Posted on 09/10/2008 1:49:42 PM PDT by AuntB
Not all of them are legal.
WESTON—Up on a hill overlooking this Eastern Oregon town of 701 people, Smith Frozen Foods turns raw produce from the surrounding fields into ready-to-eat products.
Smith’s goods appear in grocery stores under other brand names. But in tiny Weston, a water tank emblazoned with the capital letters S-M-I-T-H sits like a sentry greeting travelers on nearby Highway 11.
Gordon Smith, a United States senator from Oregon and the only Republican senator representing a West Coast state, has owned the plant his grandfather founded in 1919 for nearly 30 years.
“Son,” father Milan Smith once said, according to Gordon Smith’s 2006 memoir, “you can sell ice to Eskimos and coals to Newcastle.”
Today, Smith Frozen Foods generates millions in income for the senator, according to Smith’s 2007 financial disclosure report.
And in this town, Smith’s wealth looms large, even though the 56-year-old lawmaker seldom visits and calls nearby Pendleton his home. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Smith is the 12th-richest member of the U.S. Senate, with an estimated net worth between $8 million and $39 million—wealth that’s allowed him to buy a $3.5 million mansion in Bethesda, Md., property on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, a Park City, Utah, condominium and—more famously—four antique golf clubs worth $1.25 million.
The workers at Smith Frozen Foods, who clean the machinery, monitor production and pack upward of 50 million pounds of produce each year, earn about $80 a day, four or five days a week, 10 months a year—if they’re lucky.
One other thing—some of them appear to be illegal immigrants.
WW recently spent several days in Weston, and the nearby cities of Milton-Freewater and Walla Walla, Wash., where most of Smith’s employees live. WW spoke to dozens of current and former Smith workers, Latino advocates, court personnel, public defenders, educators, police administrators, church officials, social service agents and business owners and determined that some portion of Smith’s workforce comprises undocumented immigrants.
It’s a revelation that may not be newsworthy around Weston, where most people this reporter interviewed knew, or assumed, that the agricultural processing plant hired illegal immigrants.
But it is news to Oregon’s Republican foot soldiers, the Smith loyalists currently knocking on doors and raising money to support the two-term incumbent’s upcoming election.
“His staff makes sure his employees are legal,” says Rick Hickey, vice chairman of the Marion County Republican Party and a member of the anti-illegal-immigrant group Oregonians for Immigration Reform. “He’s said it on the Lars Larson [KXL radio] show at least three times in the last year.”
Knowingly hiring undocumented workers is a violation of federal law. Perhaps most important, during a year when Smith is seeking re-election, it is at odds with the senator’s public statements on the explosive issue of illegal immigration.
“[W]e cannot continue to absorb the flow of illegal immigrants, many of whom benefit from government services that American citizens and companies provide,” Smith wrote in a letter to constituents dated Jan. 31, 2007. “Reform is necessary, and our borders must be tightened. Anyone who wants to come to live or work in the United States must abide by our laws while paying taxes and learning the English language.”
While it might be next to impossible to operate an agricultural business in today’s economy without depending on the work of undocumented immigrants, Smith’s situation puts him in a unique bind. He is a U.S. senator who voted against granting amnesty to the millions of illegal immigrants currently living in the United States. He has denied that his business employs illegal immigrants, but he has become rich, in part, on their backs. And he has leveraged that success in business into a seat in the U.S. Senate.
It’s not at all clear how Oregonians will respond to this news, says Jennifer Duffy, a senior editor at The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan newsletter that calls Smith’s race one of the most highly contested elections in the country.
“Democrats will make a very big deal of this,” Duffy says. “Let’s see how voters react.”
SMITH FROZEN FOODS: The senator�s Weston plant employs hundreds of workers, most of whom are Latino.
At its peak, when seasonal workers supplement its year-round workforce, Smith Frozen Foods employs nearly 500 men and women at its Weston plant. According to the workers themselves, roughly 85 percent of them are Latino. They’re from Michoacán, Sinaloa, Guanajuato and the Federal District in Mexico, as well as several other Mexican states, Guatemala and El Salvador.
Virtually all signs at Smith Frozen Foods read in English and Spanish, starting at the entrance:
Please shut the door when entering or exiting. Thank you.
Favor de cerrar la puerta cuando entra o salga. Gracias.
Checks are given at the window.
Los cheques se entrega por la ventanilla.
Smith Frozen Foods is wholly owned by the senator and his wife, Sharon Smith, the company’s chief economic officer, according to the company’s website. And while day-to-day operations are overseen by President Kelly Brown, the senator’s longtime friend and fellow Mormon church leader, Smith is in regular contact with Brown by phone, workers say. Sharon Smith continues to sign the company’s paychecks, and the couple’s son-in-law recently started working inside the plant, workers say.
In June 2007, Lars Larson asked Smith on his radio program if he ran his business without employing any illegal immigrants.
“Yes,” Smith responded. “Well, as I’ve told you, we go the extra mile to make sure we do.”
Smith went on to say the company recently had had to fire two employees at the plant after managers discovered they were not lawfully permitted to work in the country.
About a year earlier, Brown gave The Oregonian a slightly different account, that the company had recently fired about 12 people, not two, following an audit of the plant’s hiring practices by federal immigration authorities.
“[M]any times, employers and employees are tripped up by fraudulent people,” Smith told The Oregonian in the same May 2006 story. “When that is found out, there is a termination. We have been very diligent in following the letter of the law.”
But there is ample evidence to suggest that the hiring of illegal workers is a regular fact of life at Smith’s operation.
The evidence is, for the most part, secondhand. This reporter spoke to several employees of the Weston facility, none of whom admitted to being an illegal immigrant, though one woman was identified as such by another worker. And one 44-year-old worker at Garrett Packing, a company in Milton-Freewater that is also owned by the senator and supplements the work of Smith Frozen Foods, told WW he worked for Smith for nearly a decade with a fake green card.
Still, there is ample indirect evidence that Smith’s plant hires illegal immigrants and keeps them in the plant’s employ for many seasons.
Some of Smith’s own employees acknowledge that the workforce includes illegal immigrants. Liduvina Ibarra, who is lawfully permitted to work in the United States and was employed by Smith for four seasons, estimated that 50 percent of Smith’s workers were illegal, though she offered no proof. Others at the plant put the figure much lower, under one-third.
Frank Herrera runs a tax preparation service in nearby Walla Walla that serves Spanish-speaking residents. Herrera says in the past year he has helped more than five Smith employees who didn’t have Social Security numbers file their tax returns. Because they were illegal immigrants, they filed their taxes with what are called Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers, which are available only to people ineligible for Social Security numbers.
“That’s just a fact of life,” Herrera says of Smith’s hiring undocumented workers. “There’s no question.”
One member of St. Patrick Catholic Church in Walla Walla, who declined to be identified, says she knows at least one fellow church member who is undocumented and currently works at Smith Frozen Foods.
Gail Siemers, a lawyer in Walla Walla, says she represents workers from Smith Frozen Foods arrested on criminal charges outside of work. When they’re booked in jail, prison officials check their immigration status, and in that way Siemers often learns her clients are undocumented workers. One illegal immigrant, Antonio Mendez Jr., who worked at Smith for several seasons, was in the Walla Walla County Jail on Monday on harassment charges and awaiting possible deportation. “When it’s going full bore, over 70 percent of the workers on the line [at Smith] are undocumented,” Siemers estimated.
Yes, he's a Rino, in every sense of the term and cousin to the democrat Udalls, but he's still better than his opponent for the Senate, Merkley, the democrat. Sad state of affairs since the Senate needs a good flushing.
Smith just responded to this story on the Lars Larson http://www.larslarson.com/
He called it 'slime', a hit piece, all lies. But he didn't offer much of a rebuttal except to say E verify was useless and we need a biometric system! Yeah, throw some more of our 'gold' at it, senator!
ping
In June 2007, Lars Larson asked Smith on his radio program if he ran his business without employing any illegal immigrants.
“Yes,” Smith responded. “Well, as I’ve told you, we go the extra mile to make sure we do.”
Were his lips moving? Just like the McCain-Kennedy `comprehensive immigration reform’ act promised “enforcement first” ... but they tried to ram it through without hearings. I wonder why?
If La Migra raided Smith & Co. you would see several new exits made in the plant.
So where do you stand on this issue, Governor Palin?
“So where do you stand on this issue, Governor Palin?”
Her press secretary is appearing on Lars tonight. Maybe we’ll get a clue!
Guests on National show later tonight
RNC Chairman Michael Duncan joins Lars to discuss the latest on the campaign trail
Governor Mitt Romney joins Lars to some of Senator Obama’s recent remarks
Maria Cornella, Palin’s Press Secretary, joins Lars to discuss the McCain campaign
Mark Krikorian joins Lars to discuss the lates news on immigration
Nancy Pfoetnhauer, McCain Policy Advisor, joins Lars to discuss some of McCain’s plans
Gorden Smith is a RINO, but I’m supporting him for his re-election. I just wish he would realize that ILLEGALS are CRIMINALS!!
I hear you. His opponent, Merkley (sp?) is just a bore,a liberal bore.
Figuring the Rats won't set 'em up.
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