For decades our society welcomed workers to work in our agricultural, construction, manufacturing, food processing, hospitality and healthcare industries, among others. We welcomed them because we needed them. We needed them to pick crops, install roofs and drywall, do framing, and excavation work, work in processing plants, fast food industry, hospitality and healthcare industries and many other industries that lacked sufficient workers.
They have the highest concentrations in jobs many of the native-born workers find too difficult, too hot, too labor intensive, too dirty, etc. But in such conditions, the immigrant workforce willingly shows up to work.
As a society, we should have made a viable pathway for them to come legally to work here. Many think such a legal pathway existed. Yet no such legal pathway existed for the 11 million to 15 million that have come and are working here (an estimated two-thirds of whom have been here for more than 10 years). Our federal legislature, which has the sole authority and responsibility to take these steps, has failed for decades to fix the broken system, despite many pleas. Both political parties had opportunities.
Despite this chronically broken legal immigration system, the economic realities for needed workers have taken priority; we as a society looked the other way as we put them to work year after year. Why did we look the other way? Because we wanted and needed the fruits of their labor. There was no other option.
As more than 40 years have passed, is anyone surprised that the problem has gotten substantially worse? It is going to be a complicated problem to solve but the crisis we are facing begs for our federal legislators to finally do the hard work. Hopefully the political climate is now ripe for solutions to be created.
We in Utah discussed many of these issues in 2010 when Utah adopted the Utah Compact, created by a task force I was honored to serve on. I was also pleased to be a signer on the initial Utah Compact along with hundreds of business leaders in Utah — as well as a signer when it was reaffirmed in 2019.
Today, many leaders including Gov. Cox properly state that they continue to support the principles of the Utah Compact and its balanced approach to these challenging issues. Unfortunately, other politicians and members in the public are proposing bills and actions that are contrary to the principals of the Utah Compact.
Some of this political rhetoric is unsurprisingly oversimplistic, and ignores both our own complicity in the problem, and the economic and humanitarian realities involved.
Everyone supports the effort to arrest and prosecute violent criminals regardless of the status of their documentation. That is already part of the existing criminal justice system. For the small percentage of convicted criminals that are undocumented, they should be deported if their country of origin will even take them back.
Gov. Cox recently reported that there were about 200 undocumented individuals in Utah prisons. That is a very small percentage of inmates in the state and an extremely small percent of the immigrant population. Statistically, the crime rate amongst the immigrant community is lower than the crime rate in the native-born population — something confirmed over and over again, across many studies. Stanford University economist Ran Abramitzky, for instance, shows that across recent decades, immigrants are 60% less likely to spend time in prison than U.S.-born people.
You would not know that listening to much of today’s rhetoric.
Is ICE targeting only the violent criminals? No. Within days of the new administration, up to 75% of the field workers in Bakersfield California were not showing up for work to pick the current crop of oranges, according to a local citrus industry spokesperson. Why are they not showing up? Because ICE has been threatening to detain them.
Farmers around the country are sounding the alarm about what is going to happen to their crops. Will these enforcement actions reduce the costs of groceries when they drive away many of the field workers that harvest our crops?
The chilling effect is rapidly spreading among the workforce across the country.
Gov. Cox has laudably challenged the Utah construction and development industry to build 35,000 more homes in the next five years, a field I have worked in as a construction lawyer for more than 45 years. Builders are anxious to do so. The governor wants to work with local governments to streamline the regulatory and permitting process, also commendable.
May I now ask who is going to build those 35,000 new homes at an accelerated pace if the federal administration deports a substantial number of undocumented workers? (Although official statistics are not available, we know the number is significant; companies have employees fill out I-9s as required by the law, although verification of social security numbers isn’t required).
A pending bill here in Utah, HB 214, is a backdoor approach to try to force undocumented workers to self-deport. The sponsor claims that the bill is to address identity theft — by forcing businesses with more than five employees to E-Verify all employees. But the truth, as explained by the group supporting the bill, is that its goal of forcing E-Verify is to cause the undocumented workers to self-deport.
It would be appropriate for Utah to enact such a requirement if we were simultaneously creating a legal means by which all such employees could obtain a social security number or work permit number. But no such proposal is included because Utah has no authority to do so. Hence, the likeliest effect of the bill would be to force almost all undocumented employees out of the workforce.
What would be the financial and economic impact of such a bill, especially on the many Utah industries that rely heavily upon those workers? Are those adverse effects even being discussed?
No solutions to these concerns are being proposed. But the realities cannot be ignored. When the state Legislature is in a position to address these issues holistically and have productive solutions, they should do so. But starting first with an enforcement provision that has the goal of forcing the workers out of the state is misguided. It is contrary to the principals of the Utah Compact — and to overarching concepts to guide solutions we could consider, as articulated well in a recent op-ed in this paper from Derek Miller the President of the Salt Lake Chamber.
Let’s stop pretending there are millions in line to come here to do the work being performed by those that have come in the last decades. No such legal line exists. If it existed, they would have been coming and the existing shortfalls in workers would have been met.
It’s time to be united in a constructive discussion for reasonable solutions. Perhaps the political will can be summoned to create a balanced approach to adopt a process to vet the current undocumented workers and their families already here and working hard. That would be a small fraction of the cost and not negatively impact our economy. That is consistent with the 14-year-old request from the Utah Compact to our federal delegation to find reasonable solutions to these problems.
Robert F. Babcock has been a civil engineer/construction lawyer in Utah for over 45 years. He is the president of Babcock Scott and Babcock.