The Oakes 32: Dirty, Difficult, and Dangerous

By Michael LaMont
Contributing Writer

32 men were willing to lie to get a job nobody else wanted.

This type of job, often called “stoop labor,” is extremely difficult work. Years of bending over to plant bulbs or pull weeds will leave your back so warped you’ll never stand up straight again. And though anyone can do it few will, even when faced with unemployment as the alternative.

Notorious 3D jobs (dirty, difficult and dangerous) like “stoop labor” tend to attract uneducated and unskilled migrant workers who are seeking a way out of poverty. The same jobs that Americans will turn their noses up at, migrant workers are willing to risk their lives, limbs and liberty to do.

Dark Clouds on the Horizon

It’s May 14 and the sky is clear and the weather mild in Oakes, N.D., where planting season is well underway. Two men in a Honda Accord with Idaho license plates are already two weeks into their job manually planting onion bulbs, and are probably just looking forward to a day off because everybody’s working for the weekend. Yet there are dark clouds on the horizon.

By chance it’s Friday so the two men, who are seasonal migrant workers, are at the end of a grueling week of 14-hour days. Maybe physical exhaustion and the need for sleep are taking over the senses of the driver and that’s why he captures the attention of an Oakes police officer. Whatever the case, the police officer stops the car for driving “erratically.” This, however, will not be a routine traffic stop. And the repercussions of the stop will play out over the next five days, culminating in the detainment of 30 more undocumented workers.

The men in the Accord neither have IDs, nor can they speak English. The officer, unable to communicate with the men, and no other options for translation, calls the U.S. Border Patrol for help. Over a telephone conversation with the men, the Border Patrol identify them as illegal aliens, and so the Oakes Police Department holds on to them until the Border Patrol arrives.

Another Day, Another Call to the Border Patrol

Five days later there is another traffic stop, this one conducted by the North Dakota Highway Patrol. A trooper who works the area runs the license plates on a school bus carrying eight people who are obviously not students going to or from school. The bus is registered to Four Star Ag, a farm corporation located outside of Oakes. It is still school-bus yellow and has all the lights, the stop sign, and the white beacon school buses are outfitted with—all traffic violations—so he stops them.

Although the trooper is able to communicate with the driver, he contacts Border Patrol agents who happen to be in the area.

Lt. Bryan Niewind, a spokesperson for the North Dakota Highway Patrol in Fargo, explains the situation: “Any time Highway Patrol would make a traffic stop on a vehicle and we would suspect somebody in the vehicle is possibly in the country illegally, we would contact the U.S. Border Patrol,” he says. “And what normally happens is that they’ll talk to a person over the phone and make the determination of whether or not that person needs to be detained.”

The Border Patrol detains five of the eight men on the bus, yet the biggest bust of the day is still to come. That evening the total number of people detained stemming from the two traffic stops in and around Oakes, N.D., population 2,000, jumps to 32. The details are still unclear, but the next round of arrests somehow net 25 more men at the same time. The operation is a concerted effort of the Border Patrol, North Dakota Highway Patrol, the Dickey County Sheriffs Department, the Oakes Police Department and the state office of parole and probation. Two days later this is big news even in Fargo when an article about the incident is published in the Forum.

Bad News Loves Company

At some point Barry Vculek, owner of Four Star Ag, is hit with the news that, in addition to the two men arrested the previous week, another 30 of the men working for him are not, as he thought, citizens of the U.S., but undocumented illegal aliens. The news hits hard because they are big part of his work force, and now he has to shut down operations until he can find replacements. This won’t be an easy task, however, because of the nature of the work.

In an interview Vculek tells the Forum that he needed extra workers this year because he chose the more labor-intensive task of planting onion bulbs by hand rather than using seeds this year.

“We needed quite a few workers,” he told reporter Mila Koumpilova. “I talked to Job Service, and we didn’t get a single call.”

Justice Is a Dish Best Served…How Exactly?

32 men find themselves incarcerated for lying to get a job nobody else wanted to do. A farmer loses the workers he desperately needs. It’s hard to find any winners. Some will say that justice was served, and that may be true, yet this only comes at a high cost for all involved.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nick Chase says that the U.S. District Attorney’s Office in Fargo will prosecute 14 of the 32 men because they were previously deported for document forgery. The remaining 18 will be sent to immigration court and eventually deported.

The deportation of 32 willing workers hardly makes a dent in an illegal immigration problem where in 2006, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates, 53 percent of the nations 2.7 million farm workers are in the country illegally. The Department of Homeland Security says the number may be as much as 70 percent.

According to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services document, “enhanced enforcement of Federal immigration law appears to have also contributed to a reduction in the availability of agricultural workers, which has in turn had the unintended consequence of sparking a series of agricultural crises across a number of states” between 2007 and 2008.

The document goes on to say that workers leaving farm work because of age and the opportunity for more stable, higher-paying jobs are being replaced almost entirely by unauthorized foreign-born workers. And also that data from the National Agricultural Survey, conducted each year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, shows that in 2006 “19 percent of all agricultural workers were first-time U.S. farm workers (new farm workers are those who have less than a year of U.S. farm work experience). Among the new workers, 85 percent were foreign-born; 15 percent were U.S. citizens. All of the foreign-born new workers were unauthorized (100 percent).”

In essence, there are many more farm jobs available than there are authorized workers, says the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services document, because agricultural employers find the visa application process “so plagued with problems that they avoid using it altogether.”

The labor shortage is sometimes so dire that Colorado, for instance, resorts to inmate labor where migrants used to work. And some farmers explore other options and end up shifting their operations to Mexico to secure workers they can’t hire in the U.S.

Sometimes They Come Back

For now the farmer Vculek is not facing any legal battles, because the 32 men working for him were technically employees of a contractor in Oregon. The Assistant U.S. Attorney Chase could give no information about the contractor, so it could not be contacted for this story. Chase says all 14 men in the criminal cases will enter guilty pleas in arraignment this week.

This isn’t the end of the story for the 32 men willing to do a job no one else would do; this is just the beginning of a new chapter. Their positions at Four Star Ag may or may not be taken by someone else, but there will most certainly be other jobs open to them if they decide to risk their lives and liberty for another seasonal “stoop labor” job that pays $8 an hour and no overtime. The question now: when will they be back?

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