What really happens after worksite immigration raids in California
ICE officers at the home of a suspected undocumented immigrant File photo courtesy ICE Carlos was pulled out of a deep sleep by a series of frantic phone calls one Friday morning in June By the time he arrived at a downtown Los Angeles garment factory sometime after a m his brother was in chains Agents from a constellation of federal agencies descended on the Ambiance Apparel factory and storefront on June detaining dozens of people It was the first salvo of the Trump administration s prolonged engagement in Southern California where masked federal agents are filmed daily pulling people off the street as part of the largest deportation initiative in American history Carlos brother Jose was shackled at the wrists waist and ankles Carlos watched as agents in Immigration and Customs Enforcement vests led Jose and other garment workers into a waiting white Sprinter van Carlos hasn t seen his brother since though he did confirm that Jose is being held at an immigration detention center in Adelanto We had just lost our other brother he died commented Carlos whom CalMatters is only identifying by his first name because of his own fears of deportation Then for our family losing Jose it was like someone died again Worksite raids like the one at Ambiance are an attention-grabbing component of the Trump administration s immigration crackdown one that it remains committed to despite a brief reversal in mid-June They re unfolding across the state from Los Angeles s Fashion District to farm fields in the San Joaquin Valley and a restaurant in San Diego While one stated purpose of worksite raids is to remove illegal competition from the labor marketplace the reality is far messier Studies have detected that immigration raids don t do much to raise wages and indeed deflate them Even after a raid employers are no more likely to use federal immigration verification tools like E-Verify during hiring Nevertheless on the campaign trail Trump focused on the threat of illegal competition as the political and emotional lynchpin of his deportation plans They re taking your jobs they re taking your jobs Trump explained a crowd in Wilmington N C on Sept Every job produced in this country over the last two years has gone to illegal aliens every job think of it We re going to save you We re going to save you We re going to save you Every new job between - was not in fact filled by undocumented immigrants Studies show truly deporting workers en masse from industries that rely on undocumented labor does little for U S workers Giovanni Peri a UC Davis economist who has studied the economic impacts of deportations in the s and during the Obama administration has located doing so definitely reduces job opportunities for American-born workers That s in part because a large number of American workers even those outside of immigrant-heavy industries rely on the services generated by low-wage undocumented labor the costs of which would rise with mass deportations Losing certain of these workers and jobs that Americans are moving out of it shrinks the local economic activity and there s a reduction in jobs for Americans he commented There is no evidence Peri noted that in the face of mass deportations immigrant-heavy industries would raise their wages to hire American workers instead If there is such a world it has not been the reality in the U S in a long time he declared What does tend to happen according to a research last year by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is that raids lead to more job turnover while showing little net change in the employment rate Actions that target employers audits investigations fines and criminal charges have larger effects than raids which target workers the investigation authors wrote The impact to the families can be long-term and devastating Absences suspensions expulsions and rates of substance abuse and self-harm increased among Latino students in a Tennessee town that was raided even among students whose families were not directly impacted Property crime dropped but violent crime increased in a small northeast Iowa meatpacking town after a massive raid Infants born to Hispanic mothers in that same Iowa town had a peril of low birth weight compared to the same population one year before the raid Federal Bureau of Study agents face off against protesters during an ICE raid at Ambiance Apparel in Downtown Los Angeles on June Photo by J W Hendricks for CalMatters Our mom is devastated and she s scared for herself too Carlos mentioned A lot of us are from the same Zapotec Indigenous locality in Mexico a lot of people kidnapped in the raid so it s like a whole bunch of families had a death In his first term Trump s worksite raids focused on the South and the Midwest when more than people were detained mostly at manufacturing plants and meat and poultry processing facilities That s a tiny segment of the estimated million people deported under Trump from to but it played a notable role in another of the administration s goals To create enough fear and mistrust among undocumented immigrants that they self-deport But this time Trump s focus is on California There s no money after raid Employees at Ambiance Apparel communicated each other that immigration enforcement was likely coming to their garment factory Employees who did not want to be identified stated CalMatters that people in Department of Homeland Safety jackets were on site at least twice this year the majority not long ago in April Those workers say they were stated by the company not to worry about a raid Ambiance Apparel through an attorney denied that the company had any advance warning or involvement with the raid and the company declined to comment further The garment industry is a logical target for immigration enforcement because so much of the workforce is undocumented The same is true of agriculture Estimates vary but anywhere from one third to more than one half of California farmworkers are undocumented immigrants William Lopez a University of Michigan constituents healthcare professor who has written a book on the impact of immigration raids on mixed-status families declared he learned in interviews of people present at six immigration raids in the Midwest and South in that people haven t developed the language to capture the impact of large-scale immigration raids on a locality After a raid people don t drive there s no money because everyone s paying bond no one s going to school anymore Lopez mentioned He continued the comparisons were there was hurricanes there was tornadoes there was war specific people compared it to a populace execution Specific people described it like the death of a grandchild Congress made it illegal to knowingly hire workers who don t have authorization in as part of an overhaul of the nation s immigration system The overhaul also legalized about million undocumented immigrants Still false Social Guard numbers have been fairly easy to obtain and employers are largely able to duck liability with only a cursory review of the documents workers present when they re hired Employers have had little incentive to get stricter even after the high-profile raids of meat and food processing plants during the second term of the George W Bush administration Demand for labor has remained high fines for those caught have been lax and the use of contractors and subcontractors has proliferated spreading out the risks of hiring The number of employers who have been fined or imprisoned under the statute is very low compared to the number of employees who have been rounded up as a upshot of these workplace raids revealed Leticia Saucedo a professor at the UC Davis School of Law The idea behind all of these was yes to target the employers but employees were collateral damage Saucedo announced workplace raids and the deportation of workers highlight tensions between two wings of the Republican Party Nativist groups want to curb immigration because they believe it displaces American workers while business interests want access to a stable legal pool of immigrant workers California farmer ready to demand a warrant California farmers are especially sensitive to prospective immigration raids The Perimeter Patrol conducted a sweep in Kern County just before Trump took office in January that previewed its approach in the new administration In June agents swept through farms in Ventura County conducting immigration raids iIndustry groups implored the administration to reconsider such tactics Farmworkers work in a field outside of Fresno on June Photo by Larry Valenzuela CalMatters CatchLight Local To ensure stability for our farm families and their communities we must act with both common sense and compassion Bryan Little procedures director at the California Farm Bureau announced in a comment The focus of immigration enforcement should be on the removal of bad actors or lawbreakers not our valuable and essential farm employees In an interview Little declared he hasn t seen evidence of widespread enforcement at farms But reports of any ICE sightings or arrests in agricultural areas have spread on social media spreading fear among the workforce The way this is all being handled it s interfering with food production he explained In Ventura County federal agents ultimately arrested more than immigrants in June reported Hazel Davalos director of the local farmworker advocacy group CAUSE Lisa Tate manages three of her family s eight ranches in the county where they grow citrus avocados and coffee Depending on the day anywhere from five to directly hired and contracted workers plant trim or harvest on the land They were not among the farms visited by immigration agents but Tate reported she held a meeting with her workers to communicate a longstanding company initiative if agents ever show up nobody s to be on our farm without proper authorization Tate stated the raids have put employers like her in a tough position She mentioned she has never knowingly hired any undocumented workers She reported she reviews the employment documents her workers present fills out the I- form and follows the rules Still she called it a well-known secret that a multitude of in the industry don t have valid work permits She s tried to use the guest worker visa initiative before but it comes with costly requirements to provide housing and transportation and to guarantee the guest workers have enough paid hours for the months they re here That was hard to budget for on a smaller farm like hers she commented so she prefers hiring contracted workers locally as needed We need an immigration initiative that allows for longer-term workers she declared Until we have a resolution in place we shouldn t take action because the whole system is built on what it is And if you start picking it apart there s all kinds of fallout CalMatters is a nonpartisan and nonprofit news organization bringing Californians stories that probe explain and explore solutions to quality of life issues while holding our leaders accountable
