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.
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.
RSS