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For some area business owners, the recent arrest of illegal immigrant
workers exposes a serious labor issue.

Most recently, 15 undocumented immigrants were taken into custody after
the pickup truck in which they were riding crashed near Picher, Okla.,
on Nov. 27. The Ottawa County Sheriff’s Department held the men at the
county jail until the next day, when federal immigration authorities
transported them to Oklahoma City for deportation. The immigrants, two
from El Salvador and 13 from Mexico, told Oklahoma Highway patrolmen
they were on their way to Overland Park, Kan., to work.

And last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agents
arrested 44 workers at the Marley Cooling Technologies plant in Olathe.
Over 30 of the workers accused of entering the United States illegally
have been deported to their native countries of Mexico, El Salvador,
Kenya, Guatemala and Honduras.

“It’s about quality of life and exploitation of the immigrant
workforce,” said Paul Rodriguez, president of Rodriguez Mechanical
Contractors, Inc., a plumbing and site utility contracting company.

Along with other business owners and labor union officials, Mr.
Rodriguez has met with an immigrant rights association and U.S.
Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration
(OSHA) officials during the past year over mounting concerns about
immigrant worker safety and fair wage standards.

“Exploitation may occur where the immigrant workers are classified as
independent contractors and denied employee benefits, or when they’re
placed at risk in an unsafe working environment,” Mr. Rodriguez said.

A conference scheduled for Oct. 19 in Topeka to address immigrant worker
exploitation was postponed until after the holidays when one of the
organizers sustained serious injuries in a traffic accident.

“Misrepresentation of the independent contractor is a way of getting
around paying a quality wage,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “And it impacts local
economies through lost tax revenues and contractors who pay a living
wage. Unscrupulous businesses that hire undocumented immigrants as
independent contractors are able to under-bid us.”

He said OSHA officials are concerned about the fatality rate among
immigrant workers.
“They don’t complain about workplace hazards,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “They
know that if they don’t perform, there’s someone in line behind them
willing to do the job.”

In 2003, the fatality rate for Hispanic workers was 13 percent higher
than fatalities recorded for all workers per 100,000, and foreign-born
Hispanic workers accounted for 69 percent of all fatal work injuries,
according to the federal Labor Department.

Despite the risks, there’s powerful mutual economic incentive for
undocumented immigrants willing to be human capital for employers
willing to gamble on not getting caught hiring them. Immigrants, say
advocates for reform, bear most of the burden.

Few employers are caught and fewer are sanctioned, because immigration
authorities must prove the employer knowingly hired an undocumented
worker. Fines imposed on employers fell almost 99 percent from 1992 to
2002, while the number of undocumented immigrants grew to an estimated
9.8 million. And last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents
spent fewer than 200,000 hours investigating employers, down 38 percent
from 1999.

When they’re caught, undocumented immigrant workers face deportation.
But, driven by economic necessity, they keep coming, aided by an
elaborate underground network of operatives who smuggle them into the
United States and transport them to work sites across the country.

On Dec. 2, a farm labor contractor, her husband and two sons pleaded
guilty in a federal court in Buffalo, N.Y. They’re charged with
recruiting undocumented Mexican immigrants from Arizona and transporting
them to work on farms in upstate New York for little or no pay.

In a federal court in Houston, the trial of three people charged with
smuggling more than 70 undocumented immigrants from south Texas to
Houston in May 2003 began on Nov. 30. Locked inside a tractor-trailer
without ventilation, 19 of the immigrants died. The youngest fatality, a
five year-old boy, was found in his father’s arms.

Citing the most recent arrests of undocumented immigrants employed in
Kansas, Rep. Nile Dillmore (D-Wichita) said, “It’s nothing more than a
criminal enterprise. I believe that it’s the lack of enforcement and
concern about our immigration and employment laws that foster that
environment. It is a systemic problem, a criminal enterprise to bring
workers that are easily exploitable to supply labor for corporate
America. It’s a dirty little secret.”

http://www.dosmundos.com/editions/V...s/news-Deng.htm

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