Immigrants help power America's economy. Will the election value or
imperil them?
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[October 21, 2024] By
WILL WEISSERT
BAKER, Nev. (AP) — Few things say America like Janille and Tom Baker's
ranch, with its grazing cattle, scrub brush-dotted desert and
snow-capped mountains.
If only they could get American citizens to work on it.
The ranch in remote eastern Nevada produces around 10,000 tons of hay
annually, and combines cowboy culture with a dash of Manifest Destiny.
Rabbits, gophers and the occasional badger always outnumber humans and
the nighttime sky is dark enough to count the stars.
But the Bakers' business couldn't survive without an agricultural guest
worker program that brings in Mexican immigrants for about nine months a
year to help harvest crops in fields where temperatures frequently
exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius).
“When people complain that foreign workers are taking their jobs, I roll
my eyes,” said Janille Baker, who manages the ranch's accounting. “In
any industry, everybody’s trying to find help. So this anti-immigration
stance doesn’t really make sense to me. If everyone needs workers, how
are you planning to fill those jobs?” The ranch follows federal rules
that require advertising available positions and making them available
first to U.S. citizens. But in the last six years, only two Americans
called to inquire about jobs. A third trekked out in person, but left
after seeing what the work entailed.
Immigration has become a source of fright and frustration for voters in
this presidential election — with possible outcomes that could take the
United States down two dramatically different paths. Nowhere are the
stakes higher than in Nevada, where 19% of residents are foreign-born
and around 9% of the total workforce doesn't have U.S. legal status.
The influx of illegal border crossings has strained city and state
resources across the nation, even in Democratic strongholds. And yet
immigration has fueled job growth in ways that strengthen the economy
and improve the federal government's fiscal health.
So black and white in the candidates’ rhetoric, immigration is actually
incredibly complex in reality — a fact that reveals itself every day in
Nevada.
Voters say it is among their most important issues in November. How they
come down on immigration, choosing former President Donald Trump ’s
hard-line proposals for mass deportations or Vice President Kamala
Harris ' calls for a path to citizenship for millions of people in the
country illegally who have been here for years, will go a long way
toward determining the outcome.
Nearly 300 miles or 480 kilometers south of Baker Ranch, neon-saturated
Las Vegas had almost 41 million tourists visit last year, and is seeing
the issue of immigration play out differently, but with distinct
parallels.
“There’s a lot of fear," said Nancy Valenzuela, a 48-year-old maid who
works at the Strat casino. "There are people who don’t have papers.
They’re like, ‘They want to throw us all out.’”
Valenzuela plans to vote for Harris. But others can only watch and hope
their way of life isn’t turned upside down. “We’re here, propping up the
country so the economy doesn’t crash,” said Haydee Zetino, who scrubs
lavish hotel suites at Harrah’s Casino on the famed Las Vegas strip. She
is an immigrant from El Salvador with only temporary protected U.S.
status and can't vote.
Absolutes sweep away nuance
If Trump deported all 11 million immigrants without legal status in the
U.S., as he has suggested, the collateral risk could extend to the
entire economy. Nevada’s job losses alone might nearly equal what it
suffered during the 2008 financial crisis. More than 10% of Nevada's
population lives in homes with at least one immigrant in the country
illegally, according to estimates from the advocacy group Fwd.us.
“In our wonderful, 24-hour economy, we know that these hotels and
casinos could not, should not, would not be able to open every day
without immigrants," said Peter Guzman, president and CEO of the Latin
Chamber of Commerce in Nevada.
Trump could also revive pushes he made during his first term to cancel
programs that have extended temporary legal status to Zetino and
hundreds of thousands of others.
Harris has called for humane treatment at the border, particularly for
children and families, and for letting longtime immigrants get
citizenship. But she's also promised to revive a bipartisan package that
Trump forced congressional Republicans to squash, which sought to
provide $20 billion for immigration enforcement and tightened rules for
immigrants seeking U.S. asylum.
Recent Biden administration orders have imposed asylum restrictions when
the border is overwhelmed. The vice president recently walked the border
with Mexico in Douglas, Arizona, and called for getting tougher than
Biden has — despite his administration having seen arrests for illegal
border crossings fall sharply in recent months, even approaching levels
recorded during Trump's final year in the White House.
Polling released last month by The Associated Press-NORC Center for
Public Affairs Research showed Trump has an advantage over the vice
president on who voters trust to better handle immigration 44% vs. 37% —
a gap Harris' campaign has sought to narrow by moving harder to the
middle on the issue.
Immigrants say a bipartisan push toward getting tougher at the border
has clouded the larger issue in ways often too complicated to break down
easily along ideological lines.
“I think that our focus is completely directed into the border and not
toward the people who are already here and have been here for many, many
years,” said Erika Marquez, immigrant justice organizer for the advocacy
group Make the Road Nevada, and a recipient of the Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama-area effort giving limited
protections to immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.
The Pew Research Center estimates that 11 million people in the country
illegally live in the U.S. Big states like California, Texas and Florida
have larger numbers who potentially could have even more influence on
workforces and communities. But all of those states are all solidly red
or blue in presidential races — and aren't likely to sway the election
as toss-up Nevada might.
Clark County, encompassing Las Vegas, is about 75% of the state’s
population and includes a sizeable number of hospitality industry
workers represented by Nevada’s powerful Culinary Union, which has
endorsed Harris.
But Trump is hoping to turn out infrequent voters there, and do very
well in much of the rest of the state, which tends to be rural and
conservative. Washoe County, home to Reno, is a perennial toss-up,
though. And voters can also choose “None” of the presidential
candidates, adding to the Nevada electorate's famously fickle nature.
Maria Nieto, president of the Young Democrats of Nevada, also got
Obama-era protections for immigrants who arrived as children. She said
she was always taught while growing up never to talk about her legal
status. Now, however, Nieto, is making a point of using her story to
motivate people to exercise voting rights she doesn't have.
“At times, I think that people don’t realize how personal this is,” she
said.
The post-Election Day economic consequences might be even more dire.
A group of researchers led by Warwick J. McKibbin, an economics
professor at the Australian National University, found that removing
workers in the U.S. illegally would sharply reduce labor supply in the
mining, agriculture, services, and manufacturing sectors. Deporting even
7.5 million workers might slash Real Gross Domestic Product by 12%.
If Nevada lost all of its workers in the country illegally, Labor
Department figures suggest the direct job losses would be roughly as
large as those from the 2008 financial crisis, which stalled tourism,
triggered a wave of housing market foreclosures and cost the state about
9.3% of its jobs during the subsequent Great Recession.
And rounding up people in the country illegally may not even count
people like Zetino, Marquez, and Nieto, nor the guest workers at Baker
Ranch, all of whom are authorized to be in the U.S.
Zetino, 62, gained temporary protected status since arriving after a
major 2001 earthquake in El Salvador, but saw Trump try to remove it
during his term.
[to top of second column] |
Haydee Zetino waits for the bus after working a shift as a maid at
Harrah's hotel-casino along the Las Vegas Strip, Thursday, Sept. 12,
2024, in Las Vegas. Zetino, an immigrant from El Salvador, gained
temporary protected status since arriving in the wake of a major
earthquake in 2001. (AP Photo/John Locher)
“These people don’t have any
conscience,” she said of mass deportation supporters. “They believe
they can lift up the country, move the economy forward, but they
don’t think of those at the bottom."
‘No issue with people who want to come here legally’
Trump has made border security an unofficial anthem of his campaign,
constantly decrying an “ invasion ” of people flooding into the
country illegally. At the same time, he's endorsed more temporary
visas for qualified foreigners, saying at a recent town hall with
Spanish-language Univision, “We want workers, and we want them to
come in, but they have to come in legally, and they have to love our
country."
But the former president also has lately stepped up his attacks on
people with temporary protected status, including spreading
falsehoods about Haitians legally living in Ohio abducting and
eating pets, and threatening to deport them should he win in
November. Trump has further stoked tensions by suggesting that
immigrants coming into the U.S. illegally are doing so to expressly
take jobs from Black and Hispanic Americans.
Still, some of Trump's top supporters in Nevada are more careful to
make distinctions between immigrants here legally and not. That
includes former North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee, who has been
endorsed by Trump as he runs for Congress and acknowledged of his
state: “We are running out of labor force right now.”
“We have no issue with people who want to come here legally," Lee
said. “We’ll train them and they’ll work, and we see all the joys of
America that way.” But he said people in the country illegally, by
contrast, have contributed to higher crime rates, including
construction sites being burglarized.
Other conservatives are more explicit about the economic damage
tougher immigration policies might do, though.
Guzman, of the Latin chamber, has organized forums examining how
construction in Las Vegas has been slowed by not being able to find
enough workers. He's pushed for expanding guest worker programs,
noting on a call with an advocacy group, "I'm a registered
Republican, and we are not all the same on this issue.”
Florisela López Rivera has seen that nuance firsthand and worries
about politics overwhelming decency.
A dishwasher at Wynn Casino in Las Vegas, López Rivera is originally
from El Salvador and got temporary protected status after Hurricane
Mitch's devastation in 1998. She recently gained permanent U.S.
residency after her wife became a citizen, which means she's
unlikely to face deportation under any circumstances.
López Rivera is a member of the Culinary Workers Union, which
represents 60,000, majority-Hispanic workers in Las Vegas and Reno.
A Harris supporter, López Rivera canvasses for her union to advocate
for the vice president, stressing Harris being the daughter of
immigrants.
She speaks Spanish while knocking on doors and says that she
encounters some people who tell her, “I love Trump." Even then, she
tries to engage them rather than simply turning away.
“When we focus on the negative, we lose the human side of things,”
López Rivera said.
Bipartisan support for stricter border security
Harris' calls for tightening asylum rules and stepping up
enforcement at the border underscore just how much voters backing
both parties want a strong hand there.
“Everybody I know, Republican or Democrat, believes border security
is important," said Edgar Flores, a Democratic Nevada state senator
and immigration attorney. “We have real problems with drugs, with
gangs, with violence.”
But move even partially toward mass deportations, Flores said, and
“you’re going to disturb the most essential industries in Nevada,
and that’s going to be replicated around the country.”
Marquez, of Make the Road Nevada, said her organization accepts that
there need to be stiffer controls at the border, but added, "I think
a lot of people — and Trump himself — have this irrational idea that
we are here and we are not good people.”
“We are all working class," said Marquez, who was born in Leon,
Mexico, and immigrated at age 3, when her grandmother paid smugglers
to take her and her then-pregnant mother into the United States.
"All we want is being able to supply food, shelter and a good
education for our children and just to be able to grow as a
community.”
A recent Scripps News/Ipsos survey found that 86% of Republicans
“strongly” or “somewhat support” mass deportations, but so do 25% of
Democrats. Overall, 54% of voters support removing potentially
millions of people from the country, topping the 42% who oppose it,
while a third of Americans see securing the U.S.-Mexico border as
the country’s top immigration priority, the survey found.
'You can’t get anyone to come do the work'
Back on Baker Ranch, the H-2A visa program brings immigrant workers
to the fields. They harvest hay, control weeds and irrigate with
wheel lines moved by hand, or fully hand irrigate, building small
dams using tarps they drag to different areas so that crops can be
better submerged in water.
During Trump’s first term, the H-2A program’s participation rose,
but he also proposed a rule just before the end of his term that
would have frozen farmworkers' salaries for two years, loosened
requirements for worker housing and restricted the transportation
costs they could be reimbursed for. The Biden administration wiped
those out, but imposed new rules it says can better protect workers
and has seen participation climb even higher.
Tom Baker co-owns the ranch with his brothers, and it began
operating in 1954, nearly two decades before the area was
electrified. He calls it “hard, hot work” that’s “kind of
miserable.”
“These kinds of farms, without immigrants, would become infeasible
because you can’t get anyone to come do the work,” said Baker, 54.
“The wage isn’t the issue. It’s whether people will come do the
job.”
The soil — enriched by hot days and nights that turn cooler because
of higher elevations — can make for superior hay, some of which goes
to race and polo horse centers like West Palm Beach, Florida, home
to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.
The ranch has 26 employees, including five current H-2A immigrant
workers. Many of the oldest ranch hands arrived long enough ago to
get U.S. legal status through 1980s programs. Some have children who
were born in the U.S. and are citizens, even if one or both of their
parents are not.
The guest workers declined to comment, not wanting to attract undue
attention. Still, three generations of immigrant workers at the
ranch largely hail from the towns of Apozol and Juchipila in
north-central Mexico.
The original arrivals now have grown children. Some of them work at
the ranch and have had their own children who are now in high school
and work there themselves during the summers. One former employee's
wife had her baby in a ranch vehicle on the way to the hospital,
about 80 miles away.
Janille Baker, 51, is no fan of Trump, but also has at times become
exasperated with Biden administration regulations. Those include
small things like immigrant living quarters being required to have
screen doors, despite being air conditioned and already equipped
with screens on the windows.
“It is a hot potato and each side’s lobbing one at the other. And,
in all honesty, both are to blame,” she said of immigration. “There
is going to come a point where it has to get taken care of. You
can’t just keep using fearmongering and scaring people, and then
being critical of the people who do or don’t want to do whatever
jobs.”
___
Associated Press writer Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this
report.
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