Spanish
The tightening of immigration policies in the United States, driven by President Donald Trump, not only puts many foreigners in the country in trouble.
Many American companies are now having more trouble finding workers, so their business suffers.
And they try to convince the president to rectify.
Trump promised in the campaign to carry out the "largest deportation operation in the history of the United States" and the fear of being arrested has made many afraid to leave home to go to work.
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But amid headlines about foreigners deported to prisons in El Salvador and reports that the government is deporting or denying entry to people with proper documentation, uncertainty spreads among companies about what the Trump administration plans to do with the programs that channel legal immigration, on which many depend.
The president has assured that he wants to allow legal immigration to the United States, but his government seems much more focused on arrests and deportations than on opening and putting order in the legal immigration routes or regularizing the more than eight million undocumented immigrants estimated to be working in the country.
The problem is real and pressing for many companies.
"We have around 1.7 million unfilled positions and employers are concerned about a labor shortage that is pushing up inflation for American families," Rebecca Shi, from the American Business Immigration Coalition (ABIC), an association that advocates for the reform of U.S. immigration laws, told BBC Mundo.
The Shi association carries out lobbying to achieve what it calls "a sensible migration policy".
Its members met in Washington last March with the aim of making their voice heard among the members of Congress.
The president of ABIC, Bob Worsley, is the owner of an Arizona construction company that frequently suffers from the problem of a lack of workers and in 2012 won a seat in the state legislature for the Republican Party, the same as President Trump.
Worsley and other entrepreneurs working with him believe that, more than deportations, the United States and its companies need an immigration policy that guarantees orderly pathways for legal immigration.
"This is like a dam where water will find a way to pass through sheer force. You can secure the border, but if you don't solve the immigration issue so that people can come legally, it will happen again," he told the newspaper The New York Times.
But an in-depth immigration reform is an issue that has been postponed for years due to the inability of Democrats and Republicans to reach agreements, and there are no indications that it is one of Trump's priorities.
For some businesses, the president's immigration policy has become an almost daily problem.
"Raids by Immigration agents are frequent in my area and I know that when there is one, my employees are not going to show up because they are going to stay home protecting their families," Manolo Betancur, a Colombian naturalized American who bought a small Latin bakery in the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, years ago, and now has four locations and 70 workers, all immigrants, told BBC Mundo.
The first of their businesses is located in the Central Avenue area of Charlotte, one of the most central and diverse in the city, and a usual target of ICE operations, the federal agency in charge of enforcing immigration laws.
Manolo tries to persuade the local authorities to speak out against the federal government's policies.
"Our politicians believe they are only taking away criminals and that is a big lie," he says, pointing to the climate that has been created since Trump regained the presidency.
"Our own leaders are afraid to go against the government," he denounces.
El caso de Manolo's Bakery no es excepcional.
"Employers tell us that their foreign employees are worried because many work with work permits from legal programs that are about to expire and the uncertainty of not knowing what will happen to them is causing them a lot of stress," says Shi.
"In collaboration with their American colleagues, they provide specialized work that is not easy to cover."
Although judging by the available statistics, the pace of deportations has so far been only slightly higher than that of the last months of Joe Biden's government, the one presided over by Trump has ordered an end to some of the temporary protection programs that allowed immigrants who arrived in recent years to work legally.
Source: BBC News World
