Hispanics may stay away from work at poultry plants this week

ALBERTVILLE, Al.
Hispanics upset about Alabama's new immigration law may take a page from civil rights and union pioneers this week and stay home a day to demonstrate their economic impact. "They don't believe they are the ones running the economy, but if they don't show up for work, those big companies are going to lose a lot of money, and maybe they will pressure lawmakers to change the law." Elia Ortega of Albertville said Friday, referring to the area's big poultry plants.

Ortega's job keeps her in close touch with the Hispanic community, which numbers an estimated 8,000 in this Sand Mountain city of 24,000. She asked her employer not be identified because she was speaking for only herself.
Wednesday is the day Ortega said Hispanics may stay home from Albertville's three major poultry plants: Tyson, Pilgrim's Pride and Wayne Farms. Together, they employ several thousand people in processing millions of chickens each year.
The impact on the Sand Mountain poultry business has been mixed since a federal judge upheld much of the law. Wayne Farms reported more absences last week. Tyson Foods reported no abnormal absenteeism, and Pilgrim's Pride reported a "slight" increase early in the week, but "back to normal" by Friday.
"We have had some increase in absences," Wayne Farms spokesman Frank Singleton said Thursday. "We had a job fair (Tuesday) and made about 120 job offers. About 350 people showed up." That was a large turnout, Singleton said.
At least one poultry company is seeking workers another way, according to Anna Smith, manager of an Albertville rental agency. Smith said she was called a month ago, when the new law was becoming big news, by a job placement agency seeking apartments for foreign workers coming to Albertville on temporary visas to work in the poultry plants.
John Weathers, who owns the apartments being sought, said at least some of them are from Ethiopia. Weathers' company did not rent to the agency. Attempts to confirm the presence of the workers were unsuccessful last week.
"We know the race (e.g. White, Black, Hispanic, Asian) of the people we employ, but we don't specifically track" how many of our workers are from other countries, Tyson spokesman Worth Sparkman said Thursday.
Albertville is the most integrated of the small Alabama towns transformed by years of Hispanic immigration. Arriving first to work for the area's poultry mills and farms, Hispanics, mostly from Mexico, later opened restaurants, stores and other businesses. Last year, Mayor Lindsey Lyons estimated the Hispanic population at 8,000, or a full third of Albertville's population.
Five years ago, when crowds, largely Hispanic, gathered across the country to protest a pending crackdown on illegal immigration, an estimated 5,000 marched in Albertville. It was the largest turnout in the state, and about as big as the same-day protest in Oakland, Calif.
Three years later, the Albertville city council made English the town's official language.
While some immigrants are considering another protest this week, others are simply leaving or making plans to leave. "A few have left, and many others are doing whatever they can to get ready to leave," Ortega said Friday.  "They are living in mortal fear right now that their families are going to be split apart," rental property owner Weathers said Wednesday.
"Most of the people have someone in the house who's documented," said Weathers, who requires documentation before renting. But many households have one or more members who are not documented, Weathers said, and it is the fear of what will happen to them that is driving reaction to the law.
"The kids are worrying about the parents," agreed Marjorie Centeno, manager of the Hispanic grocery Tienda el Sol on Albertville's main street. Centeno spoke Wednesday standing in an empty store that she said soon could be forced to close due to lack of business. "No customers today," she said shortly before noon.
Albertville city schools had 107 of its 1,100 Hispanic students withdraw in the days after the judge's decision, said Superintendent Dr. Ric Ayer on Wednesday.
Absences among Hispanic students also reached 107 the Thursday after the law was upheld on Wednesday, but dropped to 58 Monday and 38 Tuesday as early fears subsided. Late week numbers were not available Friday.
Those withdrawals will not affect the system's state funding, Ayer said. They happened after the yearly funding enrollment was taken, and they are scattered across classes and won't mean a need for fewer teachers. The system has 4,100 students in all.
Across the street from Ayer's office, Marshall County license and tag clerk Taye Langley said Wednesday that the new law was affecting everyone but the Hispanic community, which stayed away last week. On Wednesday, she saw "two or three" Hispanics and turned one away for inadequate documentation. That was down from "30 to 40" Hispanics on a normal day.
The Anglo community in Albertville is finding the same problems with the law cited across the state, Langley said. Without proper documentation, new tags cannot be issued. That's delayed divorced couples who haven't retitled their vehicles after the breakup and people with spouses serving overseas whose documentation is with them.
Prisoners eligible for work-release will help blunt any job shortage caused by the law, according to politicians who support it, but the benefit is limited in North Alabama.
The state placed 283 North Alabama prisoners in work-release jobs in June, 316 in July, 230 in August, and 239 in September, according to Department of Corrections spokesman Brian Corbett.
But the state has only 400 eligible inmates at its work-release center in Decatur, Corbett said, meaning there is a limit to how many jobs prisoners can take.
Despite reports that Hispanics have been afraid to go to the hospital since the judge ruled, North Alabama's major trauma center said it was business as usual in its emergency room over last weekend.
"We don't do a citizenship check when somebody comes to us for care," Huntsville Hospital spokesman Burr Ingram said.
Some businesses do expect to benefit if the law succeeds in scaring off Hispanic workers. Ricky Frazier, owner of R&S Roofing in Madison County, does not hire undocumented Hispanics but said he has competed successfully with companies that do.  Frazier does expect to get more work now. Without their Hispanic workers, he said, "The big roofing companies won't be able to get to all of (the jobs)."
Still others say the financial impact will continue to "trickle up" from workers to business owners if Hispanics do leave in large numbers. "Anything that needs to be cleaned is cleaned by Mexicans," Latin American history professor Dr. Sandra Mendiola told an immigration conference in Huntsville last week. "No restaurant is going to survive without them."
Mendiola said the minimum wage in Mexico is $5.25 a day. "How are you going to support a family on that?" she asked. "It's impossible. That's the (immigrants') motivation."
Whether the motivation is strong enough could be determined by how aggressively police enforce the law. Marshall County deputies arrested one of the first men charged with violating it Wednesday morning. They picked up Juan Vargas, 28, on a charge of sexual abuse of a child under 12 and added a charge of willful failure to carry alien registration, according to a report in The Gadsden Times.
Vargas, facing a serious criminal charge, is a poster child for supporters of the new law, but Hispanic advocates say he doesn't represent the majority of the Hispanic community. And federal attorneys have argued in court that the federal government already places a priority on deporting violent criminals.
In Madison County and other counties across the state, attorneys and law enforcement officials spent much of last week discussing the details of training officers to enforce the law without prohibited racial profiling. In one statewide teleconference, they viewed a Powerpoint presentation on the law of 101 slides, an HPD captain told the Huntsville immigration conference.
The City of Huntsville, Madison and Madison County are coordinating training and enforcement, officials say, but they were not ready to begin Friday. "Right now, we're going to do nothing," the HPD captain told the conference.