Texas Immigration Lawyer & Attorney : Kraft & Associates Law Firm : Visas, Green Card, Citizenship, Deportation : Dallas, Texas

An immigration raid in Houston yesterday netted more than 160 immigrants, many of whom will be deported. Here are details in excerpts from a story in the Dallas Morning News:

More than 160 suspected illegal immigrants working in a hot, cluttered rag factory were detained Wednesday in one of the largest immigration raids in Houston in nearly two years.

The detainees are from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

About 60 may qualify for temporary release, if they have so-called humanitarian issues, such as health needs, or are sole caregivers to children.

About 70 percent of those detained were female – eight of whom were pregnant – and two minors were released to members of their family.

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The Dallas Morning News has an interesting op-ed piece today, written by the owner of a large Texas produce company. The gist is that many farmers are having to cut back on their production, or change the types of crops they grow, because of a shortage in farm laborers. He suggests we need immigration reform or we will have to begin importing our food from Mexico. Here are excerpts:

American farmers are living an unfolding labor crisis so much worse than a drought or a flood or a plague of locusts. But unlike those natural disasters, this one is entirely preventable, if we only had enough national leaders willing to act on common-sense solutions.

Instead, we're getting nothing but "get tough" laws and regulations that will bring dangerous consequences.

While row crops like corn and wheat have been successfully mechanized, the fact is that hand labor is still critical to bringing in the harvest of wholesome fresh fruit, vegetables, milk and meat. More than 80 percent of the hired labor force bringing in the harvest is foreign born, and likely two-thirds to three-quarters does not have proper immigration status.

Despite this, America's current dysfunctional immigration policy is one of "enforcement first, damn the consequences." This approach is driving our food productivity out of the U.S., plain and simple.

Here in Texas, we have the third-largest labor-intensive agricultural sector in the country. What is happening to it? In a recent Texas A&M study and survey, 77 percent of responding growers reported that they are actively scaling back their business because of labor concerns.

This means planting less, harvesting less and switching to subsidized row crops rather than free-market crops like fruit and vegetables. Almost 30 percent reported moving at least some of their operations out of the country. Many more are considering that option.

As production leaves the U.S., the giant sucking sound will be the shriveling of our rural economies.

Our policymakers keep bringing us more of the same dangerous policies. This month, President Bush announced new rules forcing federal contractors and subcontractors to electronically verify the eligibility of their workforce. Only a handful of farms across America could meet this test. Yet the immigration restrictionists cheered loudly.

Will they be cheering when our military and school lunch programs are forced to buy fruit, vegetables and milk from other countries to feed our troops and our children?

A solution for the farm labor crisis cannot wait until a new president and Congress decide to revisit this toughest of issues. The cost of losing control of our food supply is too great

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The U.S. Department of State has released the July 2008 Visa Bulletin. Just click the link to view the bulletin.

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The Associated Press is reporting that President Bush has signed an executive order requiring contractors and others who do business with the federal government to verify that their employees are working in the United States legally

The order says federal departments and agencies must require contractors to use an electronic system to verify that the workers are eligible to work in the U.S.

AP notes that this order comes as a worker verification bill has stalled in Congress.

The impact of this executive order could be enormous. There are tens of thousands of employers who "do business" with the government, including most hospitals and universities. Plus of course every company that deals with the Department of Defense. One big question unanswered for now is when the order goes into effect.

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The New York Times this week ran a wonderfully direct and provocative editorial about the shameful way our country treats immigrants, and about the cowardice of today's politicians. I encourage you to read the entire editorial. Here are some brief excerpts:

Someday, the country will recognize the true cost of its war on illegal immigration. We don’t mean dollars, though those are being squandered by the billions. The true cost is to the national identity: the sense of who we are and what we value. It will hit us once the enforcement fever breaks, when we look at what has been done and no longer recognize the country that did it.

A nation of immigrants is holding another nation of immigrants in bondage, exploiting its labor while ignoring its suffering, condemning its lawlessness while sealing off a path to living lawfully. The evidence is all around that something pragmatic and welcoming at the American core has been eclipsed, or is slipping away.

There are few national figures standing firm against restrictionism. Senator Edward Kennedy has bravely done so for four decades, but his Senate colleagues who are running for president seem by comparison to be in hiding. John McCain supported sensible reform, but whenever he mentions it, his party starts braying and he leaves the room. Hillary Rodham Clinton has lost her voice on this issue more than once. Barack Obama, gliding above the ugliness, might someday test his vision of a new politics against restrictionist hatred, but he has not yet done so. The American public’s moderation on immigration reform, confirmed in poll after poll, begs the candidates to confront the issue with courage and a plan. But they have been vague and discreet when they should be forceful and unflinching.

Every time this country has singled out a group of newly arrived immigrants for unjust punishment, the shame has echoed through history. Think of the Chinese and Irish, Catholics and Americans of Japanese ancestry. Children someday will study the Great Immigration Panic of the early 2000s, which harmed countless lives, wasted billions of dollars and mocked the nation’s most deeply held values.

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The Houston Chronicle ran a thought-provoking article today titled Immigration raid spurs calls for action against employers. The point of the article is that if the government was serious about workplace enforcement, they would arrest officers and management, not just workers. In the recent Iowa raid, more than â…“ of the employees were arrested and labeled as illegal immigrants. As the article quotes a New York congressman, "Is it not reasonable to assume that if over a third of the work force employed at this plant violated labor law in one form or another that management has to have some complicity in those violations?"

So will we continue to put on a show of hassling workers while we allow management to skate free? Or will we get serious about enforcement by sending some corporate officers to prison? Or, would it be smarter to just sit down and come up with a comprehensive immigration reform package that both political parties could agree to pass? Here are excerpts from the article:

After the biggest immigration raid in U.S. history, hundreds of workers have been sentenced but not one company official as yet faces any charges — something critics say is typical of a federal government that is tough on employees but easy on owners.

Worker advocates and lawmakers say the fact that nearly 400 workers were arrested in the May 12 raid at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in Postville — or more than one-third of the total number of employees — proves that company officials must have known they were hiring illegal immigrants.

"Until we enforce our immigration laws equally against both employers and employees who break the law, we will continue to have a problem with immigration," said U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley, an Iowa Democrat whose district borders Postville.

Such raids are designed to get headlines and make it appear that the federal government is cracking down on illegal immigration, said Frank Sharry, executive director of the immigration reform group America's Voice. But he says even those who think enforcement is the answer can't seriously believe the 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. can be arrested and deported.

"Even if you wanted to pursue an imbalanced enforcement-first strategy, the only thoughtful way to do it would be to go after employers, make examples of them and try to scare other employers into compliance," he said. "They're not doing that."

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