While the defeat of the US Senate immigration bill was a dismaying disappointment to illegal immigrants and the groups that support them, it also created major worries for employers across the country who depend on immigrant workers.
Employers from agriculture and food-processing industries, as well as construction contractors and commercial landscapers were among the most persistent forces pushing for passage of the Senate bill, which failed on Thursday when senators voted 53 to 46 not to proceed to a vote.
The measure would have provided a path to legal status for millions of illegal immigrants, who make up a significant percentage of workers in many low-wage, labor intensive industries.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
The bill's defeat was hailed on Thursday by conservative groups and others who said it would have rewarded law-breaking immigrants and would have wrongly excused the employers who hired them. Now, employers say they face a bleak landscape of intensified raids by the immigration authorities and growing pressure to purge illegal immigrants from their work force, but no new options to bring in temporary foreign workers or help illegal workers become legal.
"It leaves most of our guys in a pretty tough spot," said Brewster Bevis, director of legislative affairs for Associated Builders and Contractors, a national organization of construction businesses.
"Most of our members are good actors, they believe the workers they have hired are legal," Bevis said. "But they wanted this reform so they can sleep better at night and don't have to fear potentially being visited by ICE," the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency.
Meatpacking employers were especially concerned about the defeat of the bill. Senate conservatives who opposed it, backed by a surge of support from irate voters, said they wanted to secure the nation's borders and crack down on employers of illegal immigrants before considering legalization measures.
"Immigration policy is divorced from enforcement, and the American employer, for one, is caught in the middle," said Jack Shandley, a vice president at Swift & Co, a meatpacking company in Greeley, Colorado. Immigration agents arrested 1,282 Swift workers in raids last December that cost the company more than US$45 million in lost production and worker replacement costs.
Leaders on all sides of the unusual coalition of business groups and immigrant advocate organizations that supported the bill said they would have to hunker down with a status quo they called dysfunctional.
"More people are going into hiding," said Juan Salgado, president of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, based in Chicago, which works with many illegal immigrants.
Salgado said most illegal immigrants have family ties to legal immigrants and US citizens and would not be likely to return to their home countries despite the heightened risk of deportation.
"What it means in practice," he said, "is that every day you get in the car and go to work to feed the children, but you are thinking: I may not come back. If they take me what happens to my family?"
Immigrant advocates said many illegal immigrants were not acutely disappointed because they did not have high expectations that the bill would pass.
The setback was more significant for the employers, who were represented by the American Chamber of Commerce the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition. Supporting the bill was a tricky proposition for many employers, and their advocacy remained muted through the debate.
They had to call for legalizing illegal workers without admitting they employed any in their own work sites.
Business leaders said they were troubled to find themselves on the wrong side of Republican lawmakers who had long been their allies. One of the most active companies behind the bill was Pilgrim's Pride, the nation's largest chicken company, with 56,500 workers, based in Pittsburg, Texas.
Senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, both Republicans of Texas, voted to kill the bill.
Cliff Butler, vice chairman of Pilgrim's Pride, said he was dismayed by calls from the bill's opponents for stepped-up deportation of illegal immigrants.
"I was surprised by how little import was given to the impact of that on millions of good people, and what it would to our economy to remove that labor force," Butler said. "They just ignored that totally."
Farmers and construction contractors said they anticipated labor shortages. They worried that they would have to continue to rely on the existing system for verifying the immigration status of new hires, which is known as Basic Pilot, even though it is error-prone and inefficient. Swift had participated for years in the program before the raids last year.
Farming and farmworker groups were slightly more optimistic. A proposal for a temporary worker program for agriculture, known as AgJobs, was incorporated into the Senate bill. Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein of California said she would seek to revive AgJobs in coming months by attaching it to other legislation.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained