Seasonal Foreign Workers Arrive, Not All Have Legal Status

ELLSWORTH, Maine – The “summer folk” who begin arriving in Downeast Maine about this time each year include not only well-to-do vacationers, but also thousands of low-income seasonal workers.

Many who come each summer to rake blueberries in Hancock and Washington counties are Latinos from Mexico and throughout Central America, Haitians and Native Americans from the Canadian Maritimes.

Other seasonal workers are Mexicans, Jamaicans and Puerto Ricans who work for local landscapers and other seasonal employers. Still others come from Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and other Eastern European countries to clean rooms, wait tables and wash dishes for the seasonal hospitality trade.

As Tim Francis of Ellsworth learned last week, not all such workers are in Maine legally.

A routine commercial vehicle inspection by Maine State Police last week on Route 3 in Trenton resulted in the detention of one of Francis’s temporary workers at Atlantic Landscape Construction, Jose Acosta Cardona, a native of Honduras.

A passenger in one of the two vehicles inspected, Cardona was taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, who determined he was in the U.S. illegally after a previous deportation. He faces a deportation hearing in U.S. District Court in Bangor.

Two other passengers, a Mexican and another Honduran, were written up on lesser charges of immigration violations.

“It’s certainly been a learning experience for us,” said Francis, who moved his landscaping business of 30 years from Jonesport to Ellsworth four years ago in response to a high-end real estate boom. “This incident was pretty upsetting to us. We’re certainly not trying to harbor illegal workers, just trying to fill a worker void.”

Francis said his workforce of 45 to 50 people usually includes seven Puerto Ricans who have been on his payroll for many years from April through December.

“As Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States, they don’t require any special documentation to work,” he said. “This year I also hired eight to 10 Hispanics through Juan Perez, a labor contractor out of Harrington. They’re actually his employees, not ours, and we’re struggling with how to make sure their credentials are real."

Francis said he met with Perez after the incident in Trenton.

“I told him that he’s going to have to verify that workers’ credentials are good, as we obviously don’t want anybody here who shouldn’t be,” Francis said. “This was a one-strike-and you’re-out situation, and we’ve cut down to six our labor force from him to make the point that this is not the way we want to do business.

“These are good people who work hard, but somehow we’ve got to know how to disseminate the paperwork,” Francis said. “This may be something that just doesn’t work for us. It’s our first time around the track with this fellow [Perez], and it’s certainly been a learning experience for us.”

The owner of The Mexican Store and Restaurant on Route 1 in Harrington, Juan Perez Centeno, 44, said he’s been serving as a broker for temporary workers since January. As such, he said, he finds employment for workers and withholds and files their state and federal payroll tax obligations.

Perez said he has placed about 40 workers in fish processing and landscaping jobs from Lubec to Ellsworth. Most, he says, are American citizens who live year-round in and around Harrington, where Perez has lived since 2000.

“I use the papers they bring in to verify that they are in the U.S. legally, but the problem is we don’t always know if the papers are good, or no good,” he said.

“It’s been going so-so,” he said of his new labor broker business. “Whether I continue to do this all depends. I don’t want any problems with anybody.”

Jeff Gammelin, the owner of Freshwater Stone & Brick Work in Orland, said he hired two Mexican workers through Perez, but let them go this week after only two weeks on the job.

Gammelin’s business of 30 years employs 35 workers who quarry, fabricate and install granite and other stone products.

“We tried it, and it just didn’t work,” he said. “The language barrier was a real problem for us because every piece of custom stonework we do has something unique about it that needs to be explained.”

Charles Giosia, Freshwater Stone’s controller, said he inspected the papers of the two men hired through Perez.

“We looked at whatever documents they had — passports, immigration cards, driver’s licenses, Social Security cards — and they appeared good to me,” Giosia said. “But we hired these workers through a broker, Juan Perez, so the bulk of the responsibility was his.”

Giosia said he copied the documents and then accessed a Social Security Administration Web site to determine where the workers’ Social Security cards were originally issued. He said he found it “curious” that one card originated in North Dakota, the other in Minnesota.

Last week’s incident in Trenton, Giosia said, “made me question Juan Perez a little bit.” The two workers hired through Perez were terminated because they often arrived late for work, Giosia said, not because of questions about their immigration status.

“We start here at 7 a.m., and they weren’t getting here until nearly 8,” Giosia said. “Mr. Perez was providing their transportation, and there wasn’t a lot of responsibility there.”
Juan Perez Febles, director of the Maine Department of Labor’s Division of Migrant & Immigration Services, said there is no shortage of illegal seasonal workers in Maine, and elsewhere.

“The Mexican Council in Boston estimates there are 10.5 million Mexicans in this country and that 5.5 million are here illegally,” he said. “So, when people ask me if there are undocumented workers in Maine, my answer is ‘Is the Pope Catholic?’”

George Rio, district director for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division in New Hampshire, said employers of temporary workers and the brokers who place them share the responsibility for ensuring such workers are legal.

“Both should be checking the I-9 employment eligibility certification papers,” he said.

HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY. Maine’s hotel and restaurant trade continues to wrestle with new, post-9/11 federal regulations on issuing visas for non-agricultural temporary workers, said Greg Dugal, the executive director of the Freeport-based Maine Innkeepers Association.

An annual limit of 66,000 such visas nationally was recently relaxed through extensions for foreign workers who previously held such jobs.

“Prior to the quota, of the 3,300 such workers in Maine in the year 2003, 2,800 were employed in the hospitality industry,” Dugal said. “Last year, the quota was reached by March, which was a problem. This year, by filing for extensions, people seem less stressed out.”

MIGRANT WORKERS. This year’s late summer blueberry harvest is expected to attract as many as 3,000 migrant workers, said Barbara Ginley, executive director of the Maine Migrant Health Program.

“There are usually about 8,000 to 10,000 people involved in the harvest, but only 2,000 to 3,000 of those are migrant workers,” she said. “About half are Native Americans who come down from Canada. The others are Latinos: a large number of Mexicans and Central Americans. We’ve also seen small crews of Haitians, Cubans and Dominicans.”

Last year’s “lousy” blueberry crop and increased mechanization of the harvesting process could reduce this year’s migrant population, she said.

“Word gets out pretty fast,” she said. “If people didn’t have a good experience during harvest last year, they may not make the trip this year.”