Businesses need immigrant workers but extremists ‘are stirring the pots of hatred’ - Utah

For businesses such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, hospitality, meat processing and food services, hiring immigrants has become a matter of course. But with strenuous opposition to “amnesty” for the 12 million undocumented people already in the U.S. (an estimated 100,000 in Utah) stalling federal immigration reform or other reforms that might create a guest-worker program, Swift’s labor problems are now widely shared by others.

“It’s now much bigger than a meat-processing issue,” said James Mintert, professor of agriculture economics at Kansas State University.

And if the Swift raids exposed the meatpacking industry’s practice of hiring low-wage immigrants who used stolen or fake IDs to get jobs they could not have gotten legally, the aftermath also has raised plenty of questions about immigrant labor in Utah - and there appear to be few answers. Normally, business interests in Utah and nationally are politically powerful, but in the case of immigration-reform legislation they backed in Congress this year, they’ve found themselves overwhelmed. Utah’s senators received perhaps 100 calls in opposition for every 10 in favor of the immigration-reform bill that failed to pass the Senate in June, said Clark Ivory, CEO of Ivory Homes, the state’s largest home builder.”*

*From: http://www.sltrib.com
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