ICE The elephant in the room

When I was younger I wanted my own place but now that I’m older it is nice to just sit in the house in really bad weather. My sis-in-law was talking about a former coworker that retired and THEN bought her own farm to keep horses at home…were I younger when I started, sure I’d have horses in retirement, but not starting that now!

My horse is only about 5 miles away and on 90 acres. I’m there almost every day but sometimes if the snow is really bad or if it is pouring out my friend will text and say she already fed, don’t worry about coming out. Then I stay in the house all warm and dry and happy.

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^^
I have my horses at home, too, and in this crappy weather, it sucks all the fun out of horse ownership.

This blog post was recently posted here on Chron. https://www.chronofhorse.com/category/blog/?_gl=1f20nav_gaMTA3NDk5NDM0OC4xNjYzMjQ0NzUz_ga_3Q593VP376*MTczOTk5MTY2My4xNTE1LjEuMTczOTk5MjU4OC4wLjAuMA…

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I loved having my horses at home. But I was only doing about one percent of the work. DH did nearly all (he was a stay at home dad), and I only needed to cover if he was out of town, or once when he was trapped on the floor for several days with a bad back. Wouldn’t you know that was when we got a huge blizzard. My job was far easier–I just earned the money to support all of us.

Rebecca

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Last year (January 2024) my husband went to visit family across the country for two weeks - and while he was gone we got 3 storms of wet snow (up to 15") topped by rain (which soaks in and makes the whole mass much heavier). I can’t run his snowblower and my father’s 1980s Bolens seems to finally be beyond repair. So I hand-shoveled the bank the plow threw up, plus enough of the drive to get cars in & out, and was also carrying hay up the hill to the horses (which we do on foot, don’t plow a track). I tweaked my bad SI joint (usually quiescent) and it hurt the rest of the winter.

He is no longer allowed to leave home in snow season!!!

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Yep, that would definitely make me veto winter travel plans!

I could run our plow and actually enjoyed plowing the driveway. What’s not to love about zooming up and down a long steep driveway on a small John Deere? It felt like a sports car, until I’d accidentally bump the brick on the front of the garage with the plow. That would reverberate throughout my body. Somehow I always ended up doing it on sunny days, which was a world of difference from DH being out there in a blizzard. This pic was taken from the second floor deck, with the first floor windows completely covered in drifts:

I don’t think he misses plowing, or maintaining that land.

Rebecca

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I always had horses at home and occasionally one stayed at the trainers. But once I sold the property and bought a house in town I realized how nice it was to have my horse at a full care stable. No more frozen water buckets, no longer stressed about bad roads if I needed to get my horses to the vet, no more frozen face. The older I got the less fun it was to have them at home. I do really miss having a horse, I really, really do.

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Me, too. I tried taking driving lessons for a while to get my horse fix, but it just wasn’t the same. I was OK when I had to retire each driving pony as the relationship was the most important part to me. But when the last one died, it was truly the end of an era for me.

Rebecca

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I tried a grand experiment in horse care this year. My sis and I bought out the family farm from the other sibs. I board my horses at a very nice local boarding barn - whose only fault is that they keep the horses in muddy sacrifice paddocks during the winter. I got the bright idea to bring the boys home for November - March 1 so that they could have a real pasture and no mud for the winter. We even had hay made last summer so that I didn’t have to buy it.

Now here it is, a week away from March 1 and how would I rate the experiment? I really do enjoy taking care of them even in spite of the fact that we’ve had the worst winter in a long time. They enjoyed their pasture. Except for a few snags, everything has worked out great. But! They are definitely going back March 1 because a) I want to ride (can’t do it at the farm as I don’t have a ring and also would have to deal with one horse in the barn being an idiot while trying to ride the other) and b) I do want a bit more flexibility in my schedule which is kinda hard to have when the boys have to eat.

So back to the boarding barn and I’m pretty sure they will come back to the farm again November 1, assuming we have a decent hay year and my body is still somewhat functional :smile:

But I cannot imagine how hard it would be to do the work for 25+ horses. It’s a young person’s job. I always respected our barn help but I have a new appreciation for them now.

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Unfortunately, the reality is that in immigration (and other RW places) “skill” is equated with level of education (formal) required of the job. It’s actually skilled/professional/unskilled. With professional have a degree that related to the job they do and unskilled job require less than 2 years of experience or training. The nuance of what makes a groom amazing may take years, but it doesn’t take years or special school/training to do stalls etc. I am pro groom/pro immigration but people on here aren’t realizing the legal classification of immigration.

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I see that the comments on this post stopped in late February. Things have changed quite a bit since then.

I’m out of the industry now… What is going on at the shows in? Is there a movement to protect our workers and friends?

Have people contacted their senators and representatives preemptively to let them know there could be an issue? Are attorney is being hired?

How are things going?

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More here:

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Older post and I am sure the conversation has wandered from here in the several hundred posts since. But I have a friend who was employed by a very large multinational corporation in his home country that I am positive everyone on this would recognize. The company offered him the opportunity to learn English and if it went well, they’d transfer him to one of their offices in New York and sponsor his visa and all that.

Well, he learned English and he got transferred to an IT position in New York and the company never did get him a work visa. In fact, he was in New York on 9/11 and afterwards the company told him not to leave the city because they were worried about immigration crackdowns.

If they were that worried about immigration crackdowns, they probably should have just done the right thing from the beginning and sponsored their employees for work visas rather than moving them to the US and having them work without the correct paperwork to save the company money. Friend moved back home and has done very well for himself but has very few good things to say about that multinational.

It will always enrage me that the companies employing undocumented immigrants are rarely penalized. But the immigrants are the ones who get penalized.

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While I think ultimately it is the responsibility of the person to ensure their paperwork is correct etc , I agree with you 100% that those hiring and employing these folks should be penalized as well.

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Unfortunately what is happening - at least according to the CATO institute and other analyses - is that people who had legal status are being stripped of it due to program rollbacks and other legal maneuvers that are frequently happening after ICE has already detained them. Especially if they are part of a large raid, such as at a construction site or at a racetrack (for instance).

To keep this horse related - the other issue is that many were hiring people as contractors. There is no e-Verify process when you hire people as 1099s. You get their EIN, ITIN, or SS, and you pay them under that number. Many farms rely on this process because hiring and maintaining employees is prohibitively expensive. I’m not sure how they do it from an IRS perspective, I’d have to do some research on that, but I do know they rely on it.

This will cause HUGE ripples in our industry. Construction is already taking a fairly large hit as people just aren’t showing up to work. We don’t want grooms not showing up to feed and take care of horses at the racetrack/show barns. Apparently the raid at the racetrack left horses on hot walkers etc. What a mess.

This isn’t sensible at all.

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Not a payroll expert, but I have kept books and calculated payroll for two small businesses. AFAIK, this Marketplace explainer reflects my experience:
Payroll tax, the 12 percent tax taken out of salaried workers’ paychecks, split between employer and employee, primarily funds Social Security, accounting for 88 percent of the payouts in 2017. Undocumented workers typically use a fake SSN or someone else’s SSN when applying for salaried jobs. Only a handful of U.S. states require employers to check an employee’s eligibility and their SSN through E-Verify, a Department of Homeland Security database. Other states have varying levels of E-Verify requirements, from partial to none.

Edited to belatedly add the 1099, self-employment section:

Undocumented immigrants’ payments into the Social Security funds become a murkier matter when they are self-employed. By law, anyone earning an income while in the United States is required to pay taxes, even if they are breaking other laws in doing so.

“The government, the IRS, will never say no to your tax dollars,” said Abigail Zapote, the executive director of the D.C.-based nonprofit Latinos for a Secure Retirement, with a laugh.

Many undocumented sole proprietors, from gardeners to tech startup founders, pay self-employment taxes through an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, legally issued by the IRS. It would be easy enough not to pay anything to the IRS, especially if paid in cash. But many undocumented immigrants do file with an ITIN to be in good standing with the government should there be an opportunity to apply for a green card or citizenship in the future. Undocumented immigrants who pay self-employment taxes via an ITIN also pay into the Social Security funds, however there are no statistics on exact dollar amounts.

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Although 1099 doesn’t involve withholding, the IRS knows you got that money and will expect to see an associated tax return for it from the recipient. You can only avoid taxes on it if you’re not getting a 1099 (which is a violation for the payer) or willing to live underground and don’t plan a long term presence in the US.

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I should be clear - the rules on how you treat someone in terms of scheduling for a 1099 contractor are pretty strict. You can get in trouble if you tell them when they must be present, which is pretty crucial for farm workers.

So my question was not necessarily about the workers reporting their own taxes, but the classification from the business perspective.

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Usually it works great until it doesn’t. As long as all the workers are happy and pay their taxes no one will notice. But, a worker who ends up in an ER without workman’s comp, or a group of workers who complain or otherwise come to the attention of to folk empowered to investigate, and then the jig is up. I’ve seen unfortunate fallout from these situations.

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…and NFN, regardless of the company’s CYA techniques, the arrangement has a net effect keeping wages super low, benefiting owners/managers/stockholders the most.

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This US citizen was walking in a park and detained when ICE showed up and rounded up anyone that looked Hispanic. She happens to be a lawyer. She said there was no warrant and nobody asked her if she was a US citizen until she made it to a detention center and was in holding.

https://www.dailyjournal.com/articles/386228-oc-attorney-says-she-was-detained-in-ice-raid-at-santa-ana-park

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