n increasing numbers, Hispanic immigrants are putting down roots in the Roanoke Valley. They're pouring concrete, opening hair salons and filling classrooms. Some employers, meanwhile, are attributing their success to this new labor pool. In this occasional series, The Roanoke Times explores the local impact of the national debate about immigration.
During a busy Friday night dinner waiter Jesus Malaga serves an armload of food to their Anglo customers. Malaga came to America four years ago from Mexico and, like many Mexican immigrants in Roanoke, first landed a job at El Rodeo.
Hearts torn apart
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Edgardo "Baby" Cardenas, 21, hugs his younger sister Mitzi, 6, outside their family home in Sauta, Mexico. The money that he earns in the U.S. helps fund his younger sisters’ educations as well as his mother’s water-purification business.Adrian marches with Maria Elena’s kindergarten class, corralling the group as needed and videotaping the event with the new digital Sony he brought back with him. He bought it in July and shot hours of life on the farm with the hope that showing his family where he lived would make it easier when they parted again in the spring.
“Maybe it will help some,” he says, doubtfully.
Every January, his wife, Gloria, gets depressed. And every spring after he leaves, Maria Elena loses weight, saying she’s too sad to eat.
Next year, when a Democrat-controlled Congress tackles the issue of immigration reform, Adrian Castellon hopes there’s a provision in there for the rare people like him: Mexican H-2A guest workers who have bucked the trend of sneaking into the country and instead emigrated legally for work.
After 17 years of working seasonally on Johnny and Sharon Angell’s Penhook tobacco farm in Franklin County, Castellon hopes legislative reform aimed at addressing the country’s labor shortage will finally help him realize his dream of relocating his family to the United States.
But, if the past political battles are any indication, the 36-year-old has a lot more waiting ahead of him.
“Based on current law, there’s no way to help him get his papers,” said Roanoke immigration lawyer Jeff Van Doren. “His only real hope is for the law to change, and I’m doubtful that we’ll see real comprehensive reform anytime soon.”
Here are some of the legal hurdles Castellon faces, according to farm lobbyists and immigration experts:
- The Virginia Agricultural Growers Association, the South Boston-based farming cooperative that oversees 1,300 H-2A workers in Virginia, chose not to lobby earlier this year for a reform initiative known as AgJobs. That program was a provision of the Senate-approved comprehensive immigration reform bill that ultimately died after the House passed an enforcement-only, fence-building bill. It would have allowed many illegal farm workers already in the United States to become legal permanent residents and would have streamlined the current guest-worker program. “In my opinion, it would have rewarded illegal activity and punished the ones who’ve been doing it right,” said Eloise Wilder, the co-op’s executive director.
- The last time temporary agricultural workers were granted residency — one result of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act — throngs of newly legalized guest workers left farms for easier jobs in cities and towns. Groups such as VAGA don’t want to see that repeated.
- H-2A workers such as Castellon have no one to lobby for them and are typically unfamiliar with their legal rights, according to Virginia Tech agriculture and applied economics professor Jeff Alwang. “From what I’ve heard [in earlier legislative debates], the H-2A guys haven’t been spoken for at all,” Alwang said. “The people most likely to benefit are those who are here working in much larger numbers, illegally. “The truth is, if you’re interested in becoming a long-term resident or citizen, you’re better off coming in illegally and hoping for a change in the law than you are working legally through this program.”
- As the law stands now, if Castellon applied for a green card, he would no longer be eligible to work as an H-2A worker. Once a petition is filed, petitioners have to wait in their home countries for green cards to come through, a wait that typically takes five to six years. “The fact that someone who’s been following the letter of the law for 17 years and still can’t get legal is one of the most obvious inadequacies of the system,” said Salem immigration attorney Christine Lockhart Poarch.
- The thorniest issue in the upcoming debate — what to do with the 11 million illegal immigrants already here — is likely to stall compromise on reform legislation. “The real issue in my opinion is that there are jobs here that need to be filled and there’s a willing labor supply, which is mainly being filled through illegal immigrants right now,” Van Doren said.
“If we really want to protect our border and stop the illegal flow, we’ve got to get something comprehensive passed.”
News researcher Belinda Harris contributed to this report.They applied for a temporary visitor’s visa so Gloria and Maria Elena could stay for a month on the farm, with the Angells’ blessing, but U.S. embassy officials turned them down.
As the parade winds its way around the village periphery, friends stop Adrian to welcome him back. It’s his sixth day home, and with each day away from the confines and constant work of the farm, Adrian grows more animated, meandering the village with old friends and laughing with his daughter like he has all the time for her in the world.
Several friends ask if he can help them get a visa to work the Angells’ farm, too. He’ll try, he tells them, but he won’t know how many workers Johnny Angell will need until spring.
Angell lost $80,000 on his crop this year because of bad weather and declining tobacco prices. Earlier in the fall, he told a reporter that one of the main reasons he continues farming the crop is because he worries what would happen to Adrian and the others if they couldn’t work for him.
When Adrian hears this, he nods his head: “It’s the same for me; if something happened to Johnny and he couldn’t pay to bring us up, I would work for him for free until things were better.”
There are more people marching in the parade than there are standing on the sidelines: school bands, preschoolers carrying photographs of dead Mexican presidents, girls wearing the embroidered and beaded costumes of their indigenous forebears.
At the tail end of the parade, several gray-haired field workers saunter down the dirt road dancing. One says this is the first day off she’s had since September, when the rainy season ended.
After the parade, bands play mariachi and Mexican pop at the town plaza, and the village hums with dancing and mingling well into the night. It’s the ultimate Mexican rite, the fiesta, a cross between Christianity and traditional native culture — a meld of Mexico’s “mestizo,” or mixed blood, heritage. For weeks, people work longer shifts so they can save up to buy a new sombrero or a pair of boots for this day.
Adrian has only missed one fiesta in his 17 years of migrating back and forth. He’s the rare working-class Mexican who can partake in the global economy and, at the same time, nurture his roots.
He knows that most Nortenos in the village don’t have the luxury of riding a Greyhound to and from the United States; they have to sneak. As a pop song about illegal immigrants blared in the town square earlier in the day: “For love and money, there is no risk.”
“I’m a lucky man because little by little I have accumulated what I have,” Adrian says. “But sometimes we feel like our hearts are being torn apart.”
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