Tres Strikes

[September 24th, 2008]

WALLA WALLA, Wash.—Three weeks after WW reported U.S. Sen. Gordon Smith’s Eastern Oregon food-processing plant employed undocumented workers—a claim the senator vigorously denied—another illegal immigrant has come forward with his personal story of working there.

Manuel Raya, a 58-year-old Walla Walla resident, says he worked at Smith Frozen Foods on and off for nearly a decade sorting corn and repackaging frozen produce—from September 1997 until June 28, 2007. He says he used a fake Social Security number he bought on the streets of Los Angeles in 1980, just days after he immigrated illegally to the United States from Guanajuato, Mexico.

Smith Frozen Foods confirmed Raya’s work history. But the company fired Raya when it learned he was an undocumented worker, says Mike Lesko, Smith Frozen Foods human resources manager.

“There was substantiated proof that he was illegal,” Lesko told WW on Sunday, Sept. 21.

Yet Lesko’s explanation is puzzling for three reasons: Raya worked nearly a decade for Smith Frozen Foods before his firing, the senator has responded to WW’s previous stories (“Señor Smith,” WW, Sept. 10, 2008) with a fierce defense of his business’s supposedly stringent hiring practices (“Señor Smith, Part Dos,” Sept. 17, 2008), and there’s one other noteworthy factor—Raya attracted substantial media attention while employed at Smith Frozen Foods.

Beginning in 2000, Raya was the subject of a lengthy profile that ran periodically for several months in the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, a daily newspaper that circulates in Eastern Washington and Oregon. Raya suffers from neurofibromatosis, a highly unusual medical condition that badly disfigured his face. The newspaper series focused on Raya’s efforts to have the damage surgically repaired. (As a seasonal worker at Smith Frozen Foods, Raya did not qualify for employer-sponsored health insurance.)

The story printed Raya’s full name, published several photos of him and stated clearly that he was an undocumented worker in order to explain why he also did not qualify for public assistance. Walla Walla lies just 20 miles north of Weston, Ore., where Smith’s operation is located.

Lesko confirmed Sunday that he remembered Raya because of the worker’s genetic disease, which before surgery “reduced the left side of his face to an ever-worsening cascade of tumors and loose flesh,” according to a 2003 follow-up story in the Union-Bulletin that again identified Raya as an illegal immigrant.

Yet, according to Lesko, Smith Frozen Foods did not learn Raya was an illegal immigrant until seven years after the initial series of stories, which were picked up by the Associated Press. “In June 2007 a production supervisor brought to my attention a newspaper article from 2003 that stated Manuel Raya was an ‘illegal immigrant,’” Lesko told WW in a follow-up email Tuesday, Sept. 23.

Raya, who now earns about $20 a day collecting and recycling empty cans, believes Smith Frozen Foods always knew he was an undocumented worker but chose to do nothing about it because, as is the case for most agricultural companies, undocumented workers provide a large supply of hardworking and relatively inexpensive employees.

For his part, Raya says he was finally let go in 2007, not for his immigration status but because his salary had reached $9 an hour and he could be replaced by another employee who earned only about $8 an hour.

“They knew for many years,” Raya said in Spanish while sitting in the modest mobile home in Walla Walla that he bought with help from readers of the Union-Bulletin stories. “They were just looking for a reason to get rid of me.”

Lesko says that claim is not true, noting “his rate of pay was not a factor.”

None of this would matter if Gordon Smith’s public actions and pronouncements about illegal immigration had not been so at odds with his company’s private business practices.

In 2007, Smith voted to kill federal legislation that would have paved the way for millions of undocumented workers to seek citizenship, despite the benefits his company has reaped from the 1986 amnesty under President Reagan.

He’s also voted to make English the official language of the United States, despite the fact much of his workforce speaks only Spanish.

And, according to a Jan. 31, 2007, letter to constituents, he “supported an amendment that would prevent illegal aliens from receiving Social Security benefits based on their unauthorized work history,” cutting off benefits to workers like Raya.

Finally, as recently as Sept. 10, Smith—a two-term incumbent running for re-election against Democrat Jeff Merkley—says his company’s policy is to “obey the law and document every worker.” His campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story.