New INS operation targets Nebraska meat industry

"It's racism when people lump hardworking foreign nationals with criminal elements," Gouveia said.

INS officials respond that the agency's actions are based on whether a person has broken the law, not on ethnicity.

That most of the undocumented workers in the meatpacking industry are Hispanic "is a fact," Heinauer said at a community meeting Dec. 16, 1998, at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. "It's nothing we can shy away from."

"Regardless of the INS's intentions," the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union said in a letter to the agency, "most meatpacking workers in Nebraska will perceive Operation Prime Beef as a thinly disguised attack on Latino workers."

The union noted that the program will have a "devastating impact" on thousands of union members in the state, the majority of whom are Hispanic immigrants. "Operation Prime Beef will surely cause many documented immigrant workers who are lawfully in the country -- as well as unauthorized immigrant workers -- to quit their jobs, pack up their families and belongings, leave their communities and flee to another region of the country."

According to Lourdes Chavez-Madera, a leader in the Omaha Hispanic community, people were leaving their jobs after the first reports of Operation Vanguard came out in the local media. "The CEOs at packing plants told them not to leave their jobs until told to," said Chavez-Madera, who assists immigrants with citizenship and residency paperwork.

Other workers are working up to 15 hours a day, trying to make as much money as possible before the INS comes in March.

"People feel more uneasy," said Chavez-Madera, a native of Durango, Mexico, who became a legal resident in 1990. "They think their time is coming near to leave Omaha or the country. People talk and they're afraid. These are people who have kids that were born here."

However, she said, their first option will be to seek work in another industry. "Their last choice is to leave the country," she said. "They'll stay around as long as they can."

Rethinking the laws

Immigration advocates say the solutions to the problems posed by Operation Vanguard are not found in better screening tools for companies or a return to sporadic INS raids but in rethinking the laws that the INS is enforcing

"For me it's not an INS problem they're doing what Congress asked them to do," said Fr. Stanley Kasun, associate pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe. "My problem is with Congress, that they have given the INS this power and that the laws have permitted this to happen."

The laws should allow workers to work legally, activists say. "They need to give amnesty to those who are here and temporary visas for those who want to come for a couple of years," Gouveia said. "It would be win-win for the industry, the people and Mexico, with workers going back and investing in Mexico to eliminate the need for immigration."

However, Gouveia said, working conditions, pay and benefits will need to improve in order to attract legal workers. More strict enforcement of labor laws would reduce the incentive to hire undocumented workers, she said.