As federal immigration agents began stepped-up enforcement efforts nationwide this past week as part of the Trump administration’s pledged crackdown on unauthorized immigrants, the owners of local businesses that rely heavily on immigrant employees say they are watching carefully how the new federal policy unfolds in the real world.
Expectations of how the effort will land on the South Fork were mixed in the early days of the crackdown.
Some business owners say they do not expect the deportation push to have significant direct impacts on local businesses, taking on faith the initial claims that the crackdown will focus on cities, and on individual undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes — even as workplace sweeps have already begun — and that most employees are properly documented and not vulnerable to even the most broad-based deportation sweeps.
Others say they are concerned that even if raids are targeted only at those with criminal records, just the threat of federal enforcement could keep some needed workers away as the busy summer season approaches and companies like landscapers and restaurants and hotels seek to ramp up staffing — a demand that for decades has only been possible to meet with immigrant employees.
Any drop in numbers of employees, they say, will put additional strain on the temporary worker visa programs that are already unreliable and overextended, and that employers have been calling for major expansions to for years.
The Trump administration has offered little indication of how it expects businesses would fill jobs if deportations actually reached the levels the president has said he aims for.
The new “Border Czar,” Tom Homan, has espoused favor for temporary worker visa programs, like the H-2A agricultural visas relied on by the farming industry, and H-2B visas that many in the South Fork’s hospitality and landscaping industries have relied on for decades to fill seasonal staffing needs. But whether the new administration will break political gridlock that has prevented expanding the programs despite the pleas of thousands of small business owners, remains to be seen.
In the meantime, Latino community advocates have warned that regardless of the stated aims of immigration enforcement directed at those who have outstanding deportation warrants or have committed serious crimes, officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, have for years employed a policy of “collateral arrests” of anyone else who is in a house or place of business where a targeted individual is and cannot show proof of legal immigration status.
That can mean much more far-reaching removals of individuals than just criminals and could upend the families of employees who have proper immigration documentation — even citizenship — putting emotional strains on families that will carry over into the workplace.
Nearly all of the South Fork’s largest industries — construction, landscaping, swimming pool maintenance, hotel and restaurant hospitality, and painting — rely heavily on immigrant labor to fill workforces that business owners have said they are consistently unable to find sufficient and suitable domestic candidates to fill their payrolls.
As housing costs have risen exponentially since the pandemic, staffing of all kinds has become increasingly more difficult, business owners say, and filling any positions lost presents a mountainous challenge. Higher-paying industries, like construction and other home improvement jobs, have a somewhat easier time attracting employees, but also demand workers with higher levels of skill.
Despite the claims of a goal to ultimately deport millions of undocumented immigrants, few business owners contacted this week thought that such a wide-reaching effort would — or feasibly could — come to fruition.
Joe Farrell, the founder of what is now known as the Farrell Companies, one of the largest residential construction firms in the region, said that he does not think that ICE enforcement actions will pose a significant problem for South Fork businesses in the grand scheme.
Farrell, who hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump during the presidential campaign last summer, said that he has been reassured that those within the administration know how important immigrant labor is to the vitality of the economy, and especially for legitimate small-business owners.
“The [Hispanic] labor force are wonderful people, and without them you couldn’t build a house in America. It would be almost impossible. You couldn’t afford it. Inflation would be unbelievable,” he said by phone this week. “I’m not at all concerned about the crackdown, because I know the president isn’t going after good, hardworking people.
“I can’t imagine seeing ICE in the Hamptons. From what I’ve been told by people close to the administration, everybody knows how badly we need these people.”
Another local housebuilder, who asked not to be identified by name, said he expects — and even hopes — that the crackdowns will winnow the number of contractors who are operating without licenses or the full complement of state and federal insurance and workman’s compensation and who, he suspects, are the ones who rely more heavily on undocumented workers.
His company employs about six to eight people, aside from himself, all immigrants from Latin America, and one other Long Island native who serves as his primary foreman. He said all of his employees have the required documentation, either green cards or state-issued work permits given to people who are in the process of applying for permanent residency.
“We need the workers, definitely, but it’s gotten so that someone who has swung a hammer for a couple years goes off on their own and hires a bunch of guys off the street and is undercutting guys like me, and people hire them because they don’t know the difference — but what happens when someone gets hurt or when they cause a problem at your house?” the man, a South Fork native, asked. “If there was less of that, there would be plenty of guys to work who all have the right documentation and could work for [companies] doing the right thing.
“Don’t get me wrong — I don’t want to see someone’s family torn apart by this,” he said. “I know a lot of my guys’ families, and I’m sure there’s people in them who are not documented, yes. There’s a lot of people here who have been here for a long time and are great members of this community. I don’t want to see them caught up in this.
“There has to be a way to do it fairly.”
But some say that even legitimate business owners who require employees to prove their eligibility to work are probably not completely above board, even if unconsciously so.
“The reality is, everyone says, ‘Oh, all my people have paperwork,’ but a lot of that is a guy using the same [work] permit or Social Security number as someone else working at the job up the street, and the boss looks the other way because … he can say, ‘Oh, they gave me the paperwork,’” said an East Quogue-based painting contractor, who also asked not to be named. “I know that guys are doing that. I’m sure I have somebody working for me that has done that. But I can’t police it. They have to keep their nose clean and do the right thing and come to work and hope that ICE doesn’t come looking too closely.”
James Grimes, who owns a Montauk landscaping company and garden center, Fort Pond Native Plants and James C. Grimes Land Design, said that hiring undocumented immigrants is actually quite hard for a business being careful about staying within the bounds of the law itself, because it must file I-9 employment eligibility forms for all of its workers. Companies that are following the rules should be safe.
“Since 1987, you had to file an I-9 for each employee, and from 1987 to 1991, immigration really enforced that rule with actual raids, like what you are seeing right now — except they would visit a business on a supposedly friendly basis and ask to interview employees,” Grimes recalled. “Business owners back then dodged the immigration guy like they were the Gestapo, and the consequence was that many businesses had their guys picked up and their trucks seized. But that stopped after 1991, and since then there’s been little monitoring on the part of the government.”
Grimes has relied primarily on seasonal workers using the H-2B visa program to grow his company’s staff each spring by 20 to 30 people — but says he’s been trying to whittle that number down because the lottery system for the visas is too unreliable and fraught with being stuck without a full staffing complement in spring. He currently has a half-dozen longtime employees who his company has been helping apply for green cards to remain in the United States permanently — a process he says his company has been told is being slowed by the crisis at the border bogging down immigration staff.
Minerva Perez, the executive director of the Latino advocacy organization OLA of Eastern Long Island, said she thinks that many employers are grossly misunderstanding how the current enforcement crackdown is shaping up, and what the impacts on the region’s labor force is going to be.
“We are in an entirely different universe than we were in 2017,” she said, recalling the much ballyhooed immigration sweeps during the first Trump administration, which ended up not being as prolific as during prior administrations. “It’s not just going to be targeted anymore. If you get caught up in a raid, and you have to prove you have documentation, that means everyone is in jeopardy. This is going to be impacting all of our businesses; it’s our students who are going to be going to college, it’s our future.”
The Homeland Security Investigations division of ICE reported that it detained about 1,000 people on deportation warrants nationwide this past Sunday, January 26 — acknowledging that many were collateral arrests of others who were identified as undocumented in a raid targeted at a specific individual with a criminal record.
The American Civil Liberties Union has issued guidance to immigrant communities and employers about their rights when faced with ICE agents at their doors.
“You have the right to refuse to consent to a search,” the advisory says. “You do not have to open the door. You do not have to discuss your immigration status with anyone, such as where you were born, whether you are a citizen or how you entered the country. You have the right to record your interactions with immigration agents as long as you do not interfere.”
Immigrant labor makes up 21 percent of the total workforce on Long Island, according to the Immigration Research Initiative, a nonprofit, nonpartisan labor analysis organization, and immigrants account for 23 percent of the working-age population — ages 16 to 64.
David Hersh, who owns four restaurants in Hampton Bays and Westhampton Beach, said that all of his employees have legal working papers or Social Security numbers, but that the focus on deporting immigrants who are eager to work before a system has been put in place to fill the gaps in demand for workers that will be left behind is foolhardy for the American economy. He said his restaurants sponsor more than a dozen J-1 student visa workers each summer and that several have turned into returning workers, one a permanent resident and manager for his company, Rooted Hospitality.
“China is screwed because they do not have enough people to sustain their economy. And America is the same way, and it’s going to cripple our economy over the next 20 years,” he said. “But what America has going for it is the influx of immigrant labor, which China doesn’t have — any economist will tell you, it’s the saving grace of our economy. We need these people here.”
Grimes said that perhaps the most frustrating thing with the national immigration policy now is that programs allowing immigrant workers to come to the county legally have not been expanded aggressively in response to the clear demand that is instead feeding the allure of coming to the country illegally for well-paying jobs. The H-2B program that his and many other service industry businesses rely on has actually been curtailed over the last 20 years. Workers who had come before and adhered to the program’s rules are no longer exempted from the next year’s quotas and must reenter the lottery for the limited number of visas offered.
“Everything around immigration becomes a political football,” Grimes said. “Unions are against the H-2B program, but it’s more an issue of emotions than facts. When I speak to someone and they say these guys are taking jobs away from Americans, that’s a fact to them, even if it’s not the truth.”
At the corner of Aldrich Lane in Southampton Village, where laborers looking for short-term employment have long gathered by the dozens, even hundreds at times, waiting for those in need of manpower — be it one pair of hands or a dozen — the threat of immigration enforcement sweeps has already changed the atmosphere among the regulars.
The winter off-season and a run of frigid temperatures have kept the numbers of those gathering down this month, but on a recent morning, a man leaning against a split rail fence said that some of those who would still come have stayed away this past week.
The man, whose first name is Oscar, said that he has a green card and a long-term job working nights in a Southampton restaurant kitchen, but comes to the Aldrich Lane gathering spot a few days a week partly to pick up some extra work during the days and partly for the social camaraderie of simply hanging out with the crowd of others from his native Ecuador and other Latin American countries.
“I don’t know what will happen. Maybe they will come and take people. A lot of people here say bad things to us, like they are going to call immigration, so they are scared if they don’t have the [green card],” he said — though he noted that the muster site was never targeted by ICE agents in the past as far as he recalls, even during the stepped-up enforcement efforts of the Obama administration and the early years of the first Trump administration. “Some, they will tell [employers] they will meet them somewhere away from here, or they just come one day, two days, maybe.
“I don’t know, maybe nothing goes wrong. We’ll see what happens.”
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