6-28 IAN Jumping Ship

 Executive director of the Idaho Wool Growers Association, Stan Boyd says many of his clients, Idaho Wool Growers recruit sheep herders from foreign lands such as Peru. Wool growers make sure they have a passport and line up there visas. The wool grower pays their way, buys their airplane ticket to bring them United States. It costs around  $2500-$3000 per man to bring him in. They fly them right in to the Boise airport. They get off the plane and go to work and a lot of them, one week later, they go out and the man is gone. He left in the middle of the night and became one of 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States. “When they get here, and not every one of them, but it is getting to be enough of them that it is becoming a problem. They get here, and there are what we call coyotes, headhunters, people that will approach these sheep herders and entice them to jump their contract with promises of a  better wage or whatever. there are others who get here and for whatever reason they feel they want to jump their contract and then there are others who have that in their mind from the very beginning. If they get homesick and want to go home, then go home. No problem. If they are here more than 6 months the  will grower will even pay their way home. If they do not like their employer or don’t like the country, they can transfer to another outfit. What galls everybody and what causes a lot of economic damage to these wool growers is when they just get up in the middle of the night and leave, particularly when the sheep are on the open range. Then the predators get into them and you don’t know it for a couple of days.