For an outsider, you can tell spring is coming from the noise. Sounds from dozens of different birds, back from their southern vacations, fill the air. But for Jane Andres, a lifelong resident of southern Ontario, the real sign of spring comes from the town’s other returning residents – seasonal farm workers, all the way from the Caribbean.

Andres describes the history of Niagara-on-the-Lake, nicknamed “the loveliest town in Canada,” over the crackle of a fireplace that is warming up the open living room inside her two suite bed and breakfast.

She says the town didn’t used to be a mecca for wine-lovers, that for many years the region was dotted with tender-fruit farms and canning plants. But when the last plant closed in the mid-2000s, farmers were forced to find a new crop, one that would be in-demand for years to come.

Andres says that transition has forced the hand of farmers; the vineyards now demand more workers. Since most Canadians are not interested in farm work, she says, the farmers turn to the country’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program for the help they need.

***

She’s an unlikely leader. In fact, she had to be convinced to go to a seasonal worker oriented church service in 2005.

“I was asked to help out with the music in one of their church services,” she remembers. “I said no, I was too busy.”

She was busy, it was peak season for her bed and breakfast, but it was more than just scheduling that was holding her back.

“I was not looking to make a connection,” she admits. “There was a certain amount of apprehension and fear from just not knowing.”

But one of the church leaders convinced her to at least come after the service to meet some of the men who worked on farms nearby.

“I was so surprised at how friendly they were,” Andres recalls. “So I started getting involved with the church service and then getting a music team together.”

She says the idea of hosting a welcome concert came from the yearly gathering the farmers held. Ever since then her life has been turned upside-down.

Andres jokes that she sometimes feels like she didn’t start living until she was in her 50s.

“I was surprised at just about everything when I first started, because I knew nothing. I had a lot of stereotypes in mind when I first met them.”

But since, she’s grown close to some of the workers, visiting several of them and their families in Jamaica. Andres says she is “impressed with the integrity with which they live their lives.”

***

It was 21 years ago that attitudes towards the seasonal agricultural workers first started to change in Niagara-on-the-Lake. That began after a Caribbean farm worker was killed while biking on Highway 55.

Reverend Herman Neufeld remembers the woman who found the man was shocked by the town’s reaction to the news.

“No one knew him, no one knew what farm he was working on,” recalls Neufeld. “She said this is a tragedy, this shouldn’t be. There’s thousands of them coming here but we don’t know them, they’re invisible.”

The incident inspired the creation of the Caribbean Workers Outreach Program by Grace United Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Since then with the help of Andres, Neufeld says, the program’s outreach has expanded leaps and bounds. He estimates at least a dozen churches of different denominations in southern Ontario are now involved in the program.

Andres is at the center of it all. She’s planning the annual workers welcome concert for about 600 workers and community members. In previous years, the concert has proved so popular it was broadcast in Jamaica several times a year.

Neufeld says Andres’ passion has been instrumental in the growth of the program. But Andres says she’s been inspired by the workers and wants them to take a role in creating church services.

“These guys have got great ideas, they just need someone to facilitate the sound that they want,” she said. “Mostly, when you’re homesick you want to hear some songs from home and so that became my goal.”

It’s not just the welcome concert; there are several big events in the summer for workers and the community to come together including a cricket match and a Caribbean barbeque. Plus two pastors from Jamaica are flown in for summer months to help with weekly services targeted at the workers and daily visits to farms to check in with them.

“Through it all we’ve gotten to know them personally and know their needs,” Neufeld said. “It’s become more than just a summer project, which I’m happy about. And it’s brought the churches closer, which was my other prayer.”

Andres says she just wants to show the workers that they are not invisible.

“We see you here and we appreciate you,” Andres said.

Markofski, a new business planner for Yamaha, hopes to repeat the success here that the company has had in Japan with RMAX, an unmanned aerial vehicle that sprays fertilizer and herbicides over farms there.

“In Japan, the RMAX has more in common with a tractor than it does with a helicopter,” said Markofski, of the remote-controlled helicopter that has been used in that country for two decades.

Agriculture is expected to be one of the biggest potential markets for drones in the U.S., as the FAA develops regulations to open the skies by 2015 and commercial uses grow for unmanned aerial vehicles – UAVs, or drones.

In Arizona, where thousands are already employed in drone production or related industries, new commercial markets could mean new jobs.

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International predicted high demand for agriculture drones that will be able to spray crops with herbicide and pesticide and offer access to cheap, timely data on crop health.

“The case for precision agriculture is one based on economic efficiency,” said Darryl Jenkins, author of the association’s March report.

He said drones will be used to survey huge farms and pinpoint areas in need of fertilizer and pesticides to prevent waste. Current crop surveys and dusting can be done with planes or helicopters, but drones will make the technology more affordable and accessible.

Robert Blair, an Idaho wheat farmer, started looking into unmanned aircraft as a surveying solution in 2006, after spending $9,000 on a single manned aircraft flight and then waiting weeks to get the data.

After some experimenting with a kit, he decided to build his own. The result is a drone that weighs less than 10 pounds, has a 9-foot wingspan and gives him timely information about disease, weeds and water on his 1,500 acres that he could not otherwise get.

Blair estimates that, including the cost of all the trade shows he attended to do research, he has put about $300,000 into his UAV. But besides being faster, it is cheaper to operate a drone than it would be to hire a plane and pilot to do the same job, he said.

Even though the FAA bans flying for commercial purposes, it allows remote-control flying by hobbyists, rules that Blair follows when surveying his land. Since seeing the benefits of drone farming, he has lobbied his state senators and the FAA to make sure large agricultural trade groups have a seat at the table as regulations are developed.

Blair said he is frustrated by how far the U.S. has fallen behind Japan and other countries, as it waits for the FAA to write regulations for the new industry.

“This is the country that develops the technology, but we still have the bureaucracy not allowing us to use it,” he said.

Blair believes that unmanned aircraft are the missing piece in precision agriculture that will take the world to the next level of production necessary to feed an exploding population, and that is why he continues to use them.

“There are a few points in time when a person can effect positive change in an industry that they love,” he said.

He also feels as if agriculture drones should be managed separately from drones doing public safety work, because he believes the farm UAVs pose less threat to privacy and safety.

Both Blair and the unmanned vehicles association point to Japan as a model for successful use of unmanned aircraft in agriculture. It worked well, they said, because the Japanese agriculture ministry commissioned the technology rather than inhibiting commercialization of drones.

Markofski said the ministry had identified an aging farming population as a problem and wanted to mechanize farming to encourage younger generations to stay on family farms. It asked Yamaha to start developing an unmanned aircraft in 1983.

That led to the development in 1991 of an unmanned helicopter to spray both herbicide and fertilizer. Privacy was not a concern at the time, because farming was the only use for unmanned aircraft.

Now known as the RMAX, the Yamaha helicopters are 9 feet long and 200 pounds. They are leased to trained operators who are hired by farmers, as crop dusters are in the U.S.

Precision application in Japan is key because farms are about five acres in size and using a large helicopter leads to spreading fertilizers over homes.

Since the helicopters were first introduced, their use has spread from 100,000 acres in 1991 to a little under 2.5 million acres, or about 40 percent of the country’s rice fields.

Yamaha has since exported the RMAX to South Korea and will start exporting them to Australia this year. Markofski said the company hopes to enter this country in 2015, when Yamaha will target medium-sized U.S. crops such as grapes, almonds pistachios and, of course, rice.

Jenkins predicts there will be more opportunity for entrepreneurs interested in producing and providing services with small drones rather than competing with large established companies.

One of those is Rory Paul, who started Volt Aerial Robotics in Missouri in hopes of using unmanned aircraft to survey crops for farmers.

Paul is now designing and selling his drones, even as the FAA works on regulations, but he sees huge opportunity for the industry through precision application of herbicide and fertilizer. Even though a farmer may only reduce his input of herbicides and fertilizers by 1 percent and boost his output by 1 percent, that will multiply across the industry.

“You’re talking about billions of dollars of dividends through this technology,” Paul said.

Until they met Professor Ray Bedard.

Rayleigh wanted to start a club that would build and fly drones; Bedard had wanted for years to launch drone classes. The club became a class in 2011, with the help of Lyon and Rayleigh’s expertise, and the class grew into a full-fledged drone minor that attracted 28 students when it launched at the school in August.

The minor aims to prepare students to build and fly unmanned aerial vehicles – UAVs, or drones – for a commercial market that doesn’t yet exist.

That has not stopped colleges from jumping in to the field to produce workers for an industry that many believe is poised to boom.

“Once the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) opens up the sky, there is going to be an incredible demand,” for professionals in the drone business, Bedard said.

In Arizona alone, Embry-Riddle and Cochise College have launched drone programs, Arizona State University is developing a minor and one for-profit school is offering courses online. Schools in other states are already offering similar programs, with Bedard’s minor modeled after a large-drone program at the Embry-Riddle campus in Daytona Beach, Fla.

Unmanned aircraft systems and related industries are already well-established in Arizona, employing an estimated 42,000 people in 2010, according to an Arizona Commerce Authority report, mostly in defense-related businesses.

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International predicts the industry could create 70,000 new jobs within three years of the release of FAA regulations, which should allow the commercial side of the business to take off. It predicted that as many as 3,000 of those jobs could be in Arizona, fifth-most in the nation.

“Commercial use of UAVs is going to continue at marginally the same rate as it has in the defense industry, which is double, double, double” said Matt Pobloske, a business development director in Tucson for BAE Systems.

Pobloske said BAE, a defense contractor, is already producing drones for geoscience and atmospheric research applications and for use by public institutions, and hopes to move into the wider commercial market in the future.

Future is the operative word, as there are numerous challenges facing the development of a commercial drone industry.

In addition to a perception problem – to many, “drone” conjures the image of weapons-carrying military aircraft that hunt terrorists overseas – concerns about spying drones have sparked legislation at the state and federal level.

And as Bedard noted, the FAA has yet to write standards for commercial use of drones, which is currently prohibited by the agency in most cases. Public institutions, like the U.S. Forest Service, can get permission to fly drones for civilian uses and others can fly small drones under rules established for radio-controlled model plane hobbyists.

Those rules limit the size of drones, which have to fly below 400 feet, within sight of the operator and not near an airport. That puts a crimp in entrepreneurial aspirations for the industry.

“A big reason we’re not going to blow up in the first year is we don’t want to break the law,” said Rayleigh, who now hopes to get into the drone business.

Because of FAA restrictions, Embry-Riddle cannot require students to fly drones as part of their studies, so some students participate in the club, which operates under the FAA hobbyist laws.

The club designed a 10-pound aircraft and developed software that allows it to autonomously identify specific targets for competitions. The aircraft can also be directed through a point-and-click interface on a laptop or tablet.

“Touch on the map where you would like the UAV to fly and it flies there,” Rayleigh said.

He said he runs the club “as if it was a UAV business,” and takes every precaution when the team practices for competition. Team members keep an eye out for weather that might hurt their drone and keep it in sight at all times so they can turn off the autopilot at the first sign of malfunction.

Lyon said the vast majority of students in the minor are “just curious.” The program attracted students in majors as varied as business, engineering and global security and intelligence studies.

Bedard said that as they designed the minor, he asked: “What would the students need if they were going to start a business? … Because I think that’s the future.”

It’s a definite change of pace for Lyon and Rayleigh, who learned to fly drones at Fort Huachuca and went on to fly missions with 375-pound drones – about mid-size – in the Middle East.

The two hope to ultimately start a surveying business for real estate, forestry, mining and other fields that require images newer and at a higher resolution than can be had from something like Google Earth.

At Cochise College, Don Wirthlin has his students focused on civil applications for agriculture, on search and rescue, on finding hotspots in forest fires or analyzing heat loss from buildings. He gets frustrated by widespread misunderstanding of the commercial drone industry generated by the negative publicity of military drones.

“There’s a lot of positives that people just don’t understand,” said Wirthlin, a former trainer at Fort Huachuca.

He said Cochise College has been considering a UAV program for 10 years. It finally started in January with the first group of six students.

The school set up simulators for the first lab class in April. All students in the Cochise program are required to be certified pilots so they have a foundational knowledge of flight and better spatial awareness of the plane’s movement than someone who has never flown a plane.

Wirthlin said Cochise College hopes the unmanned program will eventually grow as large as its manned aircraft-training program, which currently has 55 students enrolled.

“We’re developing a UAV program because jobs are hard to get and we’re on the front edge of it,” he said.

The 59-year-old Niagara Falls native was a sophomore in high school when a classmate in his gym class read from a front-page article in the cross-border Niagara Falls, Ontario, newspaper: “Niagara Falls, Ontario sets forth to make tourism number one industry.”

“They made some strategic decision,” said Dyster. “We thought that was funny.”

Niagara Falls, Ontario, has the last laugh for now.

Separated by Niagara River and sharing the natural wonder of the falls, the two cities have had their fair share of highs and lows.

On the Canadian side, Niagara Falls has grown economically due to its investment in tourism in the 1970s, the strategic move that Dyster recalls so vividly. It’s become a tourist center with two casinos, a giant Ferris wheel, open parkways and, of course, the falls. But it, too, has its challenges.

Its population, now 83,000 is growing but at a much slower rate than the national average in Canada. Its unemployment rate is 9.2 percent, two percentage points higher than the country as whole. So it’s now seeking ways beyond tourism to continue the city’s growth despite some challenges with the provincial government.

“We’re not afraid of the failure,” Niagara Falls, Ontario Mayor Jim Diodati said. “Failure is not the opposite of success. Failure is the path to success. If you don’t fail, you don’t succeed.”

On the other side, Niagara Falls, N.Y., peaked with a population of over 102,394 in 1960, a number that has shrunk to a little over 50,000 residents today. The city regularly has had New York’s highest unemployment rate; in December 2012 it hovered close to 12 percent. It has been on the decline due to the withering industrial sector over the last 40 years.  And its history includes one the nation’s worst environmental disasters, Love Canal.

The city feels it has gained some traction over the last decade, but it’s struggling to remain just that – a city.  If Niagara Falls, N.Y. falls below 50,000 in the next Census, it will lose its classification as a city. The city wouldn’t qualify for certain federal financial support as a result.

“We face the challenge now of trying to undo stuff that was done 40 or so years ago to get back to more normal situation,” Dyster said. “If we make the right decisions, then hopefully prosperity follows.”

History

Long before all the casinos, hotels and Ferris wheel, Niagara Falls was looked as a source for power generation. It started in the early 19^th century when settlers arrived from Connecticut to the New York side and built mills powered by the water.

The industrial sector grew in the late 19^th century with the introduction of hydroelectricity. Local historian Paul Gromosiak said people flocked from the South to find work in the factories powered by the falls during the 1920s.

“They could care less about parkland, they could care less about beauty – they wanted money,” Gromosiak said.

Meanwhile, Niagara Falls, Ontario, got a late start on the industrial boom. After the American Revolution, Canada was under British rule and it felt another war with the United States was possible. Gromosiak said it enacted a rule in 1791 for military defensive purposes declaring that nothing could be built 20 meters, or 66 feet, from the bank of the Niagara River. It had to be kept open in case of another war, which soon happened with the War of 1812.

“That’s why you see all the parkland there,” Gromosiak said. “There were no industries there. No buildings to speak of.”

Gromosiak said manufacturing peaked in the 1950s right after World War II for Niagara Falls, N.Y., leading to the city’s population peak in 1960.

Similar to the rest of the country, businesses in Niagara Falls, N.Y., fought with unions over wages. With the city’s lure of hydroelectricity negated by nationwide accessibility to electricity, many companies moved to the South for cheaper labor.

“The people who were working here still went on strike, still gave industries a hard time and they paid for it,” Gromosiak said.

The change

At the same time, Niagara Falls, Onatario’s population jumped from 22,351 in 1961 to 67, 163 in 1971. It didn’t have quite the number of factories as Niagara Falls, N.Y., but the city gained some traction with the bold move to invest in tourism, a decision which many in Niagara Falls, N.Y., expected to fail.

“We knew what an industry was,” Dyster said. “The chemical industry — that was an industry. The steel industry — that was an industry.”

It turned out that the Canadian twin city was correct that tourism is an industry as well. In fact, today it ranks as one of the most reliable and sustainable; the World Travel & Tourism Council projects Travel & Tourism direct contribution to global GDP at 3.1 percent in 2013, which will out-perform the wider global economy at 2.4 percent.

Over the last 30 years, Niagara Falls, Ontario, has developed Clifton Hill into the most popular tourist destination around the falls by building hotels, restaurants and two casinos, Casino Niagara and Niagara Fallsview Casino Resort.

Casino Niagara started as a test-pilot casino in 1996 and its success spurred the efforts for construction of a more elegant Niagara Fallsview Casino Resort in 2004. Mayor Diodati said Ontario Lottery Gaming is the biggest employer in the region with 4,500 jobs.

“It fits in nice because I like to say Niagara Falls offers a buffet of entertainment,” Diodati said. “There’s something here for everybody.”

Niagara Falls, N.Y., continued to struggle as companies and people kept leaving the city.  City Planner Tom DeSantis said it was obvious in the early 1980s manufacturing would never return to have the same impact as it did 20 years ago.

The push to find the next paradigm for the city had pedestrian ambitions. While some city leaders recognized the trend of factories leaving city, the general populous was more resistant to moving away from manufacturing.

“In some ways, we’ve been on a downward spiral because of that massive industrial employment that we enjoyed,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis recalled a number of years where Niagara Falls, N.Y. didn’t have capital budgets, used for long term planning projects or repairs. It couldn’t fix roads and infrastructure around the city that desperately needed rehabilitation.

“We were a poor place getting poorer and we couldn’t allocate a lot to capital funds,” DeSantis said. “…That doesn’t go for very long before you can’t get out of that cycle.”

Things slowly changed when Seneca Nation of Indians built Seneca Niagara Casino in 2002. The Seneca Nation of Indians signed a Gaming Compact with the State of New York, which allowed the Seneca Nation to offer “class III gaming” casino facilities. This includes slot machines, table games and “other amenities and offerings typical of Las Vegas style casinos,” according to the Seneca Nation’s website.

The city received a portion of the casino’s revenue in exchange for the exclusive right to offer “class III gaming” west of State Route 14. The revenue allowed Niagara Falls, N.Y. to catch up on deferred maintenance on streets and buildings.

“Those are not things that grab headlines,” DeSantis said. “‘City cleans streets.’ That doesn’t do it, but really that’s what starts to change perception. Things got clean.”

The cleanup efforts, DeSantis said, showed the investment world there’s a plan in place in Niagara Falls, N.Y. Through the Seneca Niagara revenue and USA Niagara, a state subsidiary assisting in developing commercial projects, the city has seen a wave of hotels either renovated or constructed in the last few years with more waiting for approval.

“The casino revenue is the biggest single thing we’ve got coming through that door,” DeSantis said.

Issues

The casinos have been more a headache for both sides of the border in recent years. however.

The Seneca Nation of Indians stopped making payments in spring 2010 because it felt the state of New York broke the agreement with the addition of video slot machines in the state’s nine racetracks. The two sides are currently in arbitration, but Mayor Dyster estimates the Seneca Nation owes Niagara Falls, N.Y., about $60 million over the past 3 ½ years, its share of revenue as a third-party beneficiary.

“The irony in all of this is the city kept its obligation to everyone in all of this,” Dyster said. “The city has really good relations with the officials in Albany and Governor Cuomo and the city has really good relations with the Seneca Nation.”

The dispute has threatened to halt the progress made in Niagara Falls, N.Y. Dyster said the revenue made a big difference in the city’s ability to participate in economic development projects.

There’s no timetable on when the two sides will come up with a resolution.

The Seneca Nation of Indians declined to comment. The governor’s office did not return multiple attempts for a comment.

The dispute could lead to a non-Indian casino in the city. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has proposed three non-Indian upstate casinos, but the state constitution does not allow casino gambling beyond tribal facilities. The state is pushing a general election vote to change the constitution on this issue in November, but it could get pushed back to 2014 in order to receive greater turnout.

The state has not decided the location of the three upstate casinos, but DeSantis believes Niagara Falls, N.Y. could benefit with the addition of the casino.

“State-run casinos here would be very beneficial both to the state, to whoever puts them up – the operators – and of course the city of Niagara Falls,” DeSantis said.

“We’re assuming that if they’re state-run, they’d be taxable entities and there would be revenues from that.”

Dyster hesitated when asked whether the city can support another casino. While he’s in favor of any project that benefits the city, he doesn’t think business will double with a second casino.

“Largely this is an issue that’s going to be decided by the market,” Dyster said. “Casino finance is a very specialized field and if the people that track the industry don’t feel there’s room for a second casino, then whatever the law says, they’re not going to loan them the money and make it happen.”

His concerns may be due to the casino battles in Niagara Falls, Ontario, where Diodati thinks Ontario Lottery Gaming wants to shut down one of the city’s two casinos.

Diodati said OLG was supposed to upgrade and rebrand Casino Niagara, the city’s oldest casino, and it hasn’t happened. The casino originally called for a 5,000-7,000 seat theater but Diodati said it was scrapped and instead the casino increased the gaming floors. Diodati said the casino no longer has valet service and tour buses no longer stop at the casino. Instead, they skip to Niagara Fallsview Casino Resort.

“It’s basically a skeleton of a casino,” Niagara Falls Small Business Consultant Angela Davidson said.

Even OLG billboards around Buffalo, N.Y. and inside the Walden Galleria mall mention no word about Casino Niagara but focus specifically on Niagara Fallsview Casino Resort.

“That’s what they’re trying to do – set it up to fail,” Diodati said. “Even the casino sign that faces the USA, facing the Rainbow Bridge was burned out for the longest time until I made a stink about it and they replaced the burned out letters. That is a sign that says we’re closed for business. That is a sign that says don’t come here.”

An Ontario economic report suggested in 2012 that the province should shut down Casino Niagara to help with Ontario’s deficit. Revenue from the two casinos  dropped by $18 million in 2011. OLG said in the report the 2.9 percent decrease was due to the introduction of U.S. passport laws and a strong Canadian dollar.

OLG did not respond for comment despite multiple attempts.

The city took another hit from the casinos after OLG won a property tax assessment appeal in March. The casinos received a $16.4 million refund for after successfully arguing that a 2004 property tax assessment was too high. The ruling says the city will have to refund $5.4 million and the Niagara region and school board must pay the rest.

Diodati said the city has appealed the assessment review, which could take a few years to complete.

Along with the $5.4 million it must repay, going forward the city will lose $3 million a year with the changed property-tax assessment.  Diodati said $3 million represents a 6-7 percent increase to the average taxpayer in Niagara Falls, Ontario, and the city recently had a three percent tax-hike.

The biggest concern for the city is if the rest of the property on Clifton Hill will be reevaluated in the same way as the casinos. It could result in millions dumped on the taxpayers and other sectors in the city.

“It’s the wrong direction,” Diodati said. “The original mandate of OLG was to stimulate the economy and it’s done just that. … This new approach is going to weaken the economy rather than strengthen the economy. They become money hungry and addicted to the revenues that they’re trying to take them out.”

Future

In the midst of these challenges, both cities look for new ways to stabilize their economies beyond the Falls.

Niagara Falls, N.Y., plans to relocate its Amtrak station to downtown near the Whirlpool Bridge with the help of a federal Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery grant and state funding. The project has been 30 years in the making and it’s expected to be completed in 2014. The Amtrak line connects two of the largest cities in North America – New York City and Toronto. It would bring more foot traffic into downtown and could bring an economic boost to the city.

The site is also an Underground Railroad marked site. The station will include a museum detailing the historical significance of the location.

“You have this historical site here and you have the 7^th wonder of the world in the Falls on the other end of Main Street,” City Council member Charles Walker said. “As you begin to connect that, you can fill Main Street in with other opportunities I believe.”

Niagara Falls, Ontario, has pushed for a youthful movement, starting with its new city slogan “be nf.” The double entendre means to “be Niagara Falls”, but Diodati also wants it challenge the city to “be enough”.

With the drop in U.S. tourists due to the changed passport rules, Diodati has attempted to attract people from emerging countries like China, India and Brazil to the area. Tourism has increased this year as a result of the change in strategy.

“They’ve got a developing upper and middle class where there’s money,” Diodati said. “They want plasma screens, and they’re on the Internet and they see the world. They want to come see the world themselves. They don’t want to read about Niagara Falls. They want to come see it as part of their bucket lists.”

The city also wants to grow outside of tourism and push toward small and medium businesses. It has created a new industrial zone from Niagara Falls to Fort Erie with lower development charges. The aim is still to grab manufacturing jobs but the focus now is on green innovative companies and biodiesel manufacturers.

“We will always have a large tourism industry that we will continue to try and grow,” WHO IS HE? Davidson said. “I just think it’s important moving forward in the sustainability of our economy that we also work just as hard to attract the small and medium businesses.”

The comparisons between the two cities will be drawn out until eternity. Growing up in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Diodati would say it’s one city split by a river.

“On some level, we’re competitive but like siblings are with a family, but at the same time we’re in this together and we want to see each other succeed,” Diodati said. “It’s going to better the both of us if each of us successful.”

Niagara Falls, N.Y. had the first laugh. Niagara Falls, Ontario has the last laugh for now, but this sibling rivalry is far from over.

He pauses before he says it and the corners of his mouth curl into a frown under his dark moustache. The 14-year veteran of the Santa Cruz County, Ariz. Sheriff’s Department knows the drugs will just keep coming, no matter how hard he works.

In 2012, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 1.1 million pounds of narcotics in the state of Arizona. According to a CBP Fact Sheet, Arizona seizures account for half of all drugs seized in the United States. The same goes for apprehensions of people attempting to illegally immigrate.

Gravel crunches under his car’s tires as Lopez pulls off the main road and onto a winding dirt path. Lopez is making his regular rounds near the Arizona border city of Nogales, a major port of entry for everything from produce to tourists to kilos of marijuana. On a typical shift Lopez is one of three to six sheriff’s deputies patrolling the 53-mile border Santa Cruz County shares with Mexican state of Sonora. But the deputies are not alone; they rub elbows with dozens of law enforcement colleagues from various agencies: Nogales city police officers, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and the nearly 1,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents that serve in Santa Cruz County.

It is not enough to stanch the flow of drugs and immigrants.

“This is everyday. All day long,” Lopez says from behind the steel grate of the cruiser’s cabin, flanked by a Mossberg shotgun and an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. “You’d be surprised, even in the middle of the day. Right now, they’re moving stuff. There could be a group moving right now and I wouldn’t know, depending on where they’re at.”

About 2,500 miles northeast of Nogales, James R. Burns, Jr. sits behind his desk at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s district office outside of Albany, N.Y. His office is decorated with an assortment of exotic narcotics paraphernalia from around the world. An ornate silver opium pipe from Thailand, plastic heroin packaging painted with roaring tigers and Chinese symbols and a curve-bladed Gurkha Kukri knife sit alongside framed photos of Burns with family and colleagues.

Burns is Assistant Special Agent in Charge for DEA operations in upstate New York, far from the scrutinizing eye the media has turned to the Southwest.

“I think on the northern border we have done a pretty good job of securing it. Is it 100 percent secure? Absolutely not and I don’t think that you ever are going to get 100 percent,” Burns says.

Burns’ work at the DEA is complicated by the geography of the New York border region: bridges at official ports of entry like Buffalo, vast waterways like Lake Ontario and the Akwesasne Mohawk Indian reservation which straddles the U.S. – Canadian border.

“The border is very wide open and I can only talk about the border with Canada in the confines of New York State because that’s what I’m responsible for, that’s where my experience lies,” Burns says. “And it is a very wide open border so if you don’t know who’s crossing where or when, then I would have to agree, it’s not as secure as we might like it to be. But then again, that’s the balance that you have to maintain with a democracy. How secure do you want it? How restrictive do you want the movement back and forth across the border to be?”

Burns says that in the winter the rivers freeze over so thick you can drive a truck across and that there are places you walk from the United States into Canada without even realizing it.

“Would I like to see more control over the northern border? Yes. Do I want to shut it down, do I want to make it look like the border in San Diego? Absolutely not.”

Two massive international borders , two different approaches to the tremendous tasks of law enforcement, both plagued by the trafficking of illicit drugs fueled by U.S. demand. According to the 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 22.5 million Americans aged 12 and older were current users of illicit drugs. That insatiable appetite fuels the international criminal organizations that move drugs, people, and other contraband across the borders.

The drug threats north and south

On the nearly 4,000 mile northern U.S. border there are numerous U.S. Customs and Border Protection efforts: the Office of Field Operations operates 92 land ports of entry; the Office of Border Patrol covers eight geographic sectors; and the Office of Air and Marine operates from 16 locations coast-to-coast. According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s 2012 National Northern Border Counternarcotics Strategy, CBP has more than 2,200 Border Patrol agents deployed to the Northern border as well as nearly 3,800 CBP Officers policing the flow of people and goods across the ports of entry. Still, that force is dwarfed by the 18,000 Border Patrol agents along 2,000 mile border with Mexico.

Marijuana and MDMA (the primary chemical in ecstasy) account for the largest volume of drugs flowing in from the north. According to the National Northern Border Counternarcotics Strategy, the groups responsible for the cultivation, production, and distribution of these drugs in Canada and across the border are generally ethnically aligned. These include Vietnamese-Canadian, Indo-Canadian, Irish-Canadian and Italian-Canadian organized crime groups as well as the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club and independent transnational criminal organizations. Although concentrated mainly in the western Canadian province of British Columbia, ecstasy and marijuana are also smuggled across the border in the eastern provinces of Ontario and Quebec, at or between ports of entry.

But the border with Mexico is the primary gateway for illicit drug smuggling to the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Drug Intelligence Center, drug seizures along the southwest border in 2010 accounted for 96 percent of all marijuana seizures, 80 percent of all methamphetamine seizures, 64 percent of all cocaine seizures and 58 percent of all heroin seizures.

“Traffickers use every other avenue imaginable – air, sea, and the U.S.-Canada border—to smuggle drugs into the United States,” the NDIC’s 2011 National Drug Threat Assessment report says. “But the volume moved across the U.S.-Mexico border significantly exceeds that moved through all other routes combined.”

80 Percent of DEA seizures in Arizona

Special Agent Ramona Sanchez sits at a conference table in the DEA’s Phoenix office. Now going on 10 years as the press information officer here, Sanchez is no stranger to the southwest drug corridor. The DEA veteran worked alongside Special Agent Jim Burns in Los Angeles where Sanchez did everything from undercover work to financial investigations of money laundering to the extradition of major cartel members from Colombia to the United States. She has witnessed the shift of smuggling from the hands of Colombian cartels like those based in Medellin or Cali in the late 1980s to Mexican transnational criminal organizations like the Sinaloa cartel, Los Zetas, La Familia Michoacana and the Gulf cartel, now waging war all along the border for control of key smuggling routes.

The Sinaloa cartel, headed by America’s most wanted drug lord, Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán, currently controls the prime drug corridor in the southwest and is responsible for more than half the illegal drugs trafficked to the U.S. According to the CBP fact sheet. Special Agent Sanchez says over 80 percent of the drugs DEA seizes in the state of Arizona are from the Sinaloa cartel.

According to the 2011 National Drug Threat Assessment most drugs are trafficked overland but the use of private boats and ultra-light aircraft is on the rise. The cartels smuggle drugs through the ports of entry or over remote, rugged border areas.

“In Mexico you have several ‘plazas.’ Plazas are…the border towns of Mexico on the other side, the key areas,” Sanchez explains. These plazas are Mexican towns at international ports of entry, many of them culturally and socially tied with their American counterpart, only divided by the border fence: Sasabe, Ariz., and El Sásabe, Mexico; Lukeville, Ariz., and Sonoyta, Mexico; Nogales, Ariz. and Nogales, Mexico; Douglas, Ariz. and Agua Prieta, Mexico; Naco, Ariz. and Naco, Mexico; San Luis, Ariz. and San Luis Río Colorado, Mexico.

In all there are 360 miles of shared border with Mexico.  In addition to the “plazas,” Sanchez explains, there is the Tohono O’odham reservation, which represents about 70 miles of shared border. And, like the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation on the northern border, there are no barriers because it is considered a sovereign nation whose citizens can walk back and forth across the border without any impediment.

Drugs cross the border here in myriad ways. Some go by vehicle through the ports of entry. Some are smuggled in underground tunnels. Some are carried by humans who pack 20 to 50 pounds of marijuana on their backs across the Sonoran desert, make a delivery and walk back. Some are more inventive, like a marijuana bale-hurling catapult discovered in 2011 near Naco, Arizona.

Once on the Arizona side loads are transported to stash houses in Tucson or Phoenix.

“When you have a distribution cell in Phoenix, obviously the dope from Tucson or Phoenix has to go to U.S. markets across the country,” Sanchez says. “A small portion, as a matter of fact, does stay in Phoenix or Tucson, but Arizona is like the feeder state that supplies the U.S. markets like Chicago and Atlanta.”

Marijuana is the cartel’s cash crop, accounting for over 50 percent of its profits, Sanchez says. Marijuana is grown cheaply in mass quantities and sold across the United States. As it passes through more hands, the price rises.

“It sells for $450 or $500 a pound. It is marked up…(in) Atlanta, it’s triple that price. More hands and the farther away it goes it becomes a rare commodity there,” Sanchez says.

Those mark-ups – the tripling or quadrupling of prices in places like Atlanta, Chicago or Tennessee — are critical to a cartel’s operations.

“The profit that they make from the sale of marijuana comes back,” Sanchez says. “They use that to finance shipments of cocaine and methamphetamine and heroin, the more expensive drugs.”

More expensive drugs like cocaine are also repackaged and distributed not only to large markets in the United States but they pass through the northern border to Canada. According to the 2011 National Drug Threat Assessment, “Significant quantities of cocaine are smuggled out of the United States into Canada, particularly through POEs in Washington. Canadian authorities assess that the United States is one of the primary transit countries for cocaine destined for their country.”

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police corroborated that assessment in their latest Drug Situation Report noting “the majority of cross-border smuggling was by commercial trucks,” and that these “northbound shipments were often exchanged for southbound shipments of Canadian-produced marijuana and MDMA.”

A local glimpse at a national problem

Peering inside the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office evidence storage facility gives one an idea of the sheer volume of drugs smuggled into the United States. Situated in what used to be the county corrections center on a street with no name in Nogales, Ariz., it houses evidence confiscated by deputies until a case has been closed. It does not include the tons of drugs confiscated by Border Patrol and other federal agents.

The nondescript brown building is surrounded by a green fence topped with barbed wire. The lone evidence custodian, Lorenzo Rodriguez, Jr., is dressed in plainclothes as he walks down a bare hallway to a locked heavy door.

He warns that the evidence locker smells potent enough to make you dizzy, adding that by merely entering the room, drug dogs at the Border Patrol checkpoint will signal a positive hit when he drives home.

“You’re going to have to look away,” he says chuckling as he enters the security code and turns a large key in the heavy, metal door. The sickly sweet smell of thousands of pounds of marijuana pours out. The room is deep and full of industrial shelves, the floor between them also stacked waist high with evidence boxes.

Rodriguez gestures to his left. “Pretty much this whole side is marijuana. Over there are the narcotics,” he says, pointing to the right wall lined with cardboard boxes, “and guns are in the middle.” Rodriguez says the facility currently holds between 10 and 15 million dollars worth of illegal drugs, weapons and paraphernalia. The shelves are lined with bales of marijuana wrapped in electrical tape, burlap and canvas. There are cardboard boxes labeled with case numbers containing cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. A metal compartment once welded to a vehicle now lies in the corner beside long, cardboard boxes containing firearms.

“We are a large consumer of the world’s drugs. We are to blame,” says Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada. “We’re providing business for these people and they’re very happy to be able to accommodate us.”

The soft-spoken sheriff touches his fingertips together pensively from behind his desk and sighs. “The demand continues to be tremendous so the drugs keep flowing. Border Patrol, I think it was last year, got about a million pounds of marijuana. You know, the demand is there and the drugs are coming across.

“And like I tell people, they’re coming through the ports, they’re coming under the ports, they’re coming over the ports, they’re coming around the ports…They do it by body carriers, in sealed compartments, anything that they can possibly do and I know that the authorities on the ports are discovering new ways on a regular basis of how they’re trying to do it, so, it’s not going to stop.”

As Congress debates what will be considered a secure border, Estrada offers his own view.

“So when you’re talking about a secure border, are you talking about zero things coming over? That’s never going to happen unless you seal it, unless you completely say nobody’s coming over. Then both communities die,” he says. “It’s impossible, that is never going to happen.”

Different problems in the north

Back in Albany, DEA Special Agent Jim Burns breaks down the drug threat in his jurisdiction. Hydroponically grown marijuana from Canada along with MDMA flows south into the United States. The money from the sale of those Canadian drugs is used to buy cocaine in the United States that is shipped north into Canada.

According to the most recent National Drug Threat Assessment, “Asian [transnational criminal organizations], principally Canadian-based ethnic Vietnamese criminal organizations, produce MDMA and marijuana in Canada and subsequently smuggle large amounts of the drugs over the northern border for distribution in U.S. markets.”

These groups are reportedly moving some operations to the U.S. to escape effective law enforcement pressure in Canada, lower transportation costs and to avoid risk of seizure at the international border.

An increase in marijuana growing sites operated by ethnic Asian trafficking groups have been reported in the Pacific, West Central, Great Lakes, and New England regions, while the amount of seized MDMA along the northern border increased from more than 1.9 million tablets in 2006 to more than 3.9 million in 2010. The majority of smuggling across the U.S./Canada border occurs at, and to a lesser extent between, ports of entry in Washington, Michigan, New York, and Vermont.

Burns says the trafficking organizations will approach “just about anybody” for help moving drugs north.  Often, he says, the method is simple: a backpack or duffle bag is placed in the cab of a northbound commercial truck.

Burns says the challenge with policing the massive U.S.-Canada border is similar to the problems faced at the Southwest border. But there are far fewer law enforcement agents up north protecting an immense and largely remote area.

“You wouldn’t know if you’re in Canada or the U.S. with the exception of some international border markers that are spaced very widely along an unmarked, unfenced border,” Burns says. “We have border crossings that some of them aren’t manned 24 hours a day. They’re only manned during the work hours, during the daylight hours.”

Waterways like the Great Lakes also pose an enforcement challenge as boats can travel back and forth with great freedom.

Burns also says the issues facing the Tohono O’odham reservation straddling the border in Arizona are similar to those faced by the Akwesasne Mohawk territory straddling the border in New York.

According to the NDIC’s 2011 New England High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Drug Market Analysis, the reservation “is a key smuggling route for drugs supplied from Canada to New England.”

Burns says that in recent years smugglers have approached those living on or near the reservation for jobs smuggling drugs and money across the border. Locals with experience smuggling cigarettes are often approached and hired to smuggle illegal drugs.

Akwesasne Mohawk Grand Chief Mike Mitchell says his tribe is looking for ways to curb tribal members’ involvement in smuggling. “It’s not attractive anymore, so we’re trying to identify real meaningful jobs, good future, good education. But we’re still a target,” says Mitchell. He says the tribe  is “trying to identify what would make a replacement of the economy that exists now from an illegal economy to a legal economy.”

A relatively new challenge in the north, Burns says, is the smuggling of prescription drugs, especially OxyContin in rural areas like the reservation. He said pharmacies in the U.S. changed their formula in the last year or so making it difficult to crush the drug in order to snort it. When the new formula is mixed with water it gels preventing it from being injected in a water-based solution. In Canada, the old formulation OxyContin is still being produced.

“So we’ve seen an influx of OxyContin, the old formulation from Canada into the U.S.,” Burns says.  With the influx of OxyContin abuse levels, particularly among the young in rural areas like the reservation have risen.  The lack of employment, Burns says, means people are more easily lured into both drug use and drug trafficking.

Erie County Undersheriff MarkWipperman says his office in Buffalo, N.Y., sees all of the problems: cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy and diverted prescription drugs moving across the northern border. But in his county the problems from both borders intersect: there has been an influx of Mexican drug gangs in the Erie County area.

“They’re very sophisticated, they’re very, very violent, and they have a lot of resources,” Wipperman says. “You can’t turn a blind eye to it and they’re trying to take over the territory which causes drug wars because with turf comes profits. When you hit a search warrant you not only look for drugs, you look for intel whether it’s computers or sheets and there’s evidence that Mexican drug gangs are operating in our areas.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: David Robles of the Cronkite Borderlands Initiative reported this story from Nogales, Ariz., Albany, N.Y., and Ontario province, Canada.

So the Tucson resident headed to his garage and, after several months of tinkering, emerged with a backpack-sized surveillance drone. While Border Patrol already has military-scale drones on the border, Rollefstad said his 6-by-18-inch prototype can launch in minutes and be used for close-in surveillance, giving agents another set of eyes in the sky.

“There’s just no need for this type of blind, bumbling around in the bush, in our desert,” he said of agents on the ground.

Rollefstad hopes to some day sell his drone to police agencies and others to help save lives. But he also knows that not everyone sees drones the way he does.

“The minute someone hears ‘drones,’ they think of the Afghan killing machines,” he said.

That perception of drones as flying spy cameras and killing machines has raised concerns of privacy advocates, led to a flood of state and federal legislation and started the process of regulation by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Congress and 39 states, including Arizona, have considered measures to limit the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. Three states – Florida, Virginia and Idaho – have already passed regulations.

It comes as both government and industry analysts predict a surge in drones in U.S. skies, with smaller, cheaper machines opening new commercial and civil uses for drones that have mostly been in military use so far.

The FAA is scheduled to develop new regulations for the commercial use of drones – largely prohibited now – by 2015. While a handful of law-enforcement agencies already use UAVs for search-and-rescue and crime scene photos, the FAA estimates that there will be 30,000 commercial drones operating by 2030.

That concerns people like Joe Hall, a spokesman for the Center for Democracy and Technology. When anyone can attach a visual or thermal-imaging camera and launch a hobby drone they can buy online, the opportunity for invasion of privacy is great, he said.

“Should people have to build bubbles around their property?” Hall asks.

Because they can be small and hard to identify from the ground, Hall thinks the FAA should require that commercial drones be registered. He also thinks they should be required to emit a signal, identifying the operator and his purpose, that people could pick up on their personal computers and phones so they are aware of the drones around them.

“We’re not anti-drone, we just want to see them used responsibly,” he said.

Arizona Rep. Tom Forese, R-Gilbert, said any law needs balance and commonsense to protect private citizens, while encouraging a fledgling drone industry that could add thousands of jobs to the state’s already robust aerospace and defense industries.

“This is our legacy, and opportunities are rightfully Arizonan,” he said of the prospect of new jobs in a new commercial drone industry.

Forese introduced a bill this year calling for a committee to study “the economic development, safety and privacy concerns and potential applications” of UAVs in the state. That committee is to report back to the legislature by the end of this year.

Analysts say Arizona, which is one of 37 states vying for one of six UAV test ranges the federal government will designate, is poised to capitalize on the expected growth in jobs, once the FAA opens the skies to commercial drones.

“I think Arizona should have a very robust marketplace,” said Darryl Jenkins, of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.

In addition to entrepreneurs like Rollefstad, Jenkins said large defense firms can also be expected to get into the civilian drone market. Once drones are cleared for commercial use, Jenkins predicts that precision agricultural uses will dominate the market, with public-safety applications in second place.

Some law-enforcement agencies are already taking advantage of the technology.

Benjamin Miller, who manages the drone program for the Mesa, Colo., County Sheriff’s Office, said the office started flying UAVs because of the cost: Drones are about $25 an hour to operate, compared with $250 to $1,000 per hour for a traditional aircraft.

Miller flies both a backpack-sized helicopter and a small airplane that can fit the trunk of a car. They have been used at fires, to find missing people and, recently, to survey a local landfill, which he said saved Mesa County almost $10,000.

Miller had the idea to start using drones five years ago and said that in four years his office has flown more than 40 missions. Miller, who said Mesa County residents have supported the drones, told a U.S. Senate committee recently that the potential for invasion of privacy did not start with the development of UAVs.

“Any tool can be abused. This sad reality is not unique to law enforcement nor did it begin with unmanned aircraft,” Miller told the Senate Judiciary Committee in March.

Miller, whose office is one of 22 local law-enforcement agencies with approval to operate drones in the United States, testified that under current FAA rules, officers can only use drones within sight for short, specific missions, which prevents infringement on privacy. He also said the International Association of Chiefs of Police have issued guidelines to encourage responsible use of drones.

“In this conversation it’s very important to focus on the information,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how we collect it. It’s what we do with it.”

Rollefstad hopes that his Cylone 6 prototype will some day be one of those tools in the police toolkit.

The six-propeller micro-drone can fly straight up to a predetermined height and zip away with a click on the map on a standard laptop. He said its design allows it to stay airborne longer by using wind currents to soar when possible.

“A lot of the companies I have worked for in the past have spent millions on systems that are difficult to use,” he said

Rollefstad and his team have started a business, Cyclone Autonomous Design Group and are looking for grants to get into the next phase of development. They also hope to be part of any discussion on regulation of the fledgling industry.

“I’m a problem solver, I want to come to an agreement,” he said.

That’s because the guest worker from San Luis, Mexico, was afraid that if he did he would be replaced by an undocumented worker willing to work longer hours for lower pay, said Adrienne DerVartanian.

DerVartanian, the director of immigration and labor rights for Farmworker Justice, said Duarte is among the hundreds of thousands of farm workers silenced by a “fundamentally flawed” H-2A visa program that pits U.S. citizens, guest workers and undocumented laborers against one another.

“They will work the limits of human endurance in order to please their employer and keep their jobs,” she said.

It is one reason that advocates are pinning their hopes on the Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform bill, which would do away with H-2A in favor of more flexible farmworker visas and a path to citizenship for farmworkers who have been here illegally.

In a rare instance of agreement, those provisions in the 844-page bill have also drawn the support of farm organizations, who say the current visa system is “overly bureaucratic,” leaving them little choice but to hire undocumented workers for jobs most U.S. citizens refuse to do.

“It (H-2A) is a very restrictive program,” said Kristi Boswell, the American Farm Bureau’s director of congressional relations. “We’ve lost confidence that the program can even be reformed to meet agricultural needs.”

The bill would create a new nonimmigrant agricultural visa program that would let workers cross the border in search of work, and stay for up to 60 days after one job is over instead of having to go directly home.

It also creates a “blue card” program, a way for the current agricultural workforce to gain legal residency and, ultimately, the option of citizenship. Between 50 and 75 percent of agricultural workers may be here illegally, by some estimates.

The bill was introduced in April and has already had several Senate hearings. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said he expects committee votes later this month.

The agricultural language in the bill has been touted as a “bipartisan compromise” in which all parties were involved in its creation – even though neither side is thrilled with the areas they conceded.

Farmworker advocates worry about a proposal to stop requiring housing for guest workers within 50 miles of the border, for example. They fear it will lead workers looking for jobs in the U.S. to crowd towns on the Mexican side of the border, where there is not adequate housing or community services to accommodate a mass migration.

United Farm Workers President Arturo Rodriguez worries that overcrowding, and the lower wage rate allowed for in the bill, will create a climate for gangs and drug cartels to thrive.

For their part, farmers worry that their concession to cap the number of visas at 112,333 each year will leave them in the same situation of being unable to hire enough people to harvest all the crops.

Still, both sides say the current system is so bad that even a compromise is an improvement.

“I think it’s a positive step and a positive improvement,” Boswell said. “We rely on an immigrant labor force and will continue to rely on an immigrant labor force.”

But Roy Beck, CEO of Numbers USA, said he sees the bill as an open door for an increasing immigrant population.

Providing “amnesty” to the workers now here illegally, allowing future guest workers to apply for citizenship and creating flexibility that allows farm workers to seek work in other industries creates more job competition for U.S. citizens, he said, and forces employers to regularly hire new employees.

“This bill would open them up to constantly having to recruit new workers,” Beck said. “This bill isn’t going to answer their problems.”

But worker advocates say the current program is rife with abuses and farmers say there are not enough legal agricultural workers. That creates a paradox where workers face dehydration and heat stroke because they are too scared to take breaks or complain, and where crops wither and die in the fields during peak harvest because employers are too scared to hire undocumented workers.

Rodriguez said that the current H-2A system could have been reformed, but that the program proposed in the Senate bill is a “very good piece of legislation.”

“It does create a better situation for the agriculture industry as a whole,” he said.

Wendy Fink-Weber, senior director of communications for the Western Growers Association, agreed with Rodriguez. She said that regardless of what each party had to give up, it is time for the decades-old guest-worker program to be reformed.

“It’s not every day that the United Farm Workers and the growers sit down and come to an agreement on anything,” she said. “Anybody who eats should have an interest in this bill.”

As Nov. 6 approached, those groups had thousands of volunteers knocking on doors to encourage people to mail back those ballots and, if voters couldn’t for any reason, offering to deliver ballots to the county.

“We’re in this to really be able to give a community a voice,” said Petra Falcon, executive director of Promise Arizona, a Latino rights group that mobilized one of the larger ballot-collection efforts. “Voting is the very first step to doing that.”

Falcon estimated that her more than 2,100 volunteers collected and submitted several thousand ballots and turned them in to the Maricopa County Elections Department. Citizens for a Better Arizona estimated that it collected and submitted at least 4,000 ballots.

Leaders of both groups say collecting and submitting early ballots is a way of addressing historically low voting rates among Latinos and other minorities. While state law allows early voters to drop off ballots at any polling place in their county if they can’t mail them back by election day, those leaders say minorities are less likely to do so because of work or because they feel that candidates don’t care about their concerns.

Randy Parraz, head of Citizens for a Better Arizona, said the goal is making sure someone who may not otherwise return an early ballot for any reason has his or her voice heard.

“It would end up in the garbage had we not sat with them, because they didn’t care that much because no one asked them for their vote” Parraz said.

To a top Republican lawmaker, however, it’s too easy for those who collect ballots to not do what they promise – destroying or failing to submit them, for example.

Sen. Michele Reagan, R-Scottsdale, chairwoman of the Senate Elections Committee, pushed this legislative session for Arizona to follow the lead of California and other states that have banned the practice or placed restrictions on how it can be done.

SB 1003 would bar those working or volunteering for third-party political organizations from collecting and submitting another person’s early ballot. A voter could still designate someone else to submit the ballot – a friend or spouse, for example.

As approved by the Senate, a violation would carry a felony charge.

“There is no other state that allows an individual to walk into a polling place with thousands of ballots,” Reagan said. “Not one other state. So if other states have restrictions, why is it so shocking that Arizona would chose to look at, have some restrictions too?”

It’s one of two election reform bills pushed by Reagan that have drawn the ire of civil rights groups and Democrats. The other, SB 1261, would allow counties to purge names from permanent early voting lists under certain circumstances and make it illegal for another person to alter a voter registration form without the registrant’s consent.

Both bills cleared the Senate on party-line votes but as of early May hadn’t received votes on the House floor.

The bills were a response to the November 2012 election, which drew national attention to Arizona because of the record number of provisional ballots cast and perceived delays in counting all the votes. Several Senate Democrats sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice in March asking for the Civil Rights Division to watch the legislation because they said it would disproportionately impact minorities who rely more on third-party political groups and are more likely to have recently signed up for permanent early voting lists.

Testifying before the Senate Elections Committee in February, Maricopa County Elections Director Karen Osborne said SB 1003 would help secure ballots. She noted that some voters, including two people in her office, reported people posing as county election workers coming to their homes, asking who they voted for and asking to take their early ballots.

“It is very, very difficult to understand why somebody would do that,” she said. “It can’t happen, it makes the public nervous.”

Tammy Patrick, Maricopa County Elections federal compliance officer, echoed that concern in an interview.

“Why are they asking for who somebody voted for?” Patrick said. “Does that mean that they’re not going to turn in the ballot? Does that mean they’re going to destroy it? Does that mean that they’ll wait and turn it in so it’s late if it’s somebody that they didn’t want to win?”

Many states allow some form of mail-in voting, and most of them have rules on who can submit another person’s ballot. In Alaska, for instance, a person must have power of attorney for an individual they’re submitting a ballot for. Colorado and Arkansas cap the number of ballots that may be submitted.

Reagan’s bill is based on a California statute that has barred anyone affiliated with political campaigns from returning mail-in ballots since 2001.

A bill similar to SB 1003 made it through the Legislature and was signed by Gov. Jan Brewer in 2011. Sponsored by Sen. Don Shooter, R-Yuma, it would have required that anybody who delivers more than 10 ballots would have to provide a copy of his or her photo ID. That law never went into effect because the state withdrew it from a required review of proposed changes to Arizona’s election procedures by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Citizens for a Better Arizona, a political action group that helped lead the recall efforts of former state Sen. Russell Pearce, was perhaps the most successful ballot-collecting group during the November 2012 election season. The group collected more than 4,000 ballots, according to Parraz, the group’s leader. He said his volunteers were open with their support for Paul Penzone, a Democrat who ran against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

“For every person, we went up to and asked them, ‘Can we count on you to support Paul Penzone for sheriff?’ and if they said no, we didn’t collect their ballot,” Parraz said. “We left them alone. So we didn’t take ballots for Arpaio and throw them away, we just didn’t want their ballot.”

State Sen. Steve Gallardo, D-Phoenix, said in an interview that SB 1003 is unnecessary and, if it becomes law, would be tied up on federal court as he and opponents challenge it.

“It may not be the wisest thing to give your ballot to someone you don’t know, but that comes from voter education,” he said.

Doug Chapin, an elections expert at the University of Minnesota who studies election procedures, said that election administrators generally don’t seem to have a problem with third-party ballot collection.

“That’s something they’re relatively neutral on as long as they know what the rules are,” Chapin said. “If you are going to allow somebody to pick up a ballot, you want to make sure there’s some sort of proof of chain of custody.”

Chapin said that the debate over who can handle a voter’s ballot is more politically contentious than other election procedure debates.

“Limiting who can handle ballots, how many they can handle, and who can take them brings far more political, racial and ethnic baggage,” he said.

Gallardo said restricting ballot collection would hit low income and minority voters harder than other groups because the third-party political groups that do so primarily work in those neighborhoods.

“Mi Familia Vota, Promise Arizona, look at all the organizations,” Gallardo said. “They’ve targeted one area: low income areas, predominantly black and Hispanic … they have turned out a lot of black and brown voters to participate and now we have people who suddenly have a problem with how this is done.”

Rosa Romero, a 15-year-old Chandler high school student, said she spent many hours volunteering for the Adios Arpaio” campaign organized by Promise Arizona and Unite Here, a union representing hospitality workers. That included encouraging people to return early ballots and offering to submit them.

She said she ran into people who didn’t support what she was doing but found many more who did.

“I went to one lady’s house and she really thanked me for going to her house because she said if it wasn’t for me, that I picked up her ballot, she would have not voted,” Romero said.

Reagan said her bill wouldn’t prevent people like Romero or groups like Promise Arizona or Citizens for a Better Arizona from trying to engage low-income and minority voters. The bill is aimed at protecting people’s ballots, she said.

“This is all about the voters and making it better for them and their election system,” Reagan said, “and to make sure that their voters are counted and that they’re counted in a timely fashion.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story gave an incomplete accounting of organizations in charge of the “Adios Arpaio,” campaign. Those groups include Unite Here, a union representing hospitality workers in Arizona, as well as Promise Arizona.