before the spring of 1998, Buca brought his sister Laura and her husband, Lucio, across the border to work on the farm in North Carolina. After two nights of walking to rendezvous with a human smuggler beyond an immigration checkpoint in Falfurrias, Texas, they encountered a group of 80 male migrants with their own coyote. Lucio was afraid someone among the men might try to rape or kidnap his wife, as sometimes happens in the desperate borderlands. They forfeited their food and water to avoid a conflict. Two years later, the boss sent the men back to Mexico to apply for H-2A work visas. Now Lucio and Buca travel alone to Mexico to renew their H-2A contracts almost every winter, leaving their families behind just as most Christmas tree workers return to theirs in Mexico. The H-2A program is intended for seasonal jobs that last no more than 10 months, aligning perfectly with the Christmas tree growing season but forcing even assimilated immigrants like Buca to return to their native countries from mid-December to mid-February.

"It's too long to stay over there," Buca told me last summer, as he dreaded another winter away from his family. In December 2004, after his crew loaded the last Christmas tree that would bring some American family together, Buca's split apart. His boss has tried three times to obtain green cards for him and Lucio, to no avail.

"I'd love to find a good attorney," says the boss, "but it seems like everyone we've contacted, they take $200 or $300, and you never hear from them again."

Buca is qualified for a green card, but he's competing against millions of other candidates. Experts estimate the number of unauthorized Mexican immigrants in the United States at somewhere between 5 million and 6 million, with nearly half a million crossing our southern border annually during the last five years. Because the law caps annual immigration from any one nation at 7 percent of the total, these millions are competing for fewer than 26,000 permanent resident green cards a year for Mexicans. The only additions to this quota are for those with U.S.-citizen spouses, parents, or children able to sponsor them. The system provides only 140,000 spots for employment-based green card applicants, and only 40,000 of those are for aspiring immigrants with education at the baccalaureate level or below. Just 10,000 permanent resident visas a year cover the unskilled jobs that most Mexican immigrants fill.

Buca's current application emphasizes his training in handling pesticides and operating farm equipment. He might apply for a commercial driver's license to improve his chances of landing one of the skilled labor spots. But the odds are still extremely low. As of October, the Department of Homeland Security was still processing employment-based green card applications filed by Mexicans in 2000 and earlier. North Carolina alone has an estimated 300,000 undocumented immigrants. "It's gotten crazy for people like Buca who are every bit as American as people who were born here," says his neighbor Richard.

Amanda has almost no shot at a green card. It will be another 10 years before Darby, a U.S.-born citizen, turns 21 and can sponsor her parents' application. Although she and her sister have known no other home, the Department of Homeland Security could deport their mother at any time. Back in Veracruz, Amanda dreamed of being a teacher. She'd love to pursue her GED and go to college. She trusts local officials, but she's afraid of attracting outside attention by filing an application.