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A former Forest Service inspector says many of our national forests have been replanted by undocumented workers. BY LOUISE WAGENKNECHT
Photo: TIM JEWETT
The lead story in the Sunday Oregonian's business section outlined the extensive use of undocumented workers in the metro area's booming nursery business. While most Oregonians are probably aware that private businesses use illegal aliens to plant trees, they might be surprised to learn that the U.S. Forest Service does the same thing. For more than a decade, I worked for the USFS in the Klamath National Forest, just south of the Oregon border, inspecting crews who did the hard, dirty work of forestry. I've loaded bags of trees onto green pickups at 5:30 in the morning. I've led vans full of planters up muddy, winding logging roads. I've looked out through clacking windshield wipers at a pie slice of forest--a thousand-foot-long wedge with every living stick of wood removed or burned--then stepped out into a crowd of about 20 planters, all Mexican, most under 21, and more than a few lacking a valid green card. My job was to inspect the quality of the men's work, not their legal status. It was a good thing, because despite the Forest Service's claim that it will not knowingly hire contractors who use undocumented workers, it was clear to me that many of the men who were replanting our national forests were in this country illegally. How did the federal agency get itself into this shadowland of illegality? Blame it on optimistic projections that large clearcuts could be successfully, and cheaply, regenerated. In reality, planting, unlike logging, cannot be mechanized on the steep slopes of the Pacific Northwest. Planting 1,500 acres every spring required large crews. Local people may have wanted the work, but they lacked the cash to compete for the huge contracts put out by the Forest Service. So each winter, federal contracting officers sitting in warm headquarters buildings solemnly told the successful bidders that hiring illegal aliens was, well, illegal. The contractors--big companies with access to the Northwest's large reservoir of undocumented laborers--solemnly assured the officers that all their workers had green cards. The officers, paperwork in order, went back to their desks. And 70 miles away, a couple of inspectors followed two dozen ill-clad teen-agers across a scarred mountainside. We watched the road above, yelled "Bueno!" down the slopes, and silently prayed that these cheerful and competent youngsters would not be hassled by immigration officials until they had crawled out of the last clearcut and planted the last tree. On a typical February morning, two foremen--the only English speakers on the crew--would open the bags and lift out the bundles of tiny, 2-year-old conifers. Young Mexican planters seized the trees, sloshed the roots in a slurry of water and vermiculite, then stuffed them into rubberized bags belted to their waists, each holding about 500 seedlings. They wore cheap tennis shoes, polyester trousers, loud cowboy shirts. New arrivals could be spotted by their lack of gloves or hats--until they got their first paychecks. It was often 34 degrees, windy and raining, cold even through long underwear and heavy rain gear like mine. Once their bags were full of tiny trees, the young men dropped out of sight--the earth fell away from the road in a slope steeper than an attic staircase--and worked down the hill, 8 feet apart, searching for planting spots. Their only tools, "hoedads," were flat steel blades about 18 inches long and 4 inches wide attached to ax handles. They plunged the blade into the soil, popped the handle to break a space, deftly slipped a seedling in, tamped the soil, and slid another 8 feet down. At midday, the crew built an enormous fire on the roadbed to brown tortillas and fry meat and beans. Peppers, salsa, cans of soda and cookies appeared and disappeared amid talk and laughter. Their lives had given them rough hands and whippet-like bodies, but they seemed happy at the prospect of three months of picnics in a deluge. We didn't ask questions about their legal status, but actions spoke. One day, when a Forest Service expert drove up unexpectedly, the crew dropped their tools and raced off, almost as one man. The two foremen, legal and middle-aged, came up the road and laughed in relief when they saw he wasn't from the INS. "Your truck is the same color as the Border Patrol trucks," they chortled. "You scared them pretty good!" Real immigration raids usually came at night, when the crew was asleep in rented motel rooms in town. One time, the overnight departure of an entire crew meant that hundreds of thousands of seedlings had to wait in a tree cooler for a month while the planters made their way back north. When they came, the crews put in 14-hour days, seven days a week, planting as many as 23,000 trees a day. But time was against us. A week of hot weather in early May ended the season. We set fire to the hapless leftover trees and waved good-bye to the crew.
This story came to WW via the AlterNet News Service. Louise Wagenknecht left the Forest Service in 1987. She now raises sheep in Idaho and writes for the High Country News, a Colorado biweekly, which published a longer version of this article.
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