Yuma provides more than 90 percent of the nation’s lettuce in winter, but growers and harvesters say the state’s employer sanctions law could disrupt production. Nearly all the farm labor is from Mexico and — growers say — is legal.

Nearly identical dusty, white buses pull up to the San Luis Port of Entry just south of Yuma as nightfall creeps in, dropping off thousands of workers returning to Mexico after a day spent working the lettuce fields, warehouses and shipping centers spread across southern Arizona.
The field workers are easy to spot. They walk in small groups, wearing thick, muddy rubber boots that look like footwear on fishing waders. Older workers wear cowboy hats; their younger counterparts donning baseball caps with logos of United States sports teams.
Fernando Lopez Reyes, who works for an agricultural shipping company, is one of the estimated 20,000 to 25,000 workers who cross the border into the U.S. every day to work. He insists that he is a legal worker who was granted a federal work visa, and he is certain Arizona’s employer sanctions law won’t affect him.
“I’ll be working tomorrow and the next day and the day after,” he said in Spanish, rifling through his wallet to produce one of his carefully folded pay stubs.
But some of the leaders of Yuma’s agricultural industry aren’t so sure. They fear enforcement of the state’s new law aimed at punishing businesses that employ illegal immigrants will make it more difficult to find workers in an industry where a shortage already exists. The law kicked in Jan. 1, requiring business owners to verify that all of their workers are legal, or face losing their business licenses.
The problem isn’t hordes of wage-depressing illegal immigrants. If anything, the industry is grappling with labor shortages. Americans are not interested. The demand for workers is intense. Wages can approach $20 an hour for work in the fields, industry leaders said.
And agriculture insiders argue a combination of strong local enforcement, economics and a shared desire for a secure border make documented workers from Mexico the only realistic option for employers.
The employer sanctions law only targets businesses that knowingly employ illegal immigrants. Honest businesses will not be harmed, supporters of the law have argued.
But even with precautions, “it” can happen, said C.R. Waters, a board member of the Yuma Fresh Vegetables Association. “And that’s what scares us about employer sanctions.”
In the field
The fields are yielding a plentiful crop this winter, but any enthusiasm or relief held by the farmers and vegetable shippers has been tempered with anxiety and loathing over the passing of last year’s Legal Arizona Workers Act.
The area produces a vast majority of the nation’s winter supply of iceberg, romaine, red and leaf lettuce, and is also the origin of large amounts of cauliflower, celery and broccoli. Growing food products is a $1.3 billion-a-year industry for the county, according to the Arizona Department of Agriculture.
Standing on rows of soil bearing Yuma’s cash crop of lettuce, Waters laughs when asked what a ten-day suspension — the penalty prescribed for a first time violation of the state law — would spell for a business.
“It could potentially put someone out of business for good,” said Waters, explaining interruptions of irrigation, pest control, crop thinning and harvesting would ruin the time-sensitive product. Customers, such as retail grocery stores and shippers, would go elsewhere, anywhere for the product. “It would be devastating for a company to be suspended for ten days.”
Planting for this year’s lettuce crop began in September, he said. For each acre planted, about $3,000 is invested in seed, pest control, water and labor. In theory, a good acre can produce about 25,000 heads, he said.
But the crew he observed has passed over a lot of lettuce. He kicks a head from the soil, and finds the culprit: a hidden dime-sized portion of frost damage on a leaf. Others are slightly undersized.
“It is skilled labor,” he said, watching workers cut and package the crop. If not for the occasional brief chatter and constant ripping sound produced by tape guns securing individually bagged lettuce, the scene would be completely silent.
Workers line up in pairs behind a slowly creeping deck shielded by a canopy. The trailing partner kneels down, stabbing lettuce heads from their root with a short, blunt-tipped knife affixed to a wrist with a drawstring.
Once removed, the head is hand-held and with two fast slashes its outer leafs are gone. The knife is released, left to dangle while the newly freed fingers rip a plastic bag from the bunch secured around the waist.
In another quick motion, the bag’s opening is found and flicked open and the lettuce is dropped in and the item is placed on a tray connected to the crawling dock.
Seconds later, the pickers’ partner grabs the bag, spins it hard and secures the twisted excess with a tape gun. The bag is stuffed label-up into a carton that rests on a rail overhead. Twenty-four heads fill each carton, which are slid from the track when full and stacked on the deck by other workers.
The pace is fast and constant, as lettuce heads are densely planted. The moving deck will run about the length of a football field before turning to harvest more.
The work is seasonal, occurring for about four to six months a year. Experienced harvesting crews usually stick together and often return to work year after year. If a foreman leaves an employer, the crew usually follows, said Waters.
While a new hire can expect to earn around $9 an hour, veteran harvesting crews attract per-piece rates, allowing them to collect based on the amount of cartons packed. This prized pay scale can earn a worker $18-20 an hour.
All of the workers provide documents necessary for the I-9 employment eligibility verification requirements. “If it looks like a real I.D. and the form is acceptable, you have to accept it,” Waters said.
In the office
Paul Muthart manages Pasquinelli Produce, one of the Yuma’s largest growers. This year, the company will grow vegetables on 7,000 of the county’s 60,000 acres used for agriculture and sell the product to shipping titans like Dole and Taylor Farms.
Though the pinch of sanctions has yet to be seen, Muthart is most concerned with the state law’s collision with federal requirements — and what he views as a disproportionately strong response to infractions.
The legislation requires employers to screen applicants through E-Verify, a computer program operated the U.S. Social Security Administration and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that matches the names and Social Security numbers provided by prospective employees.
Under federal regulations, the program is strictly limited to new hires. But the Arizona employer sanctions law mandates a conflicting responsibility by holding businesses liable for employing any undocumented worker regardless of date of hiring, he said.
Pasquinelli Produce, which reaps between $15 million to 20 million in sales each year, employs about 50 full-time employees. But its bulk force — some 350 seasonal workers, nearly all Mexican — return annually to grow the winter crop, said Muthart.
And even if a foreman or supervisor suspected an existing employee of not being legally eligible to work, without proof that suspicion is not grounds to terminate a
worker. Neither is a no-match letter sent by the Social Security Administration in response to a rejected entry into the E-Verify program, he said.
“What am I supposed to do about the guy in the field who has been employed for three years≠” Muthart asks with frustration. “What am I supposed to do now≠”
Catch-22
Labor law attorney Tom Rogers, writer and editor of Arizona’s labor law handbook for employers, backs both of Muthart’s assertions.
Federal immigration and labor law prevent employers from firing workers on the basis of suspected national origin to protect against on-the-job retaliation and discrimination, he said.
“That puts the employer in a Catch-22,” said Rogers, referring to Arizona businesses attempting to comply with state and federal law. “The knowledge (under federal law) the employer is required to have is a good faith completion of the I-9 (form).”
Like many in the industry, Muthart communicates extreme frustration with federal inaction to cope with illegal immigration and its failure to boost the number of immigrant worker visas.
The employer sanctions law, which Muthart views as hastily assembled and poorly vetted, only adds another threat to an industry already at the mercy of weather, pests, and shifting marketplace demands, he said.
Left unharvested, food rots. This fact, he said, places an absolute premium on the immediate availability of labor. “Our labor force needs to be there when we need them there. It’s a perishable product. If we don’t get our crop harvested it’s worthless,” he said.
And the value of that food is immense, said Doug Mellon, owner of Mellon Farms.
“Yuma County produces somewhere between 90 and 95 percent of this country’s produce from Thanksgiving to Easter,” said Mellon, who noted his company hasn’t hired illegal immigrants for about three years that he is aware of.
Now, though, one infraction could shut down a business and cause hundreds of legal workers to temporarily lose their jobs. Another violation means they would be out of work permanently.
A beefed up Border Patrol and the presence of the National Guard has already drastically cut down the amount of illegal immigration through Yuma. That population, Mellon said, is far more interested in moving north as fast as possible to cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas and Chicago, where it far less likely that illegal immigrants will be arrested.
Agriculture bears a large part of the public’s attention when it comes to illegal immigration due to the obvious visibility of workers. But the undocumented, he said, are much more likely to be found in restaurants, hotels and the construction industries.
Mellon, who speaks with a slight twang, is resentful and aggravated by the topic of employer sanctions. The federal government’s failure to heed the agriculture lobby’s demand for increased guest-worker visas has left him visibly bitter.
“My first opinion is that this (immigration) is a federal issue,” he said. “I’m not very happy with my federal legislators. They haven’t done anything the past two years besides re-run for office.”
There is an effort underway to create a guest-worker program in the state that would create a new way for Mexican workers to legally enter the U.S. for an extended period of time for work purposes. But it remains to be seen whether Arizona lawmakers and the federal government will follow through.
Mellon’s role on the Yuma Fresh Vegetable Association, a conglomerate of local growers and shippers, has been taken over by his son. Members of the group have traveled several times to Washington, D.C., over the past few years to press elected officials from Arizona for commuter visas and a guest worker program.
“They’ve been well-received and they’re told they will get right on it, but nothing happens,” he said.
Now employers in Arizona must pick up the slack, he said, lamenting what he regards as a new responsibility of detecting phony documents given by job applicants. Lawful Mexican workers already present their documents to border security every day, and illegal immigrants would hardly be a reliable source of labor.
“Are you going to sneak across the border every day to come and work for me≠” he asked. “No.”
The drain
Both Mellon and Muthart take immediate exception when presented with claims brought by staunch supporters of employer sanctions that illegal immigrants drain resources devoted to health care, education and law enforcement.
Their workers are legally verified and pay taxes. The real method to cut down illegal immigration and the associated expenses would be attacking under-the-table hiring and pay, they said.
But the pair differs on the eventual effects of the current employer sanctions legislation.
Muthart said he wants to remain optimistic, but worries the law could drive Arizona’s agriculture-based businesses out of the state and perhaps out of the country, leaving a large part of the nation’s food supply almost entirely in foreign hands.
Mellon, who regards the law as an “asinine” product “written by people without the slightest idea what they’re doing,” isn’t ready to go that far.
He visions that machinery could soon displace the bulk of Yuma’s lettuce-harvesting workforce. But clearly offended by what he perceives as ingratitude shown toward the agricultural community, he offers a scenario.
“People are liable to wake up in the grocery store they thought produced lettuce and fruit and what-have you,” he said. “They are going to wake up and find out they don’t produce that stuff in the back room at Safeway. Maybe that’s a good thing.”