Crossing over the state.
Arizona: The state senate has recently passed a new law that aims to tighten its already harsh laws against illegal immigrants. This bill makes it a state crime for immigrants not to carry authorization papers, requires the police ‘when practicable’ to check the immigration status of people they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally and allows people to sue cities and counties if the law is not being enforced. Now any cop in Arizona can ask anyone to prove their immigration status, and every cop in Arizona is compelled, under threat of lawsuit, to enforce federal immigration laws. Police do not require warrants or the proof of probable cause to detain suspected illegal immigrants.
While the authors of this bill had the best interests at heart, the food industry can’t help but be alarmed that this could have a major negative effect on them.
The Atlantic tells us: “Salinas, California, is known as America’s salad bowl, but each fall, as evening temperatures drop in Steinbeck’s home valley, farmers pack up and head south to what the industry simply calls The Desert. From November to March, major suppliers of lettuce, spinach, arugula, and radicchio all farm in and around Yuma, Arizona, a small town of steakhouses, strip clubs, and retirement communities. Their production accounts for more than one third of the country’s annual leafy greens. Seemingly permanent factories in Salinas are dismantled, packed into trailers, and reconstructed in The Desert in time for the first harvest, relying on veteran farmers to determine when the crop will be ready. Glimmering steel tanks used for washing greens in a chlorinated bath, giant driers that tumble the washed greens, and conveyors that gently move the fragile leaves along and into bags for retail are all portable. And with the crop and the factory go many undocumented workers.”
If the new law is passed, many of the harvesters will feel the threat of being deported hanging over their heads like Edgar Allan Poe’s swinging pendulum and may choose not to work in Arizona. The Department of Labor estimates that of the country’s 2.5 million farm workers, most of whom are Hispanic, 52 percent are undocumented. The UFW believes the figure is actually 80 to 90 percent, making the industry a prime target for enforcement. Deportation is relatively inconsequential for some harvesters in Yuma, since many are seasonal workers who commute daily from Mexico, where they board buses just north of the border for a 20-minute ride to the fields. But many of the year-round migrants who follow the crops from Salinas to Yuma and back againand who account for up to 40 percent of Arizona lettuce harvesterslive full-time in the U.S., and for them, to risk deportation is to risk estrangement from established communities and families.