Increased enforcement of immigration laws having local impact

A box full of phone cards sits under the counter at Alejandro Sánchez’s Columbia grocery store, Los Tres Hermanos. For the first time in seven years, he has not sold the weekly allotment of 1,500 cards.

Sánchez looks tired as he talks about how business at his store on Business Loop 70 has plummeted since federal immigration reforms were announced Aug. 10.

“We get by on the people that come to work in this country,” Sánchez said in Spanish. “We might have to close the business. How are we going to get by?”

“People are packing their bags,” he said. “Sales have hit the floor.”

Business was already not so great, the result of growing anxiety among the region’s Hispanic population. In the last year, sales at Los Tres Hermanos and the two Los Cuates Latino stores, one on Bernadette Drive and the other on Paris Road, already had dropped by approximately 60 to 70 percent, the stores’ owners said. Los Cuates I used to process, on average, 200 wire transfers a month, but that number has dropped to about 60 to 70 a month. On some days there are no wire transfer customers, said manager Alfredo Jiménez.

“These people are really, really frightened,” Francisco Ortiz, owner of Los Cuates I and II, said in Spanish. “They don’t want to go out; they don’t want to spend.”

The slowdown could be just the beginning for stores with a mostly Hispanic clientele. National and state crackdowns on illegal immigration have been announced recently, and business owners in mid-Missouri who depend on Hispanics as customers or employees say they’re worried about the future, or are already in trouble.

With an estimated 35,000 to 65,000 undocumented workers in Missouri, according to the U.S. Census, builders, landscapers, restaurants, hotels, farms and meatpacking plants are likely to feel the impact of the crackdowns.

Carl Rusnok, spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Public Affairs Central Region, based in Dallas, Texas, confirmed that deportations would increase this year.

The “no-match” regulation requires employers to verify their workers’ legal status or dismiss them if the employer receives a letter from the Social Security Administration informing them that 10 or more of their workers’ names and Social Security numbers don’t match.

Once the regulation goes into effect, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said at an August news conference, the Social Security Administration will send out around 15,000 letters a week over a period of eight to 10 weeks.

Deborah Meyers, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, predicted that because undocumented workers constitute around 5 percent of the national workforce, the greatest impact will be apparent within six months, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Already too few, businesses say
Though many businesses that hire guest workers would like to see an increase in the number of visas granted — and see the process streamlined — U.S. senators voted in May to reduce the cap from 400,000 to 200,000 annually. Businesses that employ seasonal workers are hoping that the Save Our Seasonal ?Business Act, which would renew the guest worker program, is approved by Congress at the end of September.

Stephen Blower, a Columbia-based immigration lawyer, said that the H-2A program is “so bureaucratized that there is no incentive for an employer to apply for workers,” adding that “employers are the ones that will have to eat the problem — employees can find a new job.”

Eduardo Crespi, director of Columbia’s Centro Latino, asserts that if there are no workers next year, “perhaps all these [state representatives] will have to cut the grass themselves.”

“This will touch both sides of the aisle,” he said. “Democrats as well as Republicans are worried about the repercussions of this enforcement.”

For Sánchez, the reforms will mean saying goodbye to many of the same customers he has had for years, such as the workers who file into Los Tres Hermanos after work, hair wet and faces dirty, to buy packs of tortillas and cans of frijoles and salsa. Most make little more than the minimum wage.

“I’m Mexican, but the government won’t let me hire people who are here illegally,” Sánchez said. “That makes you feel bad, you know?”

Nine undocumented workers who work in construction and the restaurant business said that employers are already growing more reluctant to pay them in cash and are asking for identification. But they said they believe there will always be another business in a different city that will employ them; those who will suffer the most, they said, are U.S. employers.

“Who does the work for them? An American doesn’t work the way a Mexican does,” said one of these men in Spanish. He has been in the U.S. illegally for five years and asked not to be named due to fear of deportation.

For now, the bottom line is that when enforcement is present, people don’t want to work or shop, said Alejandro Sánchez. They wait in their houses until time passes.

At El Tapatio restaurant in Sedalia, manager César Marín has also noticed that immigrants recently have taken to staying at home because of the uncertainty of what the coming months will bring.

One of the prominent voices of the Sedalia Hispanic community, Angel Morales, host of a weekly Spanish language radio program, expects the crackdown to inflict a great deal of pain on people and affect businesses.

“With legislation changing every day, (immigrants) don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said.

But Blower, the immigration attorney, said immigrants are very resourceful and will find alternatives; the reforms will only “create a chilled climate where undocumented persons will be afraid to work and where employees will be afraid to hire them.”

The Sedalia Tyson chicken plant, a major employer for Hispanics in the town, was quick to provide a news release detailing the company’s dedication to the proposals.

The release stated that the company’s policy is to give workers whose employment records don’t check out 30 days to resolve the issue. They are fired if they don’t show proper documentation within that time. “We will change our process to mirror the new time frame established by the government, which is 90 days,” reads the news release provided by Tyson.

The release also stated, “We have zero tolerance for employing people who are not authorized to work in the U.S. … If we learn one of our workers may not have authorization to work in this country, we take immediate measures.”

Representatives for the Cargill factory in California, Mo., and for Farmland Foods in Kansas City, which owns a factory in Milan, Mo., did not return phone calls.

At El Corral Mexican Restaurant in Jefferson City, owner Joao Coaguila said the current situation is the fault not of only the immigrants or the legislators, but all of us.

“Todos pagamos los platos rotos,” he said.

It means: We all pay for the broken plates.

Adelante reporters Abby Callard, Jordan Hickey, Nicolás Jímenez, Kolleen Kawa, Lee Anne Litzsinger, Angela Potrykus, Beverly Rivera and Tara Ballenger contributed to this report.