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Hunt: NC lacks cash for future
Emerging Issues Forum, Michael WaldenSpeakers address tax reform in Raleigh
Emerging Issues Forum, Michael Walden
Richardson
agrees spaceport is risk, but worth taking
Emerging Issues Forum
Thompson:
Economy's shifting, are Carolinas?
Emerging Issues Forum
Forum
speakers favor tax cuts
Emerging Issues Forum
A pioneer
in the push for safer coal mines
Bob Kochersberger
2 savor,
document diversity
Walt Wolfram and Neal Hutcheson
Judge
hears arguments in lawsuit claiming sexual assault by Avery County
students
Herb Sendek basketball camp
Duke,
NCSU, and UNC-CH Women’s Basketball Coaches to be Honored
Kay Yow, The 2006 Sports Excellence Tribute Gala
America’s
Criminal Immigration Policy
Immigrant labor
Duke, NCSU, and UNC-CH Women’s Basketball Coaches to be Honored
Feb. 7, 2006
Lincoln Tribune, dBusinessNews Triad, dBusinessNews Charlotte, dBusinessNews Triangle, dBusinessNews Los Angeles (CA)
By staff report
© Copyright 2006
Raleigh - University athletic departments, network affiliates, WNBA superstars, Raleigh Sports Club, and sports enthusiasts from around the globe announce the “Toast and Roast” honoring Gail Goestenkors, Kay Yow, and Sylvia Hatchell at the RBC Center Court gala. The 2006 Sports Excellence Tribute Gala, presented by the Raleigh Sports Club, is set to acknowledge and salute the collective achievements of three of the Triangle’s top women’s ACC basketball coaches.
The Triangle is heralded across the nation for its legendary men’s college basketball teams and coaches. Oftentimes, their female counterpart’s momentous achievements are overlooked. That’s why, this year, the Raleigh Sports Club, North American Sports Promotion (NASP), and sports fans everywhere will pay tribute to Gail Goestenkors from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina; Kay Yow from North Carolina State University in Raleigh; and Sylvia Hatchell with the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The 2006 Sports Excellence Tribute Gala will honor, toast, (and roast) these honorees and illustrate how important these coaches are to the sports community. The combined contributions of these women to the great game of basketball are incomparable.
The gala will start at 5:30 in the evening with a hospitality reception. Dinner will be served on Centre Court at the RBC Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. Players and coaches will be ready to tell their personal stories about each coach. Our honorees will be ready for some good-natured ribbing and rivalry – all for a great cause. Sponsor and attendee funds will be donated to the coaches’ charity selection.
For more information, visit www.northamericansports.org
Feb. 7, 2006
Charlotte Observer, Associated Press
By PAUL NOWELL
© Copyright 2006
RALEIGH - North Carolina won't have the money it needs to pay for road construction, public schools and health care in the future unless the state restructures its tax system, experts warned Monday at a forum hosted by former Gov. Jim Hunt.
" Financing the future is not a task for the faint of heart, or for those who worry about their political shadow," Hunt said in his opening remarks at the annual Emerging Issues Forum at North Carolina State University.
North Carolina gets a little more than half of its $17 billion in annual tax revenues from individual income taxes, with a quarter coming from sales and use taxes, according to legislative researchers. Corporate income taxes generate about 6 percent of revenue.
However, those tax dollars have not kept pace with the state's rapid growth in population and infrastructure needs, Hunt said. He asked those who came to Monday's forum to help improve the state's tax and finance system for the next generation of residents.
Several people at the forum suggested overhauling the state's sales tax
system to reflect the transformation of North Carolina's economy from
a manufacturing
base to one rooted in service.
"
Right now, the sales tax is imposed only on goods, and not services," N.C.
State economist Michael Walden said during a panel discussion. "At the
retail level, people are starting to spend more on services than on goods."
Imposing a sales tax on services would also allow the state to lower the overall sales tax rate because the burden would be spread out over more transactions, said John Connaughton, an economist at UNC Charlotte. That's a better option than only raising income tax rates, he said.
" The people who pay the highest income tax are also the most mobile," Connaughton said. "They simply leave North Carolina."
North Carolina lawmakers have struggled to find new sources of revenue in recent years, although the state does have a more than $200 million revenue surplus this fiscal year. Even so, the state's expenses continue to climb.
Medicaid alone now takes up nearly one-seventh of the budget, while public education requires nearly 40 percent of state spending. North Carolina also faces a $29 billion gap between the money available and the expected cost of transportation infrastructure needs in the next 25 years.
Although it's unclear exactly how much money the state will need to meet all of its future costs, Walden and Connaughton agreed that the cost of health care will probably increase the most as the state's population grows.
While most speakers at the conference focused on the state's tax code, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill took issue with the federal tax system, calling it a "big mess" of more than 10,000 pages of regulations. He said $300 billion in federal taxes goes uncollected every year, leaving other taxpayers to make up the difference.
O'Neill said he would support the end of federal corporate income taxes.
" We have a huge number of people in companies who are working to reduce tax load the best they can, most of the time legally," he said. "It also reduces the opportunity or need for corporations to post legions of lobbyists in Washington because there would be nothing for them to get there."
Emerging Issues
• Tax Warning: Former Gov. Jim Hunt warned Monday that
North Carolina won't have the money it needs for
future road construction,
public
schools and
health care unless it restructures its tax system.
• Solution: Several other speakers suggested overhauling the sales tax system to reflect North Carolina's change from an economy based on manufacturing to one rooted in service. That would lower taxes by spreading out the tax over more transactions.
• Costs: Economists predicted that the cost of health care will probably increase the most as the state's population continues to grow. Medicaid already takes up about one-seventh of the state's budget.
Speakers address tax reform in Raleigh
Feb. 7, 2006
News 14 Charlotte, WRAL.com, WCNC, Winston-Salem Journal, WWAY NewsChannel 3, Greensboro News Record, Charlotte Observer, abc11tv.com, The State (SC), Myrtle Beach Sun News (SC), WVEC.com (VA), Centre Daily Times (PA), WVEC.com (VA)
By staff report
© Copyright 2006
RALEIGH, N.C. -- North Carolina won't have the money it needs to pay for road construction, public schools and health care in the future unless the state restructures its tax system, experts warned Monday at a forum hosted by former Gov. Jim Hunt.
"Financing the future is not a task for the faint of heart, or for those who worry about their political shadow," Hunt said in his opening remarks at the annual Emerging Issues Forum at North Carolina State University.
North Carolina gets a little more than half of its $17 billion in annual tax revenues from individual income taxes, with a quarter coming from sales and use taxes, according to legislative researchers. Corporate income taxes generate about 6 percent of revenue.
Monday's forum was held at North Carolina State University.
However, those tax dollars have not kept pace with the state's rapid growth in population and infrastructure needs, Hunt said. He asked those who came to Monday's forum to help improve the state's tax and finance system for the next generation of residents.
Several people at the forum suggested overhauling the state's sales tax system to reflect the transformation of North Carolina's economy from a manufacturing base to one rooted in service.
"Right now, the sales tax is imposed only on goods, and not services," N.C. State economist Michael Walden said during a panel discussion. "At the retail level, people are starting to spend more on services than on goods."
Imposing a sales tax on services would also allow the state to lower the overall sales tax rate because the burden would be spread out over more transactions, said John Connaughton, an economist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. That's a better option than only raising income tax rates, he said.
"The people who pay the highest income tax are also the most mobile," Connaughton said. "They simply leave North Carolina."
North Carolina lawmakers have struggled to find new sources of revenue in recent years, although the state does have a more than $200 million revenue surplus this fiscal year. Even so, the state's expenses continue to climb.
Medicaid alone now takes up nearly one-seventh of the budget, while public school education requires nearly 40 percent of state spending. North Carolina also faces a $29 billion gap between the money available and the expected cost of transportation infrastructure needs in the next 25 years.
Although it's unclear exactly how much money the state will need to meet all of its future costs, Walden and Connaughton agreed that the cost of health care will probably increase the most as the state's population grows.
Looking ahead to determine how to handle that growth and other challenges will pay off, said Wachovia Corp. chief executive and chairman Ken Thompson, whose Charlotte-based bank is the nation's fourth-largest.
"We spend too much time talking about what we want to do in the next 25 days when we should be talking about the next 25 years," he told several hundred people Monday.
"We must stop trying to bring back jobs that are going away and focus on the future. Are we financing the right things? We need to fund educational programs to help people move from a manufacturing-based economy to services."
While most speakers at the conference focused on the state's tax code, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill took issue with the federal tax system, calling it a "big mess" of more than 10,000 pages of regulations. He said $300 billion in federal taxes goes uncollected every year, leaving other taxpayers to make up the difference.
O'Neill said he would support the end of federal corporate income taxes.
"We have a huge number of people in companies who are working to reduce tax load the best the can, most of the time legally," he said. "It also reduces the opportunity or need for corporations to post legions of lobbyists in Washington because there would be nothing for them to get there."
Richardson agrees spaceport is risk, but worth taking
Feb. 7, 2006
Winston-Salem Journal, WCNC, Charlotte Observer, Winston-Salem Journal,WRAL.com, WVEC.com (VA), Myrtle Beach Sun News (SC), Fort Worth Star Telegram (TX), Worcester Telegram (MA), Centre Daily Times (PA), Grand Forks Herald (ND), Associated Press
By staff report and Associated Press
© Copyright 2006
RALEIGH, N.C. -- New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson acknowledged Monday that teaming up with Sir Richard Branson to build the world's first commercial spaceport is a big risk, but says it's one worth taking.
The port, developed through Branson's Virginia Galactic space line firm, would provide space flights for passengers and payloads using aircraft modeled after air-launched spaceships developed by aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan.
"We believe this is an industry of the future and we're gambling on it," Richardson said at the Emerging Issues Forum at North Carolina State University. "We are ready to gamble on the future."
Branson chose the spaceport site in southern New Mexico over those in other states, including Florida and California.
The state would have to provide $100 million over the next three years, part of the $225 million deal that also includes federal and local money. Work on the project could begin in 2007 and be completed by 2010. It would generate nearly 5,800 jobs and an economic impact of $752 million, according to estimates.
New Mexico also would be home to a "Rocket Racing League" similar to NASCAR, Richardson said drawing laughs from the crowd. Rocket planes would fly at 5,000 feet and about 300 mph.
"Sure, you laugh, but it's the truth," Richardson responded.
___
CULTURAL DIVERSITY: Richardson said he's modeled many of his initiatives in New Mexico after North Carolina's successes, including the Research Triangle Park and preschool education and health initiatives.
North Carolina _ with its surging Latino population _ could also learn some things from Richardson and New Mexico, where 42 percent of its residents are Hispanic and 11 percent American Indian.
"You are seeing how America is going to look 20 years from now," said Richardson, who is seeking re-election as governor and is considered a potential 2008 presidential candidate. "That's why we all know the importance of opening doors for people."
Those with extensive language and technical skills succeed in a multicultural world, he said.
"By being bicultural, you can understand problems better, you can resolve problems. You can understand the impact of cultural differences and language differences," he said.
Richardson, the son of a Mexican mother and an American father, is the nation's only Latino governor.
"My mother only spoke to me in Spanish, my father never spoke to me," he quipped.
___
EARLY START: The room was less than half full when former Gov. Jim Hunt stood at the podium at 8 a.m. sharp to kick off the Emerging Issues Forum.
That's the risk you take when you schedule a meeting for the morning after the Super Bowl.
Hunt took it in stride, reminding those participants who did show up that "the right team won last night" _ a reference to the champion Pittsburgh Steelers and their coach, Bill Cowher, who like Hunt is an alumnus of N.C. State.
___
WHAT WOULD STEVE DO?: Former Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes delivered his tax-cut sermon to a packed afternoon session.
Prefacing his remarks by saying he wished he wasn't scheduled for the post-lunch slot, Forbes quickly charged up the room with a stream of anecdotes to support his views.
He was introduced by SAS Institute chairman Jim Goodnight, who said he didn't understand why more voters did not support his no-nonsense platform when he ran for president in 1996 and 2000.
"I guess he came off as too intellectual," Goodnight quipped.
"I like his rational for why I'm not in the White House. I'll take it," Forbes responded. "It's better than some I've gotten."
Forbes then showed off his intimate knowledge of North Carolina's tax system, advising political leaders in the room that the state's rates are among the highest in the Southeast.
"That will restrain growth despite your advantages," he said.
"Cutting rates works," Forbes said. "It means more businesses and more jobs are created and the economy moves ahead."
Thompson: Economy's shifting, are Carolinas?
Feb. 7, 2006
Charlotte Observer
By KERRY HALL
© Copyright 2006
Saying North Carolina needs to take a "hard look" at where the state is headed, Wachovia Corp. CEO and chairman Ken Thompson told a group of political and business leaders Monday that they should ensure the state's tax system favors innovation.
Thompson spoke at the 2006 Emerging Issues Forum held at N.C. State University in Raleigh. The topic of the forum, which continues today, is financing the state's future. Many of the half dozen speakers who addressed the crowd Monday spoke about ways of modernizing the federal and state tax laws.
During his half-hour speech, Thompson called for the state to focus more on services than manufacturing. Once the state's mainstay, traditional manufacturing, including tobacco, textiles and furniture, now makes up less than 4 percent of the state's gross product.
Services, meanwhile, which aren't widely taxed, are the fastest-growing sector.
" We must stop trying to bring back a past that is gone," he said.
Thompson also said the state's increasing regionalism, with residents commuting across county lines, is another nuance that needs to be considered when examining tax systems.
Ultimately, education is the key to improved quality of life, Thompson said. Tomorrow's jobs, he said, will mostly come from specialized companies instead of large manufacturers.
" The clock is ticking on us," he said, "and we are running out of time. Fast."
A pioneer in the push for safer coal mines
Feb. 7, 2006
News & Observer
By Bob Kochersberger
© Copyright 2006
In the aftermath of the West Virginia mine disasters --16 dead in the past month -- Gov. Joe Manchin asked mining companies to suspend production and talk safety for a day. So it may be time now to think of an American journalistic icon who was concerned with mine safety 80 years ago.
While Ida Minerva Tarbell is best remembered as the "muckraker" whose reporting brought down John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Co. in the early years of the 20th century, her later work included social and workplace issues. She opposed prohibition, supported decent housing for workers and wondered whether Americans were losing their interest in philanthropy. She also took on the issue of mine safety.
Eighty years before the recent tragedies in West Virginia, Tarbell, spurred by the Kentucky drama of Floyd Collins in 1925, called the more than 900 miners entombed in U.S. mines each year ". . .victims of industry -- part of the price we pay for warmth and flying wheels."
• • •
The 37-year-old Collins was widely known as a spelunker. He was searching for another entrance to the Mammoth Cave system when he was snared by a 27-pound rock that fell on his foot. For more than two weeks, he lay trapped, 120 feet from the entrance and 60 feet underground, conversing with would-be rescuers who, despite their best efforts, were not able to free him. The scene above ground took on carnival dimensions, and the story gained international attention.
Reporters wrote daily dispatches based on conversations with Collins, whom they were able to reach before he died, stuck in the same dark, cold spot -- which eventually became his tomb and a tourist destination.
Tarbell, gathering steam for her support of mine safety, wrote, "If that pitiful Kentucky tragedy which dragged its hopeless way through seventeen days of the month of February will turn the minds of but a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of men and women, whose first thoughts in the morning, during those days, was of Floyd Collins' plight, why, then, the boy will not have perished in vain."
Tarbell pointed out that while Collins died the victim of his own "love of adventure and discovery," the hundreds of coal miners killed each year were the victims of industry. "We treat the awful toll as a necessary incident to keep the world running," she wrote. Ever hoping to improve workers' conditions, Tarbell asked, "Can the death list of miners from their cause be cut down? Must we engulf nine hundred men yearly in taking out soft coal?"
Clearly, she felt the answer was "no," and she called for safety measures that would seem elementary by today's standards, mainly improved timbering of mine shafts and controlling the explosive coal dust.
But even that long ago, like today, the crude balance of the expense of safety versus the profitability of the mine weighed heavily in decisions to spend money on safety. "Why do we not save these men then? Why? Careful testing, proper timbering cost money -- take time -- they interfere with quick, cheap production. 'We'll risk it!'"
Tarbell was known for her dogged pursuit of facts and information to support her positions. In this case she tracked down fatality records and wrote that from 1912 to 1922, an average of 1,824 men -- 43 of every 1,000 employed -- died in the mines each year, from being emtombed and from other accidents. That was three times the rate in Great Britain.
"What is the matter with us that we endure this? Is it ignorance? Perish the thought! An American mine owner will resent the imputation with scorn" she wrote, adding that the owners found the U.S. Bureau of Mines a nuisance in its insistence on safety devices. Tarbell also described one safety technique, covering coal dust with rock dust to prevent explosions, and called for its widespread application.
• • •
The essay is vintage Tarbell. She was a fairly humorless writer, much more interested in gathering the "reliable facts" on which she built her cases than in dazzling the reader with her prose. As the lone woman among the 12 or so journalists labeled "muckrakers," Tarbell set forth on a career of influential writing, in which she identified issues, explored aspects of them and offered her solutions.
She used Floyd Collins as a means to push for mine safety, much as she used John D. Rockefeller to push for dismantling monopolies. Today the 16 dead in West Virginia are being used to push state legislatures and overseers to improve mine safety. It's about time, and it's a move that would have pleased Ida Tarbell.
(Bob Kochersberger, editor of "More Than a Muckraker: Ida Tarbell's Lifetime in Journalism." teaches journalism at N.C. State University. He can be reached at bobkochs@gmail.com)
Judge hears arguments in lawsuit claiming sexual assault by Avery County students
Feb. 7, 2006
Asheville Citizen-Times
By Clarke Morrison
© Copyright 2006
NEWLAND — A judge heard arguments Monday in a lawsuit claiming that several Avery County High School students were sexually assaulted by older members of the school’s basketball team while at a camp in Raleigh in 2003.
The suit accuses the Avery County Board of Education and school officials of negligence in the supervision of students attending the basketball camp run by N.C. State University coach Herb Sendek.
During Monday’s hearing, attorneys for the school board argued the lawsuit filed last year should be dismissed because state law grants sovereign immunity to school districts from lawsuits.
Michael Vetro, who represents the parents of one of the alleged assault victims in the lawsuit, said the district waived immunity by purchasing insurance and should be held liable for the boy’s injuries.
Judge James Baker said he would rule on the motion later in the week, Vetro said.
The lawsuit also named Sendek, but the plaintiffs entered into a confidential settlement with the coach, Vetro said.
Two students pleaded guilty in 2003 after criminal charges were filed in connection with the incident at a private dormitory off the N.C. State campus.
A 16-year-old Avery High student pleaded guilty in Wake County Superior Court to five counts of simple assault and was sentenced to 60 days in jail and received supervised probation. A 17-year-old student pleaded guilty to 10 counts of misdemeanor hazing and received probation.
Other defendants were dealt with in juvenile court.
In response to the hazing, high school officials suspended the upperclassmen involved, passed a new hazing policy and disciplined staff.
The lawsuit claims that during the basketball camp, older members of the Avery High team held down the plaintiffs’ son while another forced an object into the boy’s rectum. The boy suffered bleeding for several months following the attack, according to the suit.
The complaint states that the teen was one of 10 younger boys who were assaulted as part of an initiation ritual.
Coaches were aware of the attacks and considered them “a rite of passage for the younger players in the Avery High basketball program,” according to the lawsuit.
Contact Morrison at 232-5849 or cmorrison@CITIZEN-TIMES.com.
Feb. 7, 2006
News & Observer
By Matt Ehlers
© Copyright 2006
Every time it seems the film might start, a few more people stroll in and a few more chairs are fetched from the back.
Eventually, 60 or so are scattered around the screen at Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh, tucked alongside bookshelves in makeshift movie-theater style.
The crowd is here to see "The Queen Family: Appalachian Tradition & Back Porch Music," the latest production from Walt Wolfram and Neal Hutcheson, a team at N.C. State University whose 30- to 90-minute documentaries focus on North Carolina dialects and culture. Wolfram is executive producer; Hutcheson is the film's producer and director.
"Everybody knows what an executive producer is, right?" says Wolfram, smiling, during his introduction to the film. "We're not fooling anybody."
He says it is his job to find the money. Hutcheson finds the pictures.
It's a partnership that so far has produced a series of films that are helping preserve the state's heritage while educating audiences about the way Tar Heels speak and live. The documentaries turn what otherwise might be lonely academic exercises into something anyone with a television can experience.
"It's a great way to communicate with the American public," Wolfram says later at his office at N.C. State, where he is the William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of English. "If you make it interesting enough, people will watch it."
They'll groove with it, too.
Toes tapped and heads bobbed during the half-hour screening of "The Queen Family," as members of one of North Carolina's most revered musical families shared their brand of acoustic mountain music, quite literally from their back porch.
Quail Ridge bookseller Nathan Miller, 27, was so impressed that he took home a DVD after the screening. "It kinda hit home," says Miller, who grew up in Wilkesboro.
Appalachian regional music -- it's very distinct. I think it needs to be remembered."
'Dialect heaven'
It's a pairing that seemed unlikely from the start -- Hutcheson, 36, is a filmmaker who comes across as studious and low-key. Wolfram, 64, is high-energy and says "dude" a lot. His research focuses on dialects.
They met in the late '90s when Hutcheson was working as a freelance video producer. He approached Wolfram at N.C. State.
"I was over here fishing around for work," Hutcheson says. "I basically just stuck my head in the door and introduced myself."
Wolfram, who heads The North Carolina Language and Life Project, had a simple question for Hutcheson that first day:
"Are you good?"
The partnership began slowly, with Hutcheson handling some editing and graphics for a project Wolfram had in the works. Hutcheson's workload increased from there. The two, who now work together full time, have since produced "Indian by Birth: The Lumbee Dialect," "Mountain Talk" and "Voices of North Carolina." Each has been shown statewide on UNC-TV.
Wolfram, a Pennsylvania native, likes to say he "died and came to dialect heaven."
Folks here talk in a wide variety of ways, including the brogue spoken on the Outer Banks -- where high tide is pronounced "hoi toide" -- African-American English in the urban areas and Appalachian mountain talk.
The state's shifting economics and demographics are affecting the dialects as well. "In North Carolina, things are changing fairly radically," Wolfram says.
As they chronicle those changes, the two men bounce ideas off each other throughout the documentary-making process.
Over the years, they have settled into a working relationship that fits their personalities. Hutcheson collects the footage alone and edits alone in a cramped, tiny office at N.C. State. Wolfram, whose bright, well-furnished office befits his status as interim chairman of the English department, is the public face for the projects, working to draw attention and funding to the cause.
"Walt is very gregarious and outgoing. He's a great spokesman for the effort," Hutcheson says. "The overall effort is his vision."
Primary funding comes from the National Science Foundation, the William C. Friday endowment and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at N.C. State.
The documentaries are geared to appeal to anyone who wants to know about how North Carolinians live.
"They're quintessential North Carolina programs," says Scott Davis, UNC-TV's executive producer for external productions. "For people who are interested in North Carolina, this is really good television."
North Carolina spirit
Although Wolfram has the vision, it is Hutcheson who does the heavy lifting.
Starting in September 2004, he made more than 10 trips to the Cullowhee area to visit the Queen family. Hutcheson got to know the family during the making of "Mountain Talk," which features musical matriarch Mary Jane Queen, 91. He recorded the family playing and singing on their back porch, and the documentary included plenty of Mary Jane's Appalachian wit and wisdom.
In addition to a 32-minute documentary on the family, the DVD includes footage of the family performing and Mary Jane Queen singing traditional Appalachian ballads. There is also a companion CD of the family's songs.
Hutcheson operates one-man band style, handling all the photography and sound by himself. Later, he does all the editing.
The finished product impressed the Queens. "I think he captured the essence of the music and particularly of mother -- her spirit and what she's about, what she has to offer," says Kathy Queen Hayes, the sixth of eight children of Mary Jane and Claude Queen.
The film will appear on UNC-TV sometime this spring or summer.
Mary Jane Queen says it is important that films like this get made. People like her won't be around forever. "Everybody should know who their forefathers and mothers were."
Staff writer Matt Ehlers can be reached at 829-4889 or mehlers@newsobserver.com.
WHERE TO GET A COPY "The Queen Family: Appalachian Tradition & Back
Porch Music," can be purchased at www.talkingnc.com. Other films from
Walt Wolfram and Neal Hutcheson also are available, as are other offerings
from The North Carolina Language and Life Project.
NEAL GREGORY HUTCHESON BORN: July 30, 1969, in Chapel Hill.
FAMILY: Wife, Karen Kast-Hutcheson, who works in genetic research at Duke University. Son Benjamin, 5; and daughter Ruby, 3.
EDUCATION: Bachelor's degree in multidisciplinary studies, N.C. State University, 1992.
HOBBIES: Occasionally plays guitar.
A DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER HE ADMIRES: Errol Morris, particularly his film "Vernon, Florida." Morris, Hutcheson says, makes films about interesting and unusual people without condescension, allowing them to tell their own stories.
LAST MOVIE HE SAW IN THE THEATER: "Chicken Little" (with
the kids).
WALTER ANDREW WOLFRAM BORN: Feb. 15, 1941, in Philadelphia.
FAMILY: Wife, Marge, the linguistics program coordinator at Duke University. Sons Tyler, 38; Todd, 37; Terry, 33; and daughter Tanya, 32. Nine grandchildren.
EDUCATION: Majored in anthropology and received a bachelor's degree from Wheaton College in 1963; master's degree in 1966 and a doctorate in 1969 in linguistics from Hartford Seminary Foundation.
WHAT HE'S READING: Wolfram sticks mainly to books on linguistics. Right now it's "How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction."
RETIRE? Wolfram will turn 65 next week but has no plans to retire. "Do I look like someone who needs to retire?" he asks good-naturedly. "C'mon, dude."
Feb. 7, 2006
News & Observer
By Rob Christensen
© Copyright 2006
As North Carolina considers modernizing its tax system, it should cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy in an effort to attract more jobs to the state, several political figures and economists said Monday.
Speakers ranging from former Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes to Democratic New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson voiced support for business tax cuts at the annual Emerging Issues Forum at N.C. State University.
"To be blunt, your state income tax is too high," said Forbes, a magazine publisher. "You have the highest marginal rate in the Southeast. If you don't address that problem, you are going to retard future economic growth."
The forum, organized each of the last 20 years by former Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt, is this year focusing on an effort to modernize the state's 1930's-era tax system, which economists say North Carolina has outgrown. The forum drew about 800 people Monday.
The forum heard a wide variety of views -- from the desirability of expanding what transactions are covered by the sales tax to the need for the state to provide relief to counties by taking over the funding for Medicaid.
But a theme running through the two-day conference was the need to reduce North Carolina's corporate tax rate and its highest marginal income tax rate. The corporate tax rate is 6.9 percent, the highest in the Southeast. The state income tax rate ranges from 6 percent to 8.25 percent.
North Carolina, overall, ranks 28th in the country in state/local tax burden with lower taxes than such Southern states as Arkansas, West Virginia, Louisiana and Kentucky, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Washington that monitors tax trends.
Several economists said that North Carolina's tax rates were out of line with neighboring states with which they compete with for jobs.
"If you put together North Carolina's taxes, state and local, they are not high by national standards," said William Fox, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Tennessee. "But your tax rates are pretty high."
Richardson, who is being mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, said that cutting taxes has helped fuel New Mexico's economy.
"You are going to hear this from a Democrat," Richardson said. "Cutting taxes is good. Being pro business is good. Putting more money in people's pockets is good."
Paul O'Neill, a former U.S. treasury secretary under President Bush, said corporate income taxes should be abolished at every level because they are not really paid by businesses but are passed on to consumers.
But there was a cautionary note offered by Paul Krugman, a columnist with The New York Times and an economist at Princeton University.
Krugman said recent tax cuts by President Bush have disproportionally helped the wealthy, helping lead to greater inequality between the rich and the middle class.
"We have seen an extraordinary increase in the income concentration at the very top at levels we had not seen since the 1920's," Krugman said.
WHAT THEY'RE SAYING PAUL O'NEILL, FORMER U.S. TREASURY SECRETARY, said that if $23,000 was put in a stock index fund for every child at birth, they would have $1 million at the age of retirement, collecting $80,000 a year in annuities.
NEW MEXICO GOV. BILL RICHARDSON said Democrats should practice what he called "The New Progressivism." "We are pro-business, we are entrepreneurial and we are ... cutting taxes."
PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST, said, "Overall, government policy has moved to actually exaggerate ... the growth of inequality."
STEVE FORBES, MAGAZINE PUBLISHER, said, "In terms of taxation, you have one of the toughest in the Southeast. Change it to one of the most benign and you will profit from it."
Kerby receives Outstanding Research in Physiology award
Feb. 7, 2006
Southwest Farm Press (KS)
By staff report
© Copyright 2006
Tom Kerby, former cotton specialist with the University of California and vice president, technical services with Delta and Pine Land Co., received the 2005 Research Award in Physiology.
The presentation was made at the opening session of this year's Cotton Physiology Conference during the Beltwide Conferences in San Antonio, Texas. This is the first time the award has gone to an individual who works in the private sector.
Keith Edmisten, Extension cotton specialist at North Carolina State University who presented the award, cited contributions Kerby has made to the industry during his career. Kerby's focus on making this research practically applied on the farm helped revolutionize the industry, Edmisten said.
During Kerby's tenure with the University of California Extension Service, he pioneered many of the tools and initiatives that are used in cotton fields throughout the United States and around the world.
Some of the specific contributions include: plant-based applications of mepiquat chloride, in-season plant mapping, computer-assisted crop management, narrow row cotton production, potassium fertilization and heat unit-dependent planting guidelines.
"Tom exemplifies everything we could wish for in a crop physiologist with a strong understanding and considerable experience in production agronomy,” said Derrick Oosterhuis, distinguished professor of cotton physiology at the University of Arkansas. “He has been an inspiration to countless colleagues with ideas and explanations of physiological phenomena and interpretation of production problems.
“Dr. Kerby has repeatedly demonstrated his commitment to research and academic excellence. His concern for detail, precision and data integrity are apparent and reflected in the quality of his research, as well as in his impressive list of high quality, widely cited publications."
J.C. Banks, Oklahoma Extension cotton specialist, said he first learned of Kerby's work when he researched his possible entry into the specialist job. Later, Banks participated in a Beltwide team effort Kerby led that "conducted field experiments to develop and verify the nodes above cracked boll technique of timing harvest aid applications.
“This is another technique now used universally by cotton producers and consultants. He has taken complicated research concepts and delivered them to the turnrow where they are universally accepted by cotton growers and consultants."
Banks said that the type of cottonseed testing done prior to Kerby's entry into the industry caused confusion for customers trying to make variety selections. He cited Kerby's work at Delta and Pine Land as pivotal for the industry and critical to the successful introduction of transgenic varieties in the mid 1990s.
"When Dr. Kerby joined Delta and Pine Land Co., he used his knowledge of cotton development and statistical analysis to develop the most complete data set of cotton varieties and cultivars in the industry,” Banks noted. “He developed a data set to accurately analyze the potential of new strains of cotton and how they would perform as compared to standard varieties.
“As variety development became more transgenic based, this data was invaluable to sort out genetic material for further development into varieties. The tremendous success of D&PL varieties is due largely to variety selection based on Dr. Kerby's expertise in analysis of genetic material."
Kerby created D&PL's technical service department in 1993. Prior to joining D&PL, he was the cotton specialist for the University of California. He earned his Ph.D. and master’s degrees in crop physiology at the University of Arizona. His bachelor’s degree is from Brigham Young University in soil science.
America’s Criminal Immigration Policy
Feb. 7, 2006
ReasonOnline
By Jesse James DeConto
© Copyright 2006
In the wee hours of a Tuesday morning in December 2004, Buca’s daughters, 10-year-old Darby and 4-year-old Daisy, reached up from their bed, hugged their daddy, and went back to sleep. Outside their back window, the sun was still waiting to cross the distant cattle pastures that rise up from the far bank of the New River valley, far below their mountaintop home in Ashe County, North Carolina. Buca (whose surname I am omitting to protect his family’s identity) was among thousands of Mexican men flowing south from the Blue Ridge Mountains in the weeks before Christmas. The girls would not see him again until February.
Like a nativity set missing a figurine, this scene recurs almost every year. Five thousand of their very own Christmas trees grow around their home, right there next to the girls’ trampoline and swing set, yet the Mexican border, 1,500 miles away, manages to divide the family at Christmas time. To comply with federal law, Buca must return to his native Veracruz, in southern Mexico, and renew his H-2A temporary guest worker visa or risk losing it and drawing up to $10,000 in fines for his employer. Except for one year, when he decided he couldn’t afford it, Buca has made this trip every winter since December 2000. His wife, Amanda, remains in the North Carolina mountains illegally with their daughters, refusing to endure another dangerous border crossing on the return trip north.
At 35, Buca is a crew leader on a large commercial Christmas tree farm, helping his employers harvest more than 30,000 Fraser firs a year from an inventory of about half a million spread across three counties in North Carolina and southwest Virginia. The state of North Carolina exports about 5 million Fraser firs every year, or one out of every five Christmas trees sold in the United States. Buca’s family fragmentation is common: Permanent resident green cards, even for parents of American citizens such as Darby and Daisy, are scarce (just over 700,000 were handed out in fiscal year 2003), and H-2A agricultural visas are for individual farm workers, not their families.
Buca is technically a “nonimmigrant worker” because his visa allows him to stay only as long as the Christmas tree growing season lasts, February through December. Amanda works as a nanny for the daughter and son-in-law of a local Baptist leader she met at church. She is ineligible for her husband’s H-2A temporary agricultural visa. More than half of all U.S. farm workers have no legal working status at all. Most are men who cross the border with other men, looking for work to provide for their families. They raise your turkey in Minnesota, dig your potatoes in Idaho, pick your corn in Illinois, and scoop your cranberries from a Massachusetts bog. A good portion of their paychecks gets wired back to Guanajuato or Chiapas, so mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, wives, and children can buy some meat, or books for school.
The agricultural, construction, and service industries have come to depend on these immigrants, yet the avenues for citizenship and full membership in American society are so narrow as to be closed completely for most foreign workers. More than 10 million illegals contribute the labor without which American society as we know it would stall, but unless the current immigration limits expand, our government will not recognize them as Americans. Legislators of both parties have proposed a plan to put illegal immigrants on a road to citizenship. Unless Congress approves it, men will continue to leave their families behind and risk their lives to improve them.
Some, like Buca, will manage to bring their families with them. They’ll become our friends, neighbors, and community volunteers. But they won’t be Americans.
I met Amanda and Buca in November 2004 at a Hispanic Baptist mission in rural Ashe County, population 25,000, which has seen its Hispanic population swell to at least 3,000 during recent fall harvests, just 20 years removed from when the area was almost exclusively white. Amanda greeted me, the only gringo in the pews, in English. It was in my language that we got to know each other, over tamales at a Latino center fundraiser, turkey and refried beans at a church-sponsored Thanksgiving dinner for migrant Christmas tree workers, and, eventually, over dozens of meals around Buca and Amanda’s kitchen table.
Barbie, Christmas Trees, and Sweet Tea
Buca took me to work with him through the spring and summer. We dug up evergreens for landscapers and garden centers, planted Fraser firs for Christmas 2012, spread fertilizer and pesticides, and trimmed this year’s crop into beautiful cones. After more than a decade on the job, Buca has climbed the young man’s mountain of proving himself. He’s earned the physically easier jobs: driving the tractors and counting the trees as the other guys carry them. If he wants to go home at 5 or 6 o’clock, he goes home, even if his friends are working late. He’s got plenty of work to do at home: his own Christmas trees to tend, neighbors’ lawns to mow, household maintenance. He lives for his girls. He teases them when they ask if he loves them. He teaches them Bible stories. He canoes with them on the river and goes to their dance and piano recitals.
A liberated yet traditional woman, Amanda learned to drive a car and joined the workforce after immigrating to the United States. She still makes Buca’s coffee and packs his lunch every morning, and she’s convinced he’d starve if she didn’t have his dinner waiting when he got home from work. (In fact, some of his dormitory-dwelling co-workers do skip dinner after 12 hours at work, because they’re too tired to cook.) Amanda has occasionally complained to me, only half joking, that she’s not as thin as she used to be. But when she smiles with her big brown eyes and high cheek bones, when she laughs at life itself, she makes you feel like you’re the most important person in the world.
This sometimes sends the wrong message to men, even Buca’s friends. It’s not a message a woman wants to send on the migrant trail of lonely men—or in the patriarchal provinces of rural Mexico, where women are often viewed as little more than property. When she and Buca first crossed the border in 1993, an unwelcome suitor tried to kidnap her; she fell from a moving freight train and walked all day with a broken collarbone; a Texas smuggler tried to force her into prostitution; a Florida labor contractor did the same; and the contractor’s brother tried to send Buca to North Carolina without her, so he could have her for himself. At the border, Amanda would have to stop being herself, a self-directed American woman.
When I would crash on their couch after our late-night talks three hours from my own home, we’d wake to the sound of the local country music station, with Tim McGraw singing of life on the road, forgotten friends, and the same sort of parental meddling that drove Buca and Amanda out of Veracruz 12 years ago. Buca was 22 when he lost his job at the government-owned Mexican oil company Pemex during a round of layoffs that cut the work force in half. His parents thought Amanda dressed immodestly, and her parents thought he drank too much. With no job prospects in his hometown of Las Choapas, Buca decided to head north to the border, where the foreign-owned maquiladora factories had provided jobs to Mexicans since the 1960s.
He and Amanda had originally intended to stay in Matamoros, opposite Brownsville, Texas, a 27-hour bus ride from home. But Buca couldn’t find a job. Amanda went to work at a fast food restaurant, and the pair lived on take-out fried chicken for a few weeks. Then the restaurant owner started hitting on Amanda, still a teenager. He tried to kidnap her as she walked home one night, and she never went back to work. They survived a few days on cash Buca received by donating blood across the border at a Brownsville health clinic. Then they finally headed north for good.
Today they drink Southern sweet tea. (They call it té dulce.) The girls barely speak Spanish, thanks to Amanda’s deliberate decision to get an Anglo babysitter. Darby and Daisy, both American citizens, are into pizza, Barbie, and Clifford the Big Red Dog. Darby’s cardboard model of the U.S. Capitol was on display for a few weeks at the public library in West Jefferson.
Their gleaming gray trailer, which Buca paints every year, perches on a plateau of manicured grass, surrounded on three sides by the meandering New River 300 feet below. The view from their driveway looks down the river valley some 30 miles into Virginia. Looking left from their front porch, you can see Mount Jefferson, a hazy green backdrop to the verdant cattle pastures and neat rows of Fraser firs dotting hillsides in the foreground. They own this home and a neighborhood lawn-mowing business. A few feet from the back deck, their land drops sharply toward the river. On this mountain slope, Buca and Amanda are growing 3,000 of their own Christmas trees, ready to harvest this year or next. They have 5,000 younger trees on land owned by friends, neighbors, and lawn-mowing clients. They’re among an exclusive group of Hispanic Christmas tree workers who are growing their own crop. Eighty percent of North Carolina’s Christmas tree workers are Hispanic immigrants, but entrepreneurship is just a dream to most.
“If we don’t have papers, we can’t [grow our own trees],” an undocumented worker named César told me in Spanish. “It’s difficult.”
In Ashe County, which leads North Carolina with approximately 2,500 workers harvesting a million trees a year, I’ve been able to identify exactly four other Latinos cultivating their own Fraser firs: Buca’s business partner, Gerónimo, has 20,000; Gerónimo’s wife’s cousins Jorge and Bonificio have 40,000 between them; and their friend Silvestre leads the way with 55,000, potentially worth more than $1 million when he cuts them in a few years. All of them arrived in the United States illegally in the late 1980s; all became permanent residents under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which provided amnesty for undocumented workers; and all had come by 1991 to North Carolina, where they learned how to care for Christmas trees. By 1998, all were U.S. citizens. But not Buca. By the time he and Amanda came to the United States in 1993, the amnesty provision had expired.
Bienvenidos a Norte Carolina
With snow on the ground in March 1994, Buca and Amanda arrived in North Carolina from a $1-an-hour job in a Florida orange grove. Their new employer put them up in a two-bedroom cabin with five other guys. They had no winter clothes. One of their roommates, Enrique, asked the boss’s truck driver, Lionél, to take them to the local swap shop for some sweaters, coats, and boots. The labor contractor who brought them here from Florida was taking $2 an hour out of Buca’s $5.50 wage, so after a year another Mexican, Ramiro, helped him get a new job with no middleman, and later sold them their first car.
What’s striking, amid the national media’s fascination with cultural conflict—zoning battles over Ecuadorian volleyball, Hispanic drunk drivers on the rampage, immigration raids, the Minutemen at the border—is how the local Anglo community has embraced these immigrants. The Hispanic Baptist mission exists because the local association of more than 250 Southern Baptist churches pooled their resources to hire a Mexican pastor; one tree grower donated an old KFC to serve as a sanctuary, and another paid for 350 Spanish Bibles. In Watauga County, to the south, an Episcopal church founded the advocacy group High Country Amigos, which later opened a second branch in Ashe County and serves as a clearinghouse for translation and other immigrant services. In Alleghany County, to the east, a Colombian Baptist pastor and a Catholic doctor opened a low-cost health clinic for uninsured patients, with a team of volunteer interpreters. Grant-funded aid workers also visit the farms to provide medical care and educational supplements to migrant laborers and their families. The Los Arcoiris Mexican Restaurant in Jefferson is usually packed with a mostly Anglo clientele.
In the late 1980s and early ’90s, the North Carolina Department of Labor cited a dozen large growers for nearly 100 migrant housing violations. But conditions have improved since then. A few growers and their families are learning Spanish and have traveled to Mexico to understand where their men come from. There are still growers and landlords who will take advantage of the workers’ desperate circumstances, but there are also plenty of individuals eager to share their burdens, as Buca and Amanda happily attest.
Marilyn Riehle, a lay missionary with Ashe County’s only Catholic church, helped them find their own rental trailer after Amanda, pregnant, fell through the migrant cabin’s bathroom floor while washing all the men’s laundry in the bathtub. A woman named Robin, among the few Anglos still working the pines, drove her to the county health department for maternity care. Ramiro’s boss, whom I won’t name because Buca still works for him 10 years later, co-signed on a loan to help the couple buy their own trailer on an acre of land. He also loaned them about 2,000 Fraser fir seedlings and lets them borrow money to get through the winters, when there’s little work to do. The boss’s father helped Amanda get a job in a local woodshop, where she learned to speak English (which she does well enough to serve as an on-call interpreter for local health care providers and law enforcement). Richard, a next-door neighbor, offered Buca some land on which to plant his seedlings and later gave him a lawn tractor to start a weekend mowing business.
“It just amazes me, how well they’ve done,” says Riehle. “I wish there was some way they could get their papers.”
Ashe County Sheriff Jim Hartley also sympathizes with the illegal workers who gravitate to Ashe County, and he doesn’t mince words. “I’d probably try to come across that river too,” he tells me. “I’d come across, and I’d probably come across the next time too.…Personally, I always said, my family or myself’s not going to go hungry as long as they put glass in front of supermarkets. When you get so hungry, you do whatever you need to do.”
This entire region depends on foreign workers to energize its leading agricultural industry. Growers say there just aren’t enough local workers to fill a labor demand that triples during the six-week period from late October to mid-December. In a North Carolina State University survey, farmers told agricultural agent Jim Hamilton they’d have to cut back or go out of business without Mexican labor, and veteran workers like Buca ensure a steady supply, recruiting family and friends and helping them adjust to life in the North Carolina mountains. “If it wasn’t for these guys, we wouldn’t even be in business,” says Buca’s boss’s father, who started the family farm in 1959.
“We’d shut down. We couldn’t do it anymore,” says Mark Johnson, foreman at New River Tree Company, a huge operation that has one of the largest Anglo work forces in the area but still relies heavily on immigrant labor. “We used to work guys from Ashe County. It’s not a matter of how much you pay them. Nobody wants to do the work. The work’s hard. The Mexicans come from [where] everything they do’s hard.”
“Mexican Burros”
Johnson’s farm recruits workers through the North Carolina Growers Association, the largest source of legal immigrant labor in the United States, bringing about 10,000 men each year into North Carolina to cultivate everything from sweet potatoes to tobacco. But these H-2A workers fill only about one in 10 jobs on Christmas tree farms. Most growers find undocumented workers through their colleagues, independent labor contractors, or their own veteran workers who bring friends and family members back from Mexico. Jackie Copeland, a consultant with the North Carolina Employment Security Commission in Ashe County, says Christmas tree growers rarely ask for legal workers through her office, but they’re willing to hire local people if they apply.
“We don’t have a lot of people that apply to those orders,” she says. “You have to be willing to work from dawn to dusk.”
During the Christmas tree harvest, the men—and a few women—work 10- to 16-hour shifts. They each carry dozens, sometimes hundreds of trees a day, depending on the size. A man can haul two of the smaller six-foot trees at once, but those exceeding nine feet often require two to five workers to navigate them through the labyrinths of tender trees awaiting future harvests. Even when they team up, the men sometimes need a few minutes to recover after moving each of these grandes, as they call them. Imagine a crew of 20 men moving all the furniture and boxes from a 30-home subdivision in a single day, carrying them and loading them onto trucks parked not in front of each house but every block or two. Then imagine this neighborhood is on the side of a mountain.
The hardest work comes at the end of the day, when the workers are weariest. As a bailing crew operates a machine that ties back the branches, forming the trees into tight cylinders, the workers heave them onto flatbed trailers. The trees pile higher and higher, until some workers are standing on top of a 10- to 12-foot pile and tugging on the tops of the trees while others are pushing from below. The trailers haul the trees to storage and loading areas, where the workers reverse the process, leaning the trees against each other inside rope corrals. There, the trees wait for commercial truckers to pick them up.
Once the semis come to collect the trees, the workers use similar teamwork, as one set of men waits inside a trailer while another group sends the trees upward along a mechanized conveyor belt. They work without stopping, sometimes stumbling under the weight of the grandes, until hundreds of trees fill each truck. Crews of about 10 workers load up to a dozen trucks in one day, then wake up the next morning with sore arms, shoulders, backs, and legs, only to do it all over again, every day for five to six weeks. Pay ranges from $6 to $8 an hour for the typical worker.
“Americans don’t do this work,” says Buca’s longtime friend and co-worker Julián, in Spanish. “It’s for the Mexican burros.”
Ashe County native Kevin Dishman, 22, worked the 2002 Christmas tree harvest. “Ain’t never bothered with it again,” he said as he waited to file an unemployment claim last January. He’d injured his wrist at a poultry processing plant in nearby Wilkesboro, a job with a base pay of $9.25 an hour plus bonuses. There he had to catch several six-pound live chickens in each hand and carry them upside down by their legs, two between his thumb and forefinger and one between each of the other fingers. He’d do this over and over again, all day.
“It’s rough, but it still ain’t as bad as the trees,” he said. “Pine tree work is harder than catching chickens because of all the lifting that you’ve got to do.”
With so few local people willing to harvest Christmas trees, growers have to rely on migrants who come from tobacco fields in the Carolinas or orange groves in Florida. Out of more than 3,000 Hispanics who live in Ashe County at some point during the Christmas tree growing season, fewer than 1,000 belong to intact families who stay here year-round. About two-thirds of North Carolina’s Christmas tree workers are migrant men who come alone for late summer shearing or the fall harvest, leaving wives and children, mothers and fathers back in Mexico to wait for their pay-phone calls and wire transfers. The men live barracks-style, sleeping two or three to a bedroom, with a few more in the living room of a dormitory, trailer, apartment, or old farmhouse. These workers are vital to one of the region’s leading industries, yet the current immigration system, the subject of a protracted debate in Washington, keeps their families apart. The H-2A program does not allow workers to bring their families, and as Amanda’s story shows, crossing illegally with women and children is often too dangerous. So the men come alone.
Just when many of the migrants are reuniting with their wives and children for the winter break back in Mexico, Buca is leaving his. Last year, Buca’s employer offered to falsify a guest-worker contract so Amanda could go with him, but she was afraid something would go wrong, leaving her stuck in Mexico while her daughters live the only life they know in the United States. “I won’t do it,” she says. “She’s afraid she’s never going to see [the girls] again,” says Buca.
Separation
In 2003 Amanda’s younger brother Jorge, 20, came to work on the commercial farm with Buca, but the girls have never met their 13 other aunts and uncles and numerous cousins who still live in Mexico. Part of Amanda’s wages go to pay medical bills for her elderly father, stricken with malignant lymphoma. She hasn’t seen him since leaving Las Choapas, Veracruz, on June 29, 1993. I visited the family the day after Buca came home in February 2005. As he told us of the mangos and oranges dangling from trees in his parents’ backyard, and of his nieces and nephews who sleep on the floor because their parents can’t afford furniture, I could see the wheels spinning inside Darby’s head. “I’ve never seen my grandparents,” she said simply. Their retired neighbors, Miss Barbara and Mr. H, fill the role of Grandma and Grandpa.
Before the spring of 1998, Buca brought his sister Laura and her husband, Lucio, across the border to work on the farm in North Carolina. After two nights of walking to rendezvous with a human smuggler beyond an immigration checkpoint in Falfurrias, Texas, they encountered a group of 80 male migrants with their own coyote. Lucio was afraid someone among the men might try to rape or kidnap his wife, as sometimes happens in the desperate borderlands. They forfeited their food and water to avoid a conflict. Two years later, the boss sent the men back to Mexico to apply for H-2A work visas. Now Lucio and Buca travel alone to Mexico to renew their H-2A contracts almost every winter, leaving their families behind just as most Christmas tree workers return to theirs in Mexico. The H-2A program is intended for seasonal jobs that last no more than 10 months, aligning perfectly with the Christmas tree growing season but forcing even assimilated immigrants like Buca to return to their native countries from mid-December to mid-February.
“It’s too long to stay over there,” Buca told me last summer, as he dreaded another winter away from his family. In December 2004, after his crew loaded the last Christmas tree that would bring some American family together, Buca’s split apart. His boss has tried three times to obtain green cards for him and Lucio, to no avail.
“I’d love to find a good attorney,” says the boss, “but it seems like everyone we’ve contacted, they take $200 or $300, and you never hear from them again.”
Buca is qualified for a green card, but he’s competing against millions of other candidates. Experts estimate the number of unauthorized Mexican immigrants in the United States at somewhere between 5 million and 6 million, with nearly half a million crossing our southern border annually during the last five years. Because the law caps annual immigration from any one nation at 7 percent of the total, these millions are competing for fewer than 26,000 permanent resident green cards a year for Mexicans. The only additions to this quota are for those with U.S.-citizen spouses, parents, or children able to sponsor them. The system provides only 140,000 spots for employment-based green card applicants, and only 40,000 of those are for aspiring immigrants with education at the baccalaureate level or below. Just 10,000 permanent resident visas a year cover the unskilled jobs that most Mexican immigrants fill.
Buca’s current application emphasizes his training in handling pesticides and operating farm equipment. He might apply for a commercial driver’s license to improve his chances of landing one of the skilled labor spots. But the odds are still extremely low. As of October, the Department of Homeland Security was still processing employment-based green card applications filed by Mexicans in 2000 and earlier. North Carolina alone has an estimated 300,000 undocumented immigrants. “It’s gotten crazy for people like Buca who are every bit as American as people who were born here,” says his neighbor Richard.
Amanda has almost no shot at a green card. It will be another 10 years before Darby, a U.S.-born citizen, turns 21 and can sponsor her parents’ application. Although she and her sister have known no other home, the Department of Homeland Security could deport their mother at any time. Back in Veracruz, Amanda dreamed of being a teacher. She’d love to pursue her GED and go to college. She trusts local officials, but she’s afraid of attracting outside attention by filing an application.
During the 2004 Christmas season, Buca and Amanda’s church lost its pastor after the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services denied his green card application for the third time and the county Baptist association decided it could no longer support an illegal immigrant. The Sanchez family, Amanda’s longtime friends, chose to send their children back to Mexico for college because, even though they grew up in local schools, their undocumented status precludes in-state tuition benefits. Fortunately for the Christmas tree workers and a local economy that relies on their labor, immigration agents don’t venture to these parts unless they can round up undocumented felons or groups of 25 or more illegal aliens, according to Sheriff Hartley. That rarely happens.
It’s one of the main reasons Hispanics say they’ve settled here and probably one reason why the Hispanic population in the rural South is growing at a much higher rate than in more obvious places such as California.
The High Country Hispanic community is waiting for Congress to consider the Agricultural Job Opportunity, Benefits, and Security Act, nicknamed AgJobs, which for three years in a row has died before any real debate. Endorsed by the National Christmas Tree Association, the National Council of La Raza, and various labor unions, including the AFL-CIO, the AgJobs bill aims to make the H-2A program more attractive to growers and give current farm workers and their families a chance at permanent residence. As long as he works at least 360 days in agriculture over six years following the bill’s passage, Buca would be guaranteed a green card. In April 2005 a Senate majority supported AgJobs, but the bill barely missed the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster.
A broader piece of immigration reform legislation, the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Bill of 2005, co-sponsored by Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), would expand green card quotas to eliminate the backlogs that stymie longtime undocumented workers. Although this bill also has widespread support, it remains to be seen whether Republicans can iron out sharp disagreements within their party. Some favor stricter enforcement of existing laws and oppose creating new paths to naturalization.
Meanwhile, the families of U.S. farm workers suffer the pain of separation. I visited Amanda and her girls a few days after returning from a trip to Florida to see my own parents, siblings, and in-laws during Christmas of 2004. Buca’s return was still a month away. As I sat in her kitchen, at the end of a two-day visit to the mountains, three hours from my own wife and daughters, 4-year-old Daisy tugged on my arm and asked if I missed them.
“Yes,” I said. “Very much.”
“I miss my daddy,” she said.
Jesse James DeConto is Roy H. Park Master’s Fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His research was made possible by a grant from the Phillips Foundation.