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All photos by Mike Kane / Marguerite Casey Foundation
Arsenio Bravo looks up at a passing car while picking salal, a leafy green shrub sold for floral arrangements around the world, in the forest between Forks and La Push, Wash., on the Olympic Peninsula, in March 2012. Bravo was drawn to the area more than a decade ago from his native Oaxaca, Mexico. Picking salal gave Bravo the ability to start and support a family. He lives in Forks with his wife and son.
By Kathy Mulady
Latino families began moving to the sleepy, rural town of Forks, Wash., in the 1980s, attracted by the quiet and willing to work at low-paying jobs left behind when the logging industry faded. The men pick salal, a green plant commonly used in floral arrangements, or cut cedar shingles in the woods, making enough to support their families.
But now the town—200 miles from the Canadian border and 1,300 miles from the Mexican border—has turned into an unexpected focus of the U.S. Border Patrol.
Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Joe Romero calls in the license plate of a vehicle that he suspects belongs to undocumented salal pickers on a remote forest access road near Port Angeles, Wash. Border agents are aware of the areas that salal pickers tend to work, and know that often salal pickers are undocumented immigrants. A high percentage of the undocumented immigrants deported from the Olympic Peninsula are initially detained in the forest while picking salal.
In the last few years, the number of U.S. Border Patrol agents has increased six-fold along the U.S.– Canadian Border. In September, when a new $9.8 million field office opened in Port Angeles, on Washington States’ remote Olympic Peninsula, the number of agents at the station grew ten times, from four people in 2006 to 42 now. There is room for 50 agents in the new building.
Isabel, 10, sits with her mother Marta and father Victor in their home in Forks. Victor is undocumented and picks salal to support the family. Marta, a U.S. citizen, worries about Victor getting deported and how that would effect Isabel and Victor Jr., Isabel's 9-year-old brother. Both kids are U.S. citizens and would likely stay in the U.S. with their mother. (Last names withheld at subjects' request).
The smell of wood smoke is ubiquitous after a late-season snowfall in the trailer park neighborhoods of Forks, where many immigrant families live.
American-born Edgar Ruiz Garcia, 10 months old, looks out from his family's home in a trailer park neighborhood in Forks. Edgar's father is an undocumented salal picker who runs the risk of deportation daily by picking in the forests. Edgar is being held by his aunt, whose husband was arrested while picking salal in the forest and subsequently deported back to Mexico.
Agents are charged with preventing terrorists and their weapons of terrorism from entering the country, and apprehension of anyone or anything illegally entering the country.
With the increased presence of U.S. border patrol agents, the decades-old Latino community is dispersing, fearing deportations that can divide families. About 75 percent of the Latino families have left, and business owners say they are suffering.
See more images of immigration in PhotoBlog.
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Looks to me like the "Latino enclave" just might be a settlement of illegal Mexicans. Ya gotta love that liberal double-speak.
This story has two parts. First the border patrol agents are just doing their job, hunting down illegals who broke the law coming into this country the way they did. Second is the exploitation of these illegals. Yes they are being exploited, which only drags down the living standard of every citizen in this country. Cheap illegal labor and cheap foreign goods are destroying this country. This is just a small picture of that problem
Agreed,now kick them out.
I live in Port Angeles. I am a welder and I personally did all the structural steel work on the new border patrol building. We actually remodeled the old Eagles building (basically a bar) into their new facility. It has lots of office space, a very large weapons room, 6 jail cells, and a dog run/kennel/dog training facility. It kind of makes you wonder what they are expecting...an invasion? I doubt the local police have it so good.(i've never been inside the local police station and plan to keep it that way). And now we see border patrol agents everywhere. We do have a ferry crossing here from British Columbia, but how many agents does it take to check people getting off a boat? As far a mexicans go, I rarely see any. Most of us here just wonder why they spent so much money building such an elaborate facility here, when there's never seemed to be any border problems here. Do they know something we don't?
When we think about our "standard of living" and argue that people willing to work for less pay are dragging us all down, we miss the fact that prices are determined by supply as much as demand. If it costs more to supply a product, such as salal, to the market, it will cost the consumer more to buy it. Who wants to pay more for flower arrangements?? Who wants to pay more for food? Who wants to pay more for housing? People immigrating to the US are not destroying our country, they are meeting a need for labor that we as consumers demand through our purchasing decisions. We demand cheap goods and our desire for more and more stuff is the only thing damaging our families and country. We already have to work way too much with both parents working and our kids starving for our attention and guidance -and this is to afford the cheap goods being imported from elsewhere. What would our lives be like if we had to pay local artisan prices for our basic survival? Immigrants work their butts off and earn an honest wage. We should not point fingers at them. We should be honest with ourselves about our constant drive for more and more stuff nobody needs, which leaves less money to pay an fair wage and fair price for a locally produced product or service. Think about it. Does anyone care about immigrants when times are good? Nope.
those people are a drain on the taxpayer's they work under the table all the while their anchor's generate additional revenu for their living expenses they pay mo income taxes get a butt load of subsidies and if we can capture them and deport them prices may rise on our food staples and i realize me and my wife will just have to cut back on the two truck loads of lettuce we eat weekley
Guatamala arrested McAffee for entering there illegally and he had $$$$, yet Guatamalans enter this country with impunity, and are given $$$$$.