It’s a long and often dangerous road.  Yet they come to work!

This photo is of the road to Real de Catorce which was constructed in the 1700s so that silver could be exported by the Spaniards from Mexico.

Legal or illegal, they come and build our homes, our forests, they clean our toilets, they feed us, from the fields to the kitchens. For nearly 25 years we have viewed them as a subculture; today we are starting to realize that they are becoming mainstream, and in many respects are the backbone of our economy.

Locals doing the laundry atop the village of Cheranastico, Michoacan Mexico.

Over a decade ago my company Renewable Forestry chose the legal road to employ workers whose output equals that of my father’s and grandfather’s generation and my own as a younger man.

The following photo was taken on January 9, 2008 by David Ellis, founder of Renewable Resources, at the water reservoir atop the town of Cheranastico in the Mexican state of Michoacan.  The state is home to the largest indigenous population of Purepecha Indians who started lifting their lives out of chronic poverty some 30 years ago by entering the USA to work predominately as migrant farm labor.

“I am shocked to see my countries flag flying above the their own flag, a statement of respect that Americans need to appreciate,” I thought to myself as I gathered water to mix concrete to set a memorial in memory of my friend Benjamin Mendez Lucas.  Benjamin was in the first group of undocumented workers to obtain the now popular H2B visa.
               
We are in central Mexico deep within the Sierra Madre, some 8000 feet above sea level in the state of Michoacan, Mexico.

We are here to recruit a new crew of H2B workers to come and restore new forest in Georgia and other states. Our company will restore a 2000 acre federal/private cypress swamp that burned to the stumps last spring and reforest some 700 acres of pine and hardwood forest for private international investments. We will reforest land owned by American farmers and timberland owners and we will also build fire lines by hand to help protect Acadia National Park from wildfires for the National Park Service.

This is work that American unskilled labor will not do.

We are also here to show our respect to Benjamin Mendez Lucas who worked for Renewable as an undocumented worker and then as one of the very first undocumented Mexicans to obtain an H2B visa.

The process to open this program took David Ellis three years to complete and cost his company over $150,000, creating years of losses for the company while those who disregarded the law profited. This includes the major timber companies who refused to pay above market prices even though “market=undocumented” labor, it also equals little to no FICA and other payroll taxes being paid to the federal government on millions of acres of reforested land.  This is a tax loss to the U.S. Treasury and Social Security Tax Fund that may never be recouped, unless the American public realizes the depth of loss and seeks to force the government into recouping this loss.

May Americans learn to respect and realize that these people are not aliens; rather they are human beings with families who dream of, and are willing to work hard for, a better tomorrow.

Esperanza mourns her husband’s passing.  For nearly ten years she took care of her Benjamin who lost both his eyesight and his kidneys as a result of working in the USA. Social Security disallows benefits to H2B workers even though they now pay millions into the trust fund.

While one can argue that blocking access to SSI when the need is clear balances the abuse of the past, I can only say that the future of our economy being strong and dominate requires – no, it demands – integrity.  We have lost stature in the global perspective, for as a nation we have become a nation of corporate international giants and have forgotten that we are a nation of people.

Benjamin Mendez Lucas arrived one night uninvited to my home in a van packed with 25 “wetbacks” at around 2:00 A.M.  The year was around 1992.  I picked four men from the van load of 25.  I felt like I had entered a slave trade sale from 100 years ago.  I needed workers, I had an 800 acre single contract to plant and we had called the village in Michoacan where the men lived whom we had helped to obtain amnesty papers some years earlier.  Instead of these men coming, two from the village had changed professions from tree planter to … coyote – a person who smuggles illegals into the country for pay.

On this trip I learned that the one who smuggled Benji into the United States did over time get caught by INS and did a year in a federal prison in New Mexico, so yes, justice can and does prevail, The one-time coyote is now a shopkeeper.

Benjamin and I became close friends as we would often camp on the job sites to save money. In the years he worked for me he never got drunk or even considered a woman while being away from his wife, Esperanza.  Benjamin worked on many National Forest contracts before and after he obtained his H2B visa.  It was a time when our government turned a blind eye to the status of the worker, knowing full well that it was filling our nation's forests with undocumented workers to save money. 

My most profound respect to then Attorney General Janet Reno who assisted me directly in opening the H2B program as she was the lone wolf in the forest who listened to my complaints, contacted me, and directed people on her staff to assist me.  With that confidence behind me I choose to walk my undocumented crew into the Regional INS office in Atlanta, presented my case and stated, “Get me my visas or deport my crew and I will give the keys to my home to my banker and get a job at McDonnald's flipping burgers.” After a few phone calls the Assistance Director realized the serverity of my case, tracked down my application, and demanded on the phone to the officer who had the application to approve the damn thing, “that the south had wetbacks coming out of the woodwork," and that if my application was correct to approve it. This act finally pushed the program into operation and I did a voluntary deportation with my crew to obtain the visas. The rest is history.

Señor Mendez joined us and carried many of the bricks for the grave.

The following photo is of Señor Mendez, Benjamin’s father.  We needed more bricks to support the monument for Benji’s grave and on the back wall of this room Señor Mendez had a stack of bricks that he graciously offered.  Seeing his Bible stand I asked him for a photo. From the Bible stand he can view Eagle Mountain, the largest mountain in the region. Returning to the graveyard the family told me that Señor Mendez is very proud of the fact that we are choosing to honor his son.  They say he is profoundly sad as memories of Benji returning and telling stories of working with me in the forest flood his memory.

As the day came to a close I sat recommitting my company to assisting this community of simple souls in creating happier futures.

Friday night January the 11th we were invited to the celebration of a wedding in the village.  As we stopped and the kids of the village saw that I had a camera they went nuts.

Here the kids are piling onto the piñata that is covered by a sheet for tomorrow’s festive day.

These are the children of families whose fathers leave for months at a time and travel to the United States for labor jobs. To us they live in paradise as they live in the middle of an ancient pine forest that houses the beloved Monarch butterfly.  But all is not well in this vast forested region as pine bark beetles are now breaking out all over the forested region, and as market pressures increase the demand for pine products, illegal harvesting of timber has become a major issue in the area. This compounds the pine bark beetle problem. We also learned that 14 people have been killed in gun fights as locals attempt to protect their forest resources. Among the dead are locals, robbers and federal agents.

(Jill and I don’t make this stuff up, it all very real, and serious.)

This beetle kill site is less than a mile from the home where the kids were playing.  Below infested trees were cut for lumber.

The dead trees in the center of the photo on the previous page are a new bug spot; the stumps in the foreground are from beetle killed trees removed by the village.

The next picture shows just how little the locals understand management, as limbs of infested trees are left right next to an uninfested stand of young pines. By spring these will be infested and will die.

This is the first story in a series to come on how we recruit workers, who they are, and how working in the United States collapses time for people from less productive economies. We have sponsored one Forest Conservation Worker from Peru and have contacted the American Consulate in Ghana about sponsoring a man from that country who has proven his integrity to us as with his help we exposed serious corruption within our own Consulate in Ghana which we believe influenced the closing of the visa section as house cleaning was performed and better procedures installed.

(Actually after a meeting with the heads of the town, this wood was move to the center of corn field and burned.)

Post Script: The man, Raymond, from Ghana was once again denied a visa even though Jill and I offered to pay his travel cost round trip and cover the cost ourselves.  They still would not let him in.  It takes time for light to filter into darken areas. 

Ghana and Mexico have lots in common.  Both are home to Cieba Trees, both are loosing forest at alarming rates, both have lots of good people simple trying to move their lives forward.

Both William and Leobardo are the bucks of their groups.  It was interesting watching how they became friends and hung out together over the spring that William was with us.