Immigration Plan Troubles President's Texas Neighbors
WACO, Texas — Angelica Tellez and her family migrated to central Texas from northern Mexico in 1983, seeking a better life. Today she owns her own business, Angie's Bazaar, selling bridal gowns and quinceanera dolls to Waco's burgeoning Latino community.
Hers is a classic immigrant entrepreneur success story, the kind President Bush likes to cite as he tries to attract more Latinos into the Republican fold.
But there's a catch: For her first eight years in this country, Tellez was an illegal immigrant, living in the shadows of the law and the back alleys of the economy.
"I worked so hard to be what I am now, to have my own business, to have my own house," said Tellez, 38, who became a legal resident in 1991 after marrying a U.S. citizen. "It's the people without papers who work the hardest."
Under legislation passed by the House in December and praised by Bush, stories like Tellez's would be heard less often. Living in the United States illegally would change from a civil offense to a federal crime, turning an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants into felons and rendering them permanently ineligible for legal residency. Employers would be required to go to greater lengths to verify workers' legal status and penalties for violations would become much stiffer.
Here in Bush's backyard, a half-hour's drive from the Prairie Chapel Ranch where he and First Lady Laura Bush spent the last week unwinding, business owners appear increasingly anxious about the direction the immigration debate is taking.
America needs to crack down on illegal border crossings to deter potential terrorism, criminal activity and community disruption until other reforms are in place, several employers said in interviews last week.
But turning America's entire population of undocumented residents into criminals and seeking to ship them all out of the country is another matter, they said, and threatens to cause more economic damage than it prevents.
"We need to get control of our borders for a lot of reasons," said Carey Hobbs, president of Hobbs Bonded Fibers Inc. and a prominent Waco Republican. "But there are a lot of businesses where if you took the illegal aliens out, it would shut them down."
Among them: hotels, restaurants, building contractors, landscaping firms, food processors and farming operations, according to employers and labor market analysts.
