Two migrant farm workers took a day off Thursday to deliver a petition to Gov. Peter Shumlin asking him to oppose a controversial federal immigration enforcement program. But the governor was tied up in meetings, so Danilo Lopez and Over Lopez (pictured) pleaded their case with the Agency of Agriculture’s second-in-command instead.
For the last month, the Lopezes (who are not related) have been organizing migrant workers on Vermont dairy, vegetable and horse farms in opposition to Secure Communities, or S-Comm, an Obama administration program that shares fingerprints collected by local police agencies with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The program’s goal is to catch and deport criminal aliens, but it has come under fire for sweeping up large numbers of undocumented immigrants who have no criminal record.
Asked about S-Comm at his weekly press conference, Shumlin said that on a “philosophical level” he believes Vermont should treat migrant workers with “respect and dignity.” But he stopped well short of committing to taking a stand against the program.
“I haven’t seen exactly what they’re asking us to do,” the governor said, “so I’m gonna plead the Fifth.”
Armed with a petition signed by 70 migrant workers, the Lopezes (Danilo is pictured at right) and other members of the Vermont Migrant Farmworker Solidarity Project arrived in Montpelier unannounced at 8:45 a.m. hoping to catch the governor. Instead, they were greeted by a gubernatorial intern, Catherine Craig, who informed the group that the governor was in meetings all morning. She escorted them across the street to the Agency of Agriculture for an impromptu meeting with Deputy Secretary Diane Bothfeld.
The immigrants’ petition asks Shumlin to publicly “say no” to Secure Communities because it “threatens our security,” “promotes racial discrimination” and lacks transparency. Until recently, it was unclear whether the program was voluntary or mandatory, and governors in three states — Massachusetts, New York and Illinois — declared they would not participate. ICE has since clarified that S-Comm is mandatory and that every state must be on board by 2013. The Shumlin administration has said no one from ICE has approached Vermont officials yet about participating.
Bothfeld appeared unfamiliar with the immigration enforcement program, asking the farm workers whether it was “Vermont or federal?” Through a translator, Over Lopez, a 21-year-old Mexican who works six days a week growing greenhouse vegetables, clarified that it was federal and told Bothfeld: “We are part of the workforce in the dairy industry. If we were to be removed or deported, your state would be in an economic crisis. Everything would collapse.”
Danilo Lopez, a 22-year-old Mexican employed on a horse farm in Charlotte, added: “We come to this country for necessity — to try to feed our families, and if they get sick, to have something to send them to a hospital with. If we were to flip roles and you or Mr. Shumlin were in my situation, you would seek support to defend your rights.”
Bothfeld (pictured with Danilo Lopez) listened and promised to pass on the request to Shumlin, as well as supply the farm workers with figures about the exact number of migrant workers employed on Vermont farms. The Migrant Farmworker Solidarity Project estimates that 1200 to 1500 migrant workers help sustain Vermont’s struggling dairy farms. Most of these workers are not documented.
The workers also released an open letter today to Vermont farmers asking for their support in opposing S-Comm. It reads, “Such programs also affect you as an employer because when we run the risk of arrest, it leaves you without workers and damages your farms and threatens your income. In order to recruit new people, you must again teach them the operations of the farm, only to run the risk of repeating history over again.”
The delivery of the petition to Shumlin was timed to loosely coincide with a wave of national protests against S-Comm and the release of a critical new report about the initiative.
Later, at his weekly press conference, Shumlin was asked about the petition and whether he thinks Vermont law enforcement should be acting as immigration agents. The governor wouldn’t directly answer the question but said: “On a philosophical level this is what I know. Vermont farmers rely on migrant labor to deliver product to market. And we want to be a state that takes good care of the people that work so hard on our farms.”
Shumlin added that he wants Vermont banks to figure out a way for migrant workers to transfer money back home without incurring high-fee services as Western Union does. “We want to make sure that Vermont is a state where, when we host migrant workers, we treat them with respect and dignity. We have a raging immigration debate going on in America. There’s no question, in my view, that our immigration policies in this country are broken, and that the federal government is … frankly, some of their policies are out of step with how we treat our farm workers in Vermont.”
This article appears in Aug 17-23, 2011.
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“It seems that no matter how well the job pays, no one wants the work.”Ok, yours is a point made dispassionately, and taken.But I wonder, given the federal government’s hostility when states try to take the illegal immigration problem into their own hands, just how effective Georgia’s crackdown actually is. In other words, is there a statistically valid cause-and-effect relationship supporting the conclusion that US citizens simply aren’t interested/available to do farming work? Lord knows, hippies in Vermont seem to love doing it.
If you can’t operate a business legally, you shouldn’t be operating the business.
@Hypocrit…Your argument reminds me of a story I heard on NPR a few months ago (http://www.wbur.org/npr/137572612/cost-of-georgias-immigration-laws-passed-to-farms). In it, the president of the Georgia Agribusiness Council discusses the effect that Georgia’s new immigration law has had on the unemployment rate. Georgia has started cracking down on illegal immigrants, who have, in response, started avoiding the state altogether. However, in a state with a 10% unemployment rate, farms are having a hard time replacing illegal immigrants with legal workers, despite promises of pay between $100 and $200 per day. It seems that no matter how well the job pays, no one wants the work.
Illegal. To answer your question, yes, deport everyone who entered the country illegally, or who entered the country legally and outstayed their valid visa. When those jobs have to be done by Americans or not at all, suddenly they’ll pay better. BTW, you think my analogy of coming into your house and refusing to leave is not applicable? I’ll tell you what’s totally ridiculous: your comparison of violating the immigration laws to not bathing on Saturday night. And what does this have to do with drunk driving? Nothing.
To the guy who always posts with long usernames without spaces:I’m curious to hear your solution to the problem. Shouting ILLEGAL over and over again doesn’t count. Should we round them all up and deport them? What happens to the farms that employ these people? Do you think there are US citizens lining up to take these jobs with low pay and few benefits? Speaking of ILLEGAL… is it still a law in Barre that citizens must bathe every Saturday night? And there used to be a Vermont law that made it a crime to deny the existence of God. Should we round up all those prominent Vermont atheists and throw them in jail? After all, what they’re doing is…ILLEGAL! (and BTW, I fail to see how being in this country illegally, never leaving the farm you’re employed at, working a hard job for low pay that no one else wants to do, is a considerably worse crime than failing to bathe on Saturday night.)Lastly, your “how about I break into your house” analogy? You’re kidding about that, right? You must realize how that analogy does not come close to applying here.As for you, “send them all back”… you might be shocked to hear this, but each year, more US citizens are killed by American drunk drivers than illegal alien drunk drivers. In fact, across the board, more US citizens are killed by their fellow US citizens than by illegal immigrants! I think I see the REAL problem here!
My analogy is not ridiculous. Sneaking across the border is breaking and entering. Under the law, you no longer have to smash a window or pick a lock or kick in a door in order to be gulity of B&E. You just have to enter a house that’s not yours without permission. That’s exactly what illegal immigrants do. No one has the right to enter another country against that country’s laws. And while you’re attempting to change our immigration laws, the illegal aliens are still . . . illegal.Tell you what, Mr. Solidarity-with-the-illegals, why don’t you just sneak into Mexico without a passport or visa, and if you get past the border, stay there until you get caught, ok? Then see what happens. Call us from the detention center. You can tell the authorities there that you have a human right to be in their country regardless of their immigration laws and without their permission. Our “neighbors” to the south, whom your heart bleeds so badly for, will not think your escapade very funny. ILLEGAL.
” The ONLY issue is whether they are here illegally in the first place” Wrong. The issue is also about ignorant people who want to repeal the 14th amendment to the Constitution. As for your analogy, it’s just ridiculous. This is not a case of breaking and entering. This is a case of people who are here working as an essential part of our labor force with the implicit consent of farmers & businesses of all stripes. Changing the immigration laws is exactly what I support. And the group that this blog post is about is trying to do just that. But it is difficult to do when there are people out there characterizing all migrant workers as drunks who are out driving around and killing innocent families. It’s time to get past this foolishness and fix the immigration policies. Treating migrant workers as common criminals is not productive … Or even physically possible as this point, without declaring martial law and arresting every brown person who can’t produce his papers.
@ One Vermonter:You just don’t get it. You keep arguing that we should treat them nicely. That is NOT the issue. You’re intentionally skirting the issue. No one’s saying we should beat them or starve them or be mean to them. The ONLY issue is whether they are here illegally in the first place. Why can’t you seem to distinguish between illegality and being nice? You don’t get to break into this country, and stay. Period. You don’t like the immigration laws? Change ’em. But don’t whine when the authorities attempt to enforce them. If I sneak into your house, and do a really, really good job of cleaning your kitchen, does that mean I get to stay in your house as long as I want? And when you call the police to have me removed, is it really your neighbors’ place to whine that you’re not being nice to me?You say, “As for the “illegals”, they are people. They are our neighbors.” No, they’re not our “neighbors”; they’re in our house. Otherwise they wouldn’t be called “illegals.” Neighbors are by definition people who live in another place. Duh. I have no problem being nice to my neighbors. They can come visit me any time I invite them. And then when it’s time to go home they have to leave and go back to their own house. Get it?
“we must not forget the children they have are born U.S. citizens and that policy should change also.” That isn’t a policy. It’s the 14th amendment of the US Constitution. The 14th amendment was created in the aftermath of the Civil War, to prevent people like you from denying the basic civil rights of natural born American citizens. As for the “illegals”, they are people. They are our neighbors. They are very hard working people (that’s why they are invited to work on our farms) and their only motivation is to provide for their families. They are willing to go to extreme lengths to make a better life for their parents and their children. There is nothing more HONORABLE than that. In return for their hard work, they get low pay, zero legal protection and a whole lot of harassment from right wing ideologues. It’s time to start treating ALL of our neighbors with a basic level of human decency.
“Complain about illegal aliens all you want, but if you wave a magic wand and deport them all tomorrow, we’d be in BIG trouble. Like it or not, our economy, especially the agricultural economy, runs on the backs of these people.”^ This, all the way.