Cowboys Call for Immigration Compromise

Joaquin Morales, 12, plants a Mexican flag in the ground before a Cinco de Mayo immigrants' rights rally at Chicano Park in San Diego on Friday, May 5, 2006. (AP Photo/Denis Poroy) (Denis Poroy - AP)

So Ladd's answer goes something like this:

1. Establish a system to register and identify illegal workers.

2. Provide such workers with counterfeit-proof IDs.

3. If employers need additional workers, put in an order with the immigration service, which could allow the required number in.

4. Expedite citizenship for those now waiting and allow illegal residents to apply, but consider them only after those already in line.

"That's dreaming, I'm sure," he concludes. "But that's the way it could work."

A dog barks, and John Ladd walks into the ranch house. He is the contrary yang to his dad's composed yin.

He uses the pejorative term "wetback," saying he refuses to be politically correct. Pro-migrant rallies incense him because he believes some Hispanics are looking to "take back" the Southwest.

Nevertheless, the 50-year-old son agrees with his father on the need for a worker program and a mechanism to expedite the citizenship process. "Anybody that doesn't believe we need workers coming in is an idiot," he says.

Though it pains him, he also agrees with Arizona's Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, that walls and fences won't solve anything. The Ladd ranch has a wall, a few hundred feet of steel barricading a small slice of border. John calls it "ugly"; immigrants walk around it. He'd much prefer a shorter rail barrier that migrants could hop but that would keep his cattle penned in and Mexican cattle out.

"Show me a 50-foot wall," he says, "and I'll show you a 55-foot ladder."

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Palmer never imagined that ranchers living at the border's edge might see things his way.

His property is 40 miles north, so the foot traffic, trash and cut fences are more sporadic than what Strom and the Ladds are used to. If the stream was nonstop, he'd be so mad he couldn't think straight. He felt like that years back when he put 27 splices in a half-mile of fence immigrants severed.

"I was about to shoot every one of 'em myself," he says.

He's since changed his tune _ because Palmer doesn't just live with the effects of immigration, he needs immigrants to live.

He grows corn silage and alfalfa and runs a feed lot on 360 acres in Cochise County. He does this, nowadays, with the help of no one _ save his wife, Ann, and his 3-year-old grandson, Colten, who on this morning is running to alert Grandma Ann that Papa Paul might need help getting cattle out of a pen.

"I can't get the kind of help I need without getting guys out of old Mexico," says Palmer, 52. "I keep hearing all this whining about these guys taking jobs, but I haven't had anyone come looking for work."

Anyone other than those Palmer calls "documentally challenged." He could use about three documentally challenged laborers. He's got fences and equipment needing maintenance, painting to be done. But the workers Palmer employed in the past have moved on because they feared being caught working so close to the border.

So Palmer talks to friends at church, folks at the chamber and fellow farmers about the need for a legal way to hire foreign workers.

Certainly, not everyone agrees with him. In Cochise County, home to the Minuteman Civil Defense Corp., some ranchers scout for illegal crossers with infrared goggles or hold immigrants at gunpoint until the Border Patrol shows up.

Resident Dave Stoddard, a retired Border Patrol agent, believes employers like Palmer don't want to pay what it takes to hire American workers. Those touting a guest-worker program "already have a supply of workers available if they would pay more, give better benefits and working conditions," he said in an e-mail.

Others, like rancher Ruth Evelyn Cowan, are skeptical the government could come up with a functioning worker system. Cowan sold half her cattle herd and moved full-time back to Phoenix last year after getting fed up with the immigration traffic and trash.

"I would like for the Mexican government to take care of their people and I would like the Mexican people to demonstrate against their own country," she says. "We have laws on the books. Enforce 'em. The end."

For Palmer, the center is a strange place to be.

"I'm a patriot, and I'm ready to whup anybody that means harm to this country. But we've got to look at this thing realistically," he says. "I'm not usually a middle-of-the-road guy. But surely there's something in the middle."