The Valley Doesn't Run Without Them

There is a comfortable thing people say about this, which is that these are jobs Americans would take if the wages were better. It is comfortable because it can never be tested.

Except it has been tested. Repeatedly, under federal supervision, for fifteen years.

Farms that hire seasonal foreign labor are required by law to prove they advertised to Americans first. That requirement produces a clean record of what happens when you offer these jobs to citizens before anyone else is allowed to have them. In North Carolina in 2011, the growers association posted 6,500 farm jobs. The state had roughly 489,000 unemployed people.

Two hundred sixty-eight applied.

Nearly everyone who applied was hired — better than nine in ten. One hundred sixty-three showed up on the first day of work. Seven finished the season. Seven, against 6,500 jobs. One-tenth of one percent.

Ninety percent of the Mexican-born workers finished. Week to week, an American on that crew was thirty times likelier to walk off it.

That is not a claim about character. It is a hiring record, kept by people legally obligated to keep it, and it reads the same way every year it has been run.

The valley runs its own version of the experiment every season. The postings go up. The wages are listed. The phone numbers are public. The same people fill them.

One hundred Midland Avenue is a commercial address in West Glenwood. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has leased space there from a Florida company since 2004.

In April, the city's planning and zoning commission voted to revoke the special use permit that allowed the property to be used as a detention center. The federal agency did not appeal. Neither did the General Services Administration. Neither did the property owner. The deadline passed in silence.

On July 24, the Glenwood Springs Fire Department answered a medical call at the address. The city attorney's memo in the August 6 council packet notes what that call confirmed: the space was still being used to detain people.

So on August 6 the council took up the question of whether to go to court over it — a fight the city attorney had already described, back in April, as uphill.

Nothing about the building announces any of this. That is most of the point.

Here is the second item on that same agenda.

The Glenwood Springs Fire Department is funded by a dedicated property tax split between the city and the rural fire protection district. It does not cover the department. The gap runs about two million dollars a year, and the city's general fund has been closing it by transfer. The department's own standard-of-cover study says it is short five to seven firefighters and EMS personnel.

So the council spent one night on two questions. Whether to spend money the city does not have on a lawsuit against the federal government it is likely to lose. And whether to ask homeowners for a tax increase because the fire department cannot pay for itself.

The same department that documented what was happening at 100 Midland is the department that cannot fill five to seven positions.

That is the arithmetic of a small town holding a very large problem. Both items are real. Both are expensive. Nobody at that table has enough money for either one.

There is a version of this story that treats the people at the center of it as a category. Down here it does not work, because down here everybody knows them.

Fifteen and twenty years in one valley makes a life that is not sortable by politics. Kids in the same schools. Guys on the same crews. An American contractor whose lead framer has been with him since before his own kids were born. A restaurant owner who has trained the same cook through three menus and two remodels. Neighbors. Soccer parents. The man who plows your lot.

When a person is removed from a valley like this one, a category does not shrink by one. A crew loses the guy who knows how the job actually goes together. A kitchen loses the only person who can run a Saturday. A kid loses a classmate. A business owner loses a decade of training he cannot buy back at any wage.

And the friendships that break do not break along any line you could draw on a map. They break across all of them.

This is the part where we are supposed to get uncomfortable and change the subject.

So let's not. Money is the whole subject of this publication, and this is a money story before it is anything else. A labor supply that contracts does not send a notice. It shows up as a restaurant that goes to five days. A build that runs four months long. A lift that opens late because the crew is short. A hotel that cuts a floor. Wages up, prices up, service down, and the businesses with the thinnest margins closing first — which in this valley is most of them.

You cannot separate the lifestyle from the payroll that produces it. The powder day requires somebody to have driven a groomer at two in the morning. The dinner requires somebody to have broken down forty pounds of fish. The house requires a crew. There is no version of this place that runs on its own.

The valley you moved here for does not work without these people. It has never worked without them.

Now go look at what we are doing on Midland Avenue, and tell me that is what you wanted.