Mexifornia
Jul 20th 2003, 12:02 pm
#1
Guest
Posts: n/a
Mexifornia
http://www.latimes.com/features/prin...n29jul20.story
July 20, 2003
Undermining American workers
Record numbers of illegal immigrants are pulling
wages down for the poor and pushing taxes higher.
By Fred Dickey, Special to The Times
The perils of illegal immigration rattle around in the attic of public
policy like a troubled spirit. We pretend not to hear the dragging chains
because we don't know how to silence them, but the ghosts will endure,
especially in California. Because the nation can't control its borders,
the number of illegal immigrants grows by an estimated half-million each
year. They come because we invite them with lax law enforcement and menial
jobs. Their presence makes our own poor more destitute, creating a Third
World chaos in the California economy that we are only beginning to
understand.
Patricia Morena has no time for a philosophical discussion on unauthorized
immigration. She lives with it, or tries to. She's a U.S. citizen of Mexican
descent, and a motel maid in Chula Vista, six miles north of the border.
She's short and heavyset, and dresses with care in tasteful thrift shop. She
earns $300 before taxes, when she's fortunate enough to have a five-day week.
She's a single mom with three children, all stuffed into a ratty little one-
bedroom apartment. The eldest, an 18-year-old boy, has taken to stealing; she
thinks it's because he's always been poor.
Sitting in the pale yellow kitchen light, she looks resigned rather than
angry. She has the fear of anyone who's 39, broke and tired: being replaced.
If she didn't have to compete with unauthorized workers in the cheap motels
that cluster just north of the border, she thinks, she could lift her wages
from $7.50 per hour to maybe $10 and bargain for some health insurance.
But she won't ask for a raise. "If I ask for money, the bosses say, 'I can
get a young girl who is faster and cheaper,' " she says. "The bosses have
power over illegals. They know they're afraid and not going to ask for
overtime, even though I know the law says they should get it." So Morena
remains mired, one of 32.9 million people the U.S. Census Bureau says lived
in poverty in 2001.
The 1996 welfare reform act was pitched as a means for poor people to elevate
themselves through work. President Clinton said at the time that the act was
"to give them a chance to share in the prosperity and the promise that most
of our people are enjoying today."
Well, seven years later, Morena is still poor. Although she never studied
economics, she has learned a fundamental economic truth: The only leverage
unskilled workers have is scarcity of labor. Morena can't work her way up
the economic ladder because the bottom rungs have been broken off by the
weight of millions of new illegal workers. The census bureau says the number
of illegal immigrants in the country doubled in the 1990s, from 3.5 million
to 7 million, the largest such increase in the nation's history.
So Morena soldiers on at $7.50 an hour, living with a reality that the late
Cesar Chavez, champion of the farm worker, understood back in the 1960s.
Chavez, says David M. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian from Stanford
University, advocated limited immigration to protect the wage levels of the
Chicano workers he struggled to unionize. Without such restrictions, demand
for labor would fall, and with it the pressure to pay higher wages.
The people who traditionally benefit from the Patricia Morenas and other low-
paid workers are farther up the economic ladder--businesses, industries and
homeowners. For them, stagnant low wages mean they can hire maids, farm
laborers, seamstresses, roofers and carpet cleaners for about the same wages
as they paid a quarter-century ago. That helps industries grow cheap lettuce
and make down-market shirts. It frees up enough money for homeowners to
afford those sports cars whose price tripled even as the cost of getting
their lawn mowed stayed the same.
Yet the relentless flow of illegal labor is now changing life for
Californians on those higher rungs too.
Apart from the proliferation of workers standing on street corners waiting
for jobs, it's difficult to see that migration from Mexico into California
during the past two decades is on a scale that astonishes even those who
specialize in making sense out of human patterns. One such expert is Victor
Davis Hanson, a professor of classics at Cal State Fresno and the author of
"Mexifornia," a recent book that reveals the extent of the changing culture
and demographics of California. He says that no immigration in American
history even remotely compares to the one underway along the southwest
border, which, incidentally, is the longest that has ever separated First
and Third World countries.
Today, nearly half of California's residents are immigrants or the children
of immigrants, and the state's population is projected to increase by 52%,
to 49 million, between 2000 and 2025. An estimated 950,000 Mexicans without
papers live in the five-county Greater Los Angeles area, says Jeffrey Passel,
a demographer at the Urban Institute public policy center in Washington, D.C.
They are mostly nested in communities of the 2.4 million Mexican-born
migrants. Statewide, there are 1.6 million undocumented Mexicans, and 4.8
million in the country, Passel says. They make up more than half of the
8.5-million-plus undocumented persons of all nationalities.
The image of migrants popularized by their advocates is of work-tough
campesinos who cross the border spitting on their hands and eagerly looking
for shovels. That is true to a considerable extent, because a lot of
shoveling gets done. As the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says in support of a
new amnesty for unauthorized immigrants: "There are approximately 10 million
undocumented workers employed throughout the country who are working hard
and performing tasks that most Americans take for granted but won't do
themselves."
The second half of that sentence has been accepted as a truth for
generations. Illegal immigrants are just doing the work Americans won't.
But is it true today?
In April, I shopped for a contractor to paint my house trim. I got three
bids. One was for $1,600, about $400 less than the others. The only
condition was that payment be in cash. That wasn't remarkable. Is there a
Californian alive who doesn't know they can pay under the table for cheap
immigrant labor? You pay cash. There are no checks. There is no tax record.
But this bargain didn't come from an undocumented worker. It came from an
established businessman with good references. I asked why the ethical
gyrations.
He vented: "If I'm going to stay in business, I have to do what the illegals
do. They never pay taxes, on profits or on their employees' pay. Right there,
I'm at a 20% disadvantage. They'll come in here with about six guys with
paintbrushes who work for peanuts, do a fair job, and then they're gone."
These competitors have driven every American out of gardening, he added,
and are doing it to house-painting, roofing and car repair. He concluded in
frustration, "What am I supposed to do?"
Roy Beck, executive director of Numbers USA Education and Research
Foundation, a Washington, D.C., organization devoted to immigration control,
says it's not that millions of unemployed Americans "are too lazy and
shiftless to bus tables or wash dishes." What the Chamber of Commerce and
like-minded business groups really mean, he says, is that "Americans won't
work like slaves, like serfs. Americans want to be paid and treated fairly."
"The National Restaurant Association., for one, doesn't want their customers
to know that this system forces illegal workers to live in abject poverty,"
Beck says. "It's the serfdom thing. If customers thought about it, they'd
say, 'No, I don't want people who are hidden in the kitchen or serving me to
poor and neglected that they might be TB carriers, and hate my guts for not
caring about them.' "
Terry Anderson, a black talk-radio host in Los Angeles, says he sees similar
displacement throughout the African American community. "I defy you to find
a black janitor in L.A.," Anderson says. "In the '70s, the auto body-repair
business in South-Central was pretty much occupied by blacks. Those jobs are
all gone now. They're all held by Hispanics, and all of them are illegals.
And those $25 jobs that blacks used to hold in the '70s now pay $8 to $10,
and a black man can't get hired even if he's expert. It's absolute
discrimination, because there's a perception that a Hispanic works better.
Well, he works cheaper. They're in the country illegally, so they have no
bargaining power, and the wages get driven down."
The point he and Beck make is decidedly not a racial one, not black versus
Latino or Mexican versus white. Their point is about money. Illegal,
powerless immigrants versus relatively empowered American citizens. Who
among us could survive if every day, the streets outside our workplaces were
lined with people willing to do our jobs for two-thirds or half the pay
because in the world they came from, in the world where their money is sent,
half of our pay amounted to riches?
Anderson particularly despairs of the effect the scarcity of low-end jobs
has on poor youths. In May, 6.1 million whites and 1.7 million blacks in the
country were unemployed. But of those without jobs, young people took the
worst hit. The unemployment rate for whites ages 16 to 19 in the labor force
was 15.4%, with 892,000 unemployed; for black teenagers, it was 270,000 out
of work, at a scary 35% rate.
These kids are the millions of potential burger-flippers and mowers of lawns
that Beck and Anderson say employers are bypassing in favor of undocumented
migrants. "There was this kid in my neighborhood--good kid, 17 years old,
and he goes down to the local McDonald's to get an after-school job,"
Anderson says. "The manager tells him that because he doesn't speak Spanish,
she can't hire him because it would have a disruptive effect on all the other
workers who don't speak English. I mean, think of that: Here's a kid trying
to get a little ahead--American born, four generations in South-Central--
he's told he can't sell French fries because he can't speak a foreign
language. You want to talk about disillusionment?"
as cheap, illegal workers flood the labor force, governments and taxpayers
are feeling the pinch. Just as one dishonest act often leads to another,
illegal labor has led to other illegalities. The most pervasive is the
untaxed cash transaction. It has created a surging "underground economy"
that has become a hole in society's pocket through which falls many of our
democratic values, and a lot of loose cash.
John Chiang of Los Angeles, one of five members of the state Board of
Equalization, California's tax oversight agency, says off-the-books
businesses can have a "profoundly dislocating effect" on the economy. It
pushes some businesses to compete by also cutting legal corners, and
discourages other businesses from coming to California.
A study last year by the Economic Roundtable, a Los Angeles research group,
found that the underground sector in Southern California probably accounts
for 20% or more of the economy, says economist Dan Flaming, author of the
report. Nationwide, the International Monetary Fund reported in a 2002
issues paper, underground work amounted to 10% of the total economy.
As the underground sector surged in the '90s, an unpleasant snowball began
to gather mass. The amount of tax revenues generated by the economy didn't
keep pace with the population growth and accompanying rise in demands for
government services. That, in turn, "adds significantly to the tax burden
of honest taxpayers," Chiang says. He estimates that the state is losing
$7 billion a year in unpaid taxes.
The state Employment Development Department's estimates are somewhat lower,
at $3 billion to $6 billion annually in lost income and wage-related taxes.
Any way it's counted, that's a pile of money for a state running a
$38-billion deficit that Sacramento is attempting to close by cutting
services, raising taxes and borrowing money.
Certainly, not all of the loss is due to illegal immigrants, and the state,
with scrupulous political sensitivity, avoids placing blame there. But Jerry
Hicks, whose job until recently was to measure the underground economy for
the Employment Development Department, reluctantly agrees that common sense
would put undocumented workers at the head of the tax-avoidance list. It's
anybody's guess how much fault lies with businesses forced to compete by
dealing in cash.
That loss of tax revenue is key to understanding why unchecked illegal
immigration creates a downward economic spiral. Jan. C. Ting, Temple
University law professor and former assistant commissioner of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, says the swelling population of poor people who
have little more than manual labor to offer, and who pay few taxes, will
inevitably draw heavily on social services. That drain will, in turn,
increase taxes on businesses and homeowners, who may depart for other states,
which in turn will drive tax rates even higher.
An often-cited National Research Council study in 1997 concluded that each
native household in California was paying $1,178 a year in state and local
taxes to cover services used by immigrant (legal and illegal) households. The
demand for such offsetting taxes undoubtedly has increased in proportion to
the numbers of illegal immigrants since then.
What is known is how the tax drain is changing society. As the IMF's issue
paper warned last year, the lost revenue can lead to "a deterioration in the
quality and administration of the public goods such as roads and hospitals
provided by the government."
Hospitals provide a clear warning signal. Here's how it happens: An illegal
immigrant, without health insurance, has a serious health problem and goes to
a public hospital, incurring a catastrophic medical cost. At bargain basement
wages, that patient has as much chance of paying the hospital bill as paying
off the national debt. So the patient scribbles out a passable IOU, and
disappears.
Someone else pays. America's health system draws its lifeblood from private
health insurance, and if large numbers of patients have no insurance or can't
pay, the money has to be taken from taxes--siphoned from the state treasury.
A robust society can absorb a certain amount of those losses, but if the tax
base isn't expanding as fast as the demands placed on it, the system begins
to shut down--as Los Angeles County's has.
In 2002, 33% of L.A. County residents were without health insurance or were
grossly underinsured. The county thinks that rate is the highest in the
United States, which helps to explain why the county prepared to close two
hospitals last year because there was too much demand and too little revenue.
Carol Gunter is acting director of county emergency medical services, the
person who has to try to run a "business" in which about a quarter of the
customers don't have the means to pay for her product, but are entitled to
its full service. So just how many emergency room patients are illegal?
Federal law prevents her from knowing because hospitals are forbidden to
ask about citizenship. What Gunter does know is that, despite billion-
dollar federal bailouts, the number of public L.A. County hospitals recently
went from six to five, and another is going to close.
In March, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein announced she had joined other
senators in supporting a bailout bill to reimburse state and local hospitals
for emergency medical costs incurred by undocumented immigrants. She
estimated those costs in California at $980 million in the past year.
Celebration over the proposal becomes somewhat muted when we consider that
a bailout is--by sinking-lifeboat definition--intended to overcome the
effects of a leak, and her statement mentioned nothing about patching the
boat. Feinstein declined to be interviewed on the subject.
Jim Lott, executive vice president of the Hospital Assn. of Southern
California, puts it bluntly: "We are in a [health-care] meltdown in Los
Angeles County to the extent we have never seen before."
The state can't be far behind. An estimated 20% of patients throughout
California are uninsured, with hospitals incurring $3.6 billion in
uncompensated care. Fifty-one percent of the state's hospitals operated
in the red last year.
After the "please pay cash" painting contractor left my house, I put pencil
to paper on the bids. Considering that his line of work is labor-intensive,
if I accepted the above-board bid of $2,000, probably about $1,500 would go
toward wages, and maybe 10% of that would go to the government. If I went for
the underground bid, I would get off cheaper--and the government would lose
$200. Multiply that by the countless such transactions in California daily,
and a lot of hospitals are going to run short, and a lot of potholes are
going to grow.
Author hanson describes the practical effect of the massive immigration
numbers: "The unfortunate message we give migrants is, 'You can work here,
but only undercover, and you can't join our society.' "
Chiang sees the same ominous divisions. "California is becoming a dichotomy
society--high-wealth, low-wealth; educated, undereducated; and the
underground economy plays a large role in creating the unregulated
atmosphere that tends to widen those social and economic gaps."
So the people on either side of the divide go to their corners. The wealthy
to West L.A. and its counterparts around the state. The poor? "We have towns
in the Central Valley that are--literally--100% Mexican, and consist mainly
of illegal migrants," Hanson says. "In those towns, Spanish is the only
language spoken; there is no industry, and the towns are huge pockets of
poverty. We can legitimately fear that this is the California of the future."
Two small cities of about the same size in Fresno County underscore Hanson's
point. The town of Parlier in 2000 was 97% Latino, with 36% of the town
living in poverty, and a per capita income of $7,078, Hanson says. The town
of Kingsburg, whose population was 34% Latino, had just 11% living in
poverty. The per capita income was $16,137.
The dependence upon agricultural labor, which usually has to be done by hand,
puts a low ceiling on what immigrants can earn. That ceiling could be lifted
either by stemming the flow of illegal labor, or by mechanizing the farm
work. But neither is happening, which suits many farmers just fine.
Philip Martin, professor of agricultural and resource economics at UC Davis,
says farmers could quickly mechanize labor-intensive harvesting if it were
not so cheap to hire migrants. "Back in the late '60s and '70s, there was a
fear there wouldn't be enough farm workers, so that spurred mechanization
research," Martin says. "Then there were 70-some subsidized projects at the
University of California aimed at figuring out how to pick oranges
mechanically. Today, there aren't any, because there is plenty of cheap
farm labor. There is probably a machine available to harvest every crop grown
in the U.S., but they won't be used as long as the laborers are available at
low wages."
Martin's point reveals this turned-around truism: Agriculture in Mexico is
modernizing, which forces many laborers off their jobs there. Machines are
displacing laborers in the cornfields of Mexico, so they come north to the
"advanced" United States to pick fruits and vegetables by hand.
Because the United States makes no real effort to count its undocumented
workers, their true impact on the job market is unclear. Common sense does
say, however, that if millions of Mexicans are here illegally, they must be
working or they would go home. An estimated $10 billion was sent back to
Mexico in 2002 by workers in the United States, an increase of $800 million
from the year before, says the nonprofit Pew Hispanic Center in Washington,
D.C.
The migrants who come north used to be regarded as sellouts or deserters in
Mexican society. Now, they're heroes praised by Mexican President Vicente Fox
for the money they inject into that faltering economy. That is also a first,
Hanson says. "Mexico is a failing society that stays afloat by exporting
human capital. If you shut that border down, in five years you'd have a
revolution, because Mexico can't meet the aspirations of its own people."
There is no question that illegal immigration greatly troubles Americans.
The polls show it, both before and after 9/11. They want them to go home.
One poll even showed that almost two-thirds want the military to patrol the
border. Of course, they never gripe about the cheap hamburgers or the
low-cost gardening that migrants make possible.
Yet, curiously, in a decade of unprecedented illegal immigration, the issue
has been put on the back burner by most of society's seers and opinion-
formers.
Illegal immigrants are the people we used to call illegal aliens in a coarser
time. Now, to some, even "undocumented workers" is too harsh so they've
adopted "unauthorized." To many critics of illegal immigration, this tiptoe
nomenclature is part of the problem. They say a debate or consensus on the
issue is made impossible by a barricade of political correctness, up against
which a critic is in danger of that paralyzing accusation--racist.
Most politicians would rather swallow their tongues than talk about illegal
immigration, and Dick Morris thinks he knows why. Morris, the former political
strategist for Bill Clinton, says both political parties, "especially the
Republicans, have to know they're running out of white people to split up.
Any major politician is facing dodo bird extinction if he or she fails to
reach out to Hispanics. It scares them."
Hanson believes the politics of immigration is about greed and power more
than ideology. "It's one of those issues that's backed by strange bedfellows
--on the right, you have big business types who want open borders to make
money on cheap labor, and don't care about social consequences. On the other
side, you have this left-wing racist--I think it's racist--separatist
industry of Latino groups and leftist legislators" who want more immigration
because it expands their power base.
Quixotically, on the border south of San Diego, the U.S. runs a version of
"Checkpoint Charlie" to keep them out. Operation Gatekeeper started in 1994
to stem the flow of illegal immigration north by clamping down on the main
ports of entry in the Southwest. In addition to forcing many border crossers
to attempt a dangerous trip across the desert, it has had the unintended
consequence of transforming a fluid population that used to go back and
forth into one that simply stays here.
An unauthorized worker probably would prefer to work in this country and
return home as often as possible, preserving his Mexican roots. Gatekeeper,
however, has cemented that worker's feet in the U.S. It's not hard to
understand his hesitancy to go home for a holiday or family event if he knows
there's a good chance he'll be caught on his return. So, he does the obvious
thing: He hires a coyote (outlaw immigrant trafficker) to bring his whole
family north, often one member at a time.
So, what are the options? close the borders and kick out the undocumented
as some arch-conservatives want? Or, on the other extreme, open the borders
completely, as libertarians and some Latino groups tend to favor? On both
counts, forget about it. Not going to happen. And you can trash amnesty at
the present time, too. The War on Terrorism and the tension it has caused
between Mexico and the United States, plus a sour remembrance from the
results of the 1986 amnesty law, closed the book on "regularization," as
Bush and Fox euphemistically called amnesty in the fond days of their mutual
affection a couple years ago. A 2002 poll by Zogby International, a polling
firm, showed that 65% of Americans opposed a new amnesty.
When the nation tried amnesty 17 years ago, the whole idea was to combine it
with a crackdown on hiring illegal workers. Guess what? The amnesty worked
for 2.8 million migrants, putting them on the track for citizenship; the
crackdown did not, as the rising numbers of illegal crossings demonstrate.
The first amnesty seemed likely to only lead to another, and then another.
An advocate of controlled borders is Cecilia Muñoz, vice president of the
National Council of La Raza, the group considered an arch defender of illegal
migration. Muñoz says undocumented immigration is bad for both the country
and the workers, so she supports amnesty to make them legal, calling it
"earned legalization." Her enthusiasm flags, though, when asked if the
government should crack down on subsequent illegal immigration that
undoubtedly would follow a new amnesty.
But her convictions don't falter. "We are going to ultimately succeed because
we're all complicit in this system. We don't like it, but we benefit" from
it, and therefore should grant the laborers amnesty.
The last-gasp alternative to amnesty seems to be a "guest-worker program."
The guest-worker idea had two antecedents, one from 1917 to 1921, and
another, known as the bracero program, from 1942 to 1964. Each was started in
response to farmers' complaints of wartime labor shortages. After studying
both, professor Martin is convinced that "there's nothing more permanent than
temporary workers." He realizes the folly of inviting a poor laborer into a
comparative worker's paradise, and then expecting him to run along home when
the job is finished.
David Lorey, author of the scholarly "The U.S.-Mexican Border in the 20th
Century," says the lesson of the bracero experience "is that guest-worker
programs encourage migration." He adds, "There were horrible conditions in
the migrant camps, and a lot of abuses that resulted from this neither-fish-
nor-fowl program."
In retrospect, the lasting effect of the bracero program was to draw workers
north to the border and give them a taste of American wages. For example, in
1940, Mexicali, a Mexican border town south of El Centro, had a population of
less than 20,000 people. In 1960, it was 175,000. The programs succeeded in
drawing workers, especially in agriculture, but also left a legacy of
exploitation and ineffective regulation that has made bracero a dirty word
in the lexicon of Mexican migration.
Memories of the abuses leave Hispanic groups skittish to the idea of guest-
worker programs. But Brent Wilkes, executive director of the powerful League
of United Latin American Citizens, says that his organization might support
such a program provided the workers have labor rights equal to those of
American laborers, and have an inside-track to eventual citizenship.
However, law professor Ting calls a guest-worker program in any form
unworkable. "It's camouflaged amnesty. No one wants to use the word 'amnesty'
because the American people recognize it for what it is--admitting defeat of
our immigration system. So, they say, 'Let's call it something else. Let's
call it a 'guest-worker program.' "
The vacillation over how to effectively control illegal migration drives a
senior immigration investigator right up the wall, because he believes the
bureaucracy has the answer in its own hands. The investigator has more than
20 years' experience with the INS. Still, he believes he must remain
anonymous for fear of retribution.
Currently, he explains, the law requires an employer to make a good-faith
effort to ascertain that applicants have valid identification. However, he
considers that law a political con job because it gives unscrupulous
employers an easy out: They can't be held responsible for not having the
expertise to identify illegal or forged documents, so anything short of
those being written in crayon can pass muster. The biggest abuses, he says,
are of forged immigrant registration cards (green cards) and Social Security
cards.
What frustrates him is his conviction that a procedure is already in place
that would "immediately identify 70% of the illegal workforce." He explains
that as a part of the 1986 immigration law, a voluntary employee verification
pilot program was established, and is still operating. Under the program, the
validity of Social Security cards and green cards can be quickly checked on
all new employees by phone or online. He says the system could easily be
expanded into a mandatory nationwide computer hookup by cross-indexing the
data bases of the immigration service with the Social Security
Administration. The effect would be that honest employers could instantly
ascertain the legality of their workforce, and dishonest employers would
have no excuse for hiring undocumented workers.
Bill Strasberger, a spokesman for the immigration service, says the pilot
program is considered successful. "Employers using it are pleased, and so
are we. It provides verification with confidentiality." Asked if it would be
expanded or made mandatory by Congress, he laughed briefly, then said, "It
really is the direction we need to move in."
Why, then, aren't we doing it? The investigator says that Congress refuses
to make the program mandatory so as not to offend big agribusiness and other
industries that freely employ illegal workers. These industries then take
some of those profits and give generously to members of Congress.
Beck's organization, which advocates immigration control, plans to push for
a mandatory employee-verification law. "The American people would not stand
for a massive deportation, so what we need to do is use this program to dry
up the jobs, then most illegals would gradually go home." If such a law was
enacted, he says, the end result would be American workers gravitating to
those jobs for slightly higher wages. "You'd end up paying 25 cents more for
a hamburger and a dime more for lettuce. Big deal."
This affluent society can certainly afford more expensive hamburgers, but
can it afford the hidden costs that currently make those burgers and fries
dirt cheap? As Beck asks, "How many unskilled illegal migrants do we allow
in? Forty million? Fifty million? What is the end point?"
July 20, 2003
Undermining American workers
Record numbers of illegal immigrants are pulling
wages down for the poor and pushing taxes higher.
By Fred Dickey, Special to The Times
The perils of illegal immigration rattle around in the attic of public
policy like a troubled spirit. We pretend not to hear the dragging chains
because we don't know how to silence them, but the ghosts will endure,
especially in California. Because the nation can't control its borders,
the number of illegal immigrants grows by an estimated half-million each
year. They come because we invite them with lax law enforcement and menial
jobs. Their presence makes our own poor more destitute, creating a Third
World chaos in the California economy that we are only beginning to
understand.
Patricia Morena has no time for a philosophical discussion on unauthorized
immigration. She lives with it, or tries to. She's a U.S. citizen of Mexican
descent, and a motel maid in Chula Vista, six miles north of the border.
She's short and heavyset, and dresses with care in tasteful thrift shop. She
earns $300 before taxes, when she's fortunate enough to have a five-day week.
She's a single mom with three children, all stuffed into a ratty little one-
bedroom apartment. The eldest, an 18-year-old boy, has taken to stealing; she
thinks it's because he's always been poor.
Sitting in the pale yellow kitchen light, she looks resigned rather than
angry. She has the fear of anyone who's 39, broke and tired: being replaced.
If she didn't have to compete with unauthorized workers in the cheap motels
that cluster just north of the border, she thinks, she could lift her wages
from $7.50 per hour to maybe $10 and bargain for some health insurance.
But she won't ask for a raise. "If I ask for money, the bosses say, 'I can
get a young girl who is faster and cheaper,' " she says. "The bosses have
power over illegals. They know they're afraid and not going to ask for
overtime, even though I know the law says they should get it." So Morena
remains mired, one of 32.9 million people the U.S. Census Bureau says lived
in poverty in 2001.
The 1996 welfare reform act was pitched as a means for poor people to elevate
themselves through work. President Clinton said at the time that the act was
"to give them a chance to share in the prosperity and the promise that most
of our people are enjoying today."
Well, seven years later, Morena is still poor. Although she never studied
economics, she has learned a fundamental economic truth: The only leverage
unskilled workers have is scarcity of labor. Morena can't work her way up
the economic ladder because the bottom rungs have been broken off by the
weight of millions of new illegal workers. The census bureau says the number
of illegal immigrants in the country doubled in the 1990s, from 3.5 million
to 7 million, the largest such increase in the nation's history.
So Morena soldiers on at $7.50 an hour, living with a reality that the late
Cesar Chavez, champion of the farm worker, understood back in the 1960s.
Chavez, says David M. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian from Stanford
University, advocated limited immigration to protect the wage levels of the
Chicano workers he struggled to unionize. Without such restrictions, demand
for labor would fall, and with it the pressure to pay higher wages.
The people who traditionally benefit from the Patricia Morenas and other low-
paid workers are farther up the economic ladder--businesses, industries and
homeowners. For them, stagnant low wages mean they can hire maids, farm
laborers, seamstresses, roofers and carpet cleaners for about the same wages
as they paid a quarter-century ago. That helps industries grow cheap lettuce
and make down-market shirts. It frees up enough money for homeowners to
afford those sports cars whose price tripled even as the cost of getting
their lawn mowed stayed the same.
Yet the relentless flow of illegal labor is now changing life for
Californians on those higher rungs too.
Apart from the proliferation of workers standing on street corners waiting
for jobs, it's difficult to see that migration from Mexico into California
during the past two decades is on a scale that astonishes even those who
specialize in making sense out of human patterns. One such expert is Victor
Davis Hanson, a professor of classics at Cal State Fresno and the author of
"Mexifornia," a recent book that reveals the extent of the changing culture
and demographics of California. He says that no immigration in American
history even remotely compares to the one underway along the southwest
border, which, incidentally, is the longest that has ever separated First
and Third World countries.
Today, nearly half of California's residents are immigrants or the children
of immigrants, and the state's population is projected to increase by 52%,
to 49 million, between 2000 and 2025. An estimated 950,000 Mexicans without
papers live in the five-county Greater Los Angeles area, says Jeffrey Passel,
a demographer at the Urban Institute public policy center in Washington, D.C.
They are mostly nested in communities of the 2.4 million Mexican-born
migrants. Statewide, there are 1.6 million undocumented Mexicans, and 4.8
million in the country, Passel says. They make up more than half of the
8.5-million-plus undocumented persons of all nationalities.
The image of migrants popularized by their advocates is of work-tough
campesinos who cross the border spitting on their hands and eagerly looking
for shovels. That is true to a considerable extent, because a lot of
shoveling gets done. As the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says in support of a
new amnesty for unauthorized immigrants: "There are approximately 10 million
undocumented workers employed throughout the country who are working hard
and performing tasks that most Americans take for granted but won't do
themselves."
The second half of that sentence has been accepted as a truth for
generations. Illegal immigrants are just doing the work Americans won't.
But is it true today?
In April, I shopped for a contractor to paint my house trim. I got three
bids. One was for $1,600, about $400 less than the others. The only
condition was that payment be in cash. That wasn't remarkable. Is there a
Californian alive who doesn't know they can pay under the table for cheap
immigrant labor? You pay cash. There are no checks. There is no tax record.
But this bargain didn't come from an undocumented worker. It came from an
established businessman with good references. I asked why the ethical
gyrations.
He vented: "If I'm going to stay in business, I have to do what the illegals
do. They never pay taxes, on profits or on their employees' pay. Right there,
I'm at a 20% disadvantage. They'll come in here with about six guys with
paintbrushes who work for peanuts, do a fair job, and then they're gone."
These competitors have driven every American out of gardening, he added,
and are doing it to house-painting, roofing and car repair. He concluded in
frustration, "What am I supposed to do?"
Roy Beck, executive director of Numbers USA Education and Research
Foundation, a Washington, D.C., organization devoted to immigration control,
says it's not that millions of unemployed Americans "are too lazy and
shiftless to bus tables or wash dishes." What the Chamber of Commerce and
like-minded business groups really mean, he says, is that "Americans won't
work like slaves, like serfs. Americans want to be paid and treated fairly."
"The National Restaurant Association., for one, doesn't want their customers
to know that this system forces illegal workers to live in abject poverty,"
Beck says. "It's the serfdom thing. If customers thought about it, they'd
say, 'No, I don't want people who are hidden in the kitchen or serving me to
poor and neglected that they might be TB carriers, and hate my guts for not
caring about them.' "
Terry Anderson, a black talk-radio host in Los Angeles, says he sees similar
displacement throughout the African American community. "I defy you to find
a black janitor in L.A.," Anderson says. "In the '70s, the auto body-repair
business in South-Central was pretty much occupied by blacks. Those jobs are
all gone now. They're all held by Hispanics, and all of them are illegals.
And those $25 jobs that blacks used to hold in the '70s now pay $8 to $10,
and a black man can't get hired even if he's expert. It's absolute
discrimination, because there's a perception that a Hispanic works better.
Well, he works cheaper. They're in the country illegally, so they have no
bargaining power, and the wages get driven down."
The point he and Beck make is decidedly not a racial one, not black versus
Latino or Mexican versus white. Their point is about money. Illegal,
powerless immigrants versus relatively empowered American citizens. Who
among us could survive if every day, the streets outside our workplaces were
lined with people willing to do our jobs for two-thirds or half the pay
because in the world they came from, in the world where their money is sent,
half of our pay amounted to riches?
Anderson particularly despairs of the effect the scarcity of low-end jobs
has on poor youths. In May, 6.1 million whites and 1.7 million blacks in the
country were unemployed. But of those without jobs, young people took the
worst hit. The unemployment rate for whites ages 16 to 19 in the labor force
was 15.4%, with 892,000 unemployed; for black teenagers, it was 270,000 out
of work, at a scary 35% rate.
These kids are the millions of potential burger-flippers and mowers of lawns
that Beck and Anderson say employers are bypassing in favor of undocumented
migrants. "There was this kid in my neighborhood--good kid, 17 years old,
and he goes down to the local McDonald's to get an after-school job,"
Anderson says. "The manager tells him that because he doesn't speak Spanish,
she can't hire him because it would have a disruptive effect on all the other
workers who don't speak English. I mean, think of that: Here's a kid trying
to get a little ahead--American born, four generations in South-Central--
he's told he can't sell French fries because he can't speak a foreign
language. You want to talk about disillusionment?"
as cheap, illegal workers flood the labor force, governments and taxpayers
are feeling the pinch. Just as one dishonest act often leads to another,
illegal labor has led to other illegalities. The most pervasive is the
untaxed cash transaction. It has created a surging "underground economy"
that has become a hole in society's pocket through which falls many of our
democratic values, and a lot of loose cash.
John Chiang of Los Angeles, one of five members of the state Board of
Equalization, California's tax oversight agency, says off-the-books
businesses can have a "profoundly dislocating effect" on the economy. It
pushes some businesses to compete by also cutting legal corners, and
discourages other businesses from coming to California.
A study last year by the Economic Roundtable, a Los Angeles research group,
found that the underground sector in Southern California probably accounts
for 20% or more of the economy, says economist Dan Flaming, author of the
report. Nationwide, the International Monetary Fund reported in a 2002
issues paper, underground work amounted to 10% of the total economy.
As the underground sector surged in the '90s, an unpleasant snowball began
to gather mass. The amount of tax revenues generated by the economy didn't
keep pace with the population growth and accompanying rise in demands for
government services. That, in turn, "adds significantly to the tax burden
of honest taxpayers," Chiang says. He estimates that the state is losing
$7 billion a year in unpaid taxes.
The state Employment Development Department's estimates are somewhat lower,
at $3 billion to $6 billion annually in lost income and wage-related taxes.
Any way it's counted, that's a pile of money for a state running a
$38-billion deficit that Sacramento is attempting to close by cutting
services, raising taxes and borrowing money.
Certainly, not all of the loss is due to illegal immigrants, and the state,
with scrupulous political sensitivity, avoids placing blame there. But Jerry
Hicks, whose job until recently was to measure the underground economy for
the Employment Development Department, reluctantly agrees that common sense
would put undocumented workers at the head of the tax-avoidance list. It's
anybody's guess how much fault lies with businesses forced to compete by
dealing in cash.
That loss of tax revenue is key to understanding why unchecked illegal
immigration creates a downward economic spiral. Jan. C. Ting, Temple
University law professor and former assistant commissioner of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, says the swelling population of poor people who
have little more than manual labor to offer, and who pay few taxes, will
inevitably draw heavily on social services. That drain will, in turn,
increase taxes on businesses and homeowners, who may depart for other states,
which in turn will drive tax rates even higher.
An often-cited National Research Council study in 1997 concluded that each
native household in California was paying $1,178 a year in state and local
taxes to cover services used by immigrant (legal and illegal) households. The
demand for such offsetting taxes undoubtedly has increased in proportion to
the numbers of illegal immigrants since then.
What is known is how the tax drain is changing society. As the IMF's issue
paper warned last year, the lost revenue can lead to "a deterioration in the
quality and administration of the public goods such as roads and hospitals
provided by the government."
Hospitals provide a clear warning signal. Here's how it happens: An illegal
immigrant, without health insurance, has a serious health problem and goes to
a public hospital, incurring a catastrophic medical cost. At bargain basement
wages, that patient has as much chance of paying the hospital bill as paying
off the national debt. So the patient scribbles out a passable IOU, and
disappears.
Someone else pays. America's health system draws its lifeblood from private
health insurance, and if large numbers of patients have no insurance or can't
pay, the money has to be taken from taxes--siphoned from the state treasury.
A robust society can absorb a certain amount of those losses, but if the tax
base isn't expanding as fast as the demands placed on it, the system begins
to shut down--as Los Angeles County's has.
In 2002, 33% of L.A. County residents were without health insurance or were
grossly underinsured. The county thinks that rate is the highest in the
United States, which helps to explain why the county prepared to close two
hospitals last year because there was too much demand and too little revenue.
Carol Gunter is acting director of county emergency medical services, the
person who has to try to run a "business" in which about a quarter of the
customers don't have the means to pay for her product, but are entitled to
its full service. So just how many emergency room patients are illegal?
Federal law prevents her from knowing because hospitals are forbidden to
ask about citizenship. What Gunter does know is that, despite billion-
dollar federal bailouts, the number of public L.A. County hospitals recently
went from six to five, and another is going to close.
In March, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein announced she had joined other
senators in supporting a bailout bill to reimburse state and local hospitals
for emergency medical costs incurred by undocumented immigrants. She
estimated those costs in California at $980 million in the past year.
Celebration over the proposal becomes somewhat muted when we consider that
a bailout is--by sinking-lifeboat definition--intended to overcome the
effects of a leak, and her statement mentioned nothing about patching the
boat. Feinstein declined to be interviewed on the subject.
Jim Lott, executive vice president of the Hospital Assn. of Southern
California, puts it bluntly: "We are in a [health-care] meltdown in Los
Angeles County to the extent we have never seen before."
The state can't be far behind. An estimated 20% of patients throughout
California are uninsured, with hospitals incurring $3.6 billion in
uncompensated care. Fifty-one percent of the state's hospitals operated
in the red last year.
After the "please pay cash" painting contractor left my house, I put pencil
to paper on the bids. Considering that his line of work is labor-intensive,
if I accepted the above-board bid of $2,000, probably about $1,500 would go
toward wages, and maybe 10% of that would go to the government. If I went for
the underground bid, I would get off cheaper--and the government would lose
$200. Multiply that by the countless such transactions in California daily,
and a lot of hospitals are going to run short, and a lot of potholes are
going to grow.
Author hanson describes the practical effect of the massive immigration
numbers: "The unfortunate message we give migrants is, 'You can work here,
but only undercover, and you can't join our society.' "
Chiang sees the same ominous divisions. "California is becoming a dichotomy
society--high-wealth, low-wealth; educated, undereducated; and the
underground economy plays a large role in creating the unregulated
atmosphere that tends to widen those social and economic gaps."
So the people on either side of the divide go to their corners. The wealthy
to West L.A. and its counterparts around the state. The poor? "We have towns
in the Central Valley that are--literally--100% Mexican, and consist mainly
of illegal migrants," Hanson says. "In those towns, Spanish is the only
language spoken; there is no industry, and the towns are huge pockets of
poverty. We can legitimately fear that this is the California of the future."
Two small cities of about the same size in Fresno County underscore Hanson's
point. The town of Parlier in 2000 was 97% Latino, with 36% of the town
living in poverty, and a per capita income of $7,078, Hanson says. The town
of Kingsburg, whose population was 34% Latino, had just 11% living in
poverty. The per capita income was $16,137.
The dependence upon agricultural labor, which usually has to be done by hand,
puts a low ceiling on what immigrants can earn. That ceiling could be lifted
either by stemming the flow of illegal labor, or by mechanizing the farm
work. But neither is happening, which suits many farmers just fine.
Philip Martin, professor of agricultural and resource economics at UC Davis,
says farmers could quickly mechanize labor-intensive harvesting if it were
not so cheap to hire migrants. "Back in the late '60s and '70s, there was a
fear there wouldn't be enough farm workers, so that spurred mechanization
research," Martin says. "Then there were 70-some subsidized projects at the
University of California aimed at figuring out how to pick oranges
mechanically. Today, there aren't any, because there is plenty of cheap
farm labor. There is probably a machine available to harvest every crop grown
in the U.S., but they won't be used as long as the laborers are available at
low wages."
Martin's point reveals this turned-around truism: Agriculture in Mexico is
modernizing, which forces many laborers off their jobs there. Machines are
displacing laborers in the cornfields of Mexico, so they come north to the
"advanced" United States to pick fruits and vegetables by hand.
Because the United States makes no real effort to count its undocumented
workers, their true impact on the job market is unclear. Common sense does
say, however, that if millions of Mexicans are here illegally, they must be
working or they would go home. An estimated $10 billion was sent back to
Mexico in 2002 by workers in the United States, an increase of $800 million
from the year before, says the nonprofit Pew Hispanic Center in Washington,
D.C.
The migrants who come north used to be regarded as sellouts or deserters in
Mexican society. Now, they're heroes praised by Mexican President Vicente Fox
for the money they inject into that faltering economy. That is also a first,
Hanson says. "Mexico is a failing society that stays afloat by exporting
human capital. If you shut that border down, in five years you'd have a
revolution, because Mexico can't meet the aspirations of its own people."
There is no question that illegal immigration greatly troubles Americans.
The polls show it, both before and after 9/11. They want them to go home.
One poll even showed that almost two-thirds want the military to patrol the
border. Of course, they never gripe about the cheap hamburgers or the
low-cost gardening that migrants make possible.
Yet, curiously, in a decade of unprecedented illegal immigration, the issue
has been put on the back burner by most of society's seers and opinion-
formers.
Illegal immigrants are the people we used to call illegal aliens in a coarser
time. Now, to some, even "undocumented workers" is too harsh so they've
adopted "unauthorized." To many critics of illegal immigration, this tiptoe
nomenclature is part of the problem. They say a debate or consensus on the
issue is made impossible by a barricade of political correctness, up against
which a critic is in danger of that paralyzing accusation--racist.
Most politicians would rather swallow their tongues than talk about illegal
immigration, and Dick Morris thinks he knows why. Morris, the former political
strategist for Bill Clinton, says both political parties, "especially the
Republicans, have to know they're running out of white people to split up.
Any major politician is facing dodo bird extinction if he or she fails to
reach out to Hispanics. It scares them."
Hanson believes the politics of immigration is about greed and power more
than ideology. "It's one of those issues that's backed by strange bedfellows
--on the right, you have big business types who want open borders to make
money on cheap labor, and don't care about social consequences. On the other
side, you have this left-wing racist--I think it's racist--separatist
industry of Latino groups and leftist legislators" who want more immigration
because it expands their power base.
Quixotically, on the border south of San Diego, the U.S. runs a version of
"Checkpoint Charlie" to keep them out. Operation Gatekeeper started in 1994
to stem the flow of illegal immigration north by clamping down on the main
ports of entry in the Southwest. In addition to forcing many border crossers
to attempt a dangerous trip across the desert, it has had the unintended
consequence of transforming a fluid population that used to go back and
forth into one that simply stays here.
An unauthorized worker probably would prefer to work in this country and
return home as often as possible, preserving his Mexican roots. Gatekeeper,
however, has cemented that worker's feet in the U.S. It's not hard to
understand his hesitancy to go home for a holiday or family event if he knows
there's a good chance he'll be caught on his return. So, he does the obvious
thing: He hires a coyote (outlaw immigrant trafficker) to bring his whole
family north, often one member at a time.
So, what are the options? close the borders and kick out the undocumented
as some arch-conservatives want? Or, on the other extreme, open the borders
completely, as libertarians and some Latino groups tend to favor? On both
counts, forget about it. Not going to happen. And you can trash amnesty at
the present time, too. The War on Terrorism and the tension it has caused
between Mexico and the United States, plus a sour remembrance from the
results of the 1986 amnesty law, closed the book on "regularization," as
Bush and Fox euphemistically called amnesty in the fond days of their mutual
affection a couple years ago. A 2002 poll by Zogby International, a polling
firm, showed that 65% of Americans opposed a new amnesty.
When the nation tried amnesty 17 years ago, the whole idea was to combine it
with a crackdown on hiring illegal workers. Guess what? The amnesty worked
for 2.8 million migrants, putting them on the track for citizenship; the
crackdown did not, as the rising numbers of illegal crossings demonstrate.
The first amnesty seemed likely to only lead to another, and then another.
An advocate of controlled borders is Cecilia Muñoz, vice president of the
National Council of La Raza, the group considered an arch defender of illegal
migration. Muñoz says undocumented immigration is bad for both the country
and the workers, so she supports amnesty to make them legal, calling it
"earned legalization." Her enthusiasm flags, though, when asked if the
government should crack down on subsequent illegal immigration that
undoubtedly would follow a new amnesty.
But her convictions don't falter. "We are going to ultimately succeed because
we're all complicit in this system. We don't like it, but we benefit" from
it, and therefore should grant the laborers amnesty.
The last-gasp alternative to amnesty seems to be a "guest-worker program."
The guest-worker idea had two antecedents, one from 1917 to 1921, and
another, known as the bracero program, from 1942 to 1964. Each was started in
response to farmers' complaints of wartime labor shortages. After studying
both, professor Martin is convinced that "there's nothing more permanent than
temporary workers." He realizes the folly of inviting a poor laborer into a
comparative worker's paradise, and then expecting him to run along home when
the job is finished.
David Lorey, author of the scholarly "The U.S.-Mexican Border in the 20th
Century," says the lesson of the bracero experience "is that guest-worker
programs encourage migration." He adds, "There were horrible conditions in
the migrant camps, and a lot of abuses that resulted from this neither-fish-
nor-fowl program."
In retrospect, the lasting effect of the bracero program was to draw workers
north to the border and give them a taste of American wages. For example, in
1940, Mexicali, a Mexican border town south of El Centro, had a population of
less than 20,000 people. In 1960, it was 175,000. The programs succeeded in
drawing workers, especially in agriculture, but also left a legacy of
exploitation and ineffective regulation that has made bracero a dirty word
in the lexicon of Mexican migration.
Memories of the abuses leave Hispanic groups skittish to the idea of guest-
worker programs. But Brent Wilkes, executive director of the powerful League
of United Latin American Citizens, says that his organization might support
such a program provided the workers have labor rights equal to those of
American laborers, and have an inside-track to eventual citizenship.
However, law professor Ting calls a guest-worker program in any form
unworkable. "It's camouflaged amnesty. No one wants to use the word 'amnesty'
because the American people recognize it for what it is--admitting defeat of
our immigration system. So, they say, 'Let's call it something else. Let's
call it a 'guest-worker program.' "
The vacillation over how to effectively control illegal migration drives a
senior immigration investigator right up the wall, because he believes the
bureaucracy has the answer in its own hands. The investigator has more than
20 years' experience with the INS. Still, he believes he must remain
anonymous for fear of retribution.
Currently, he explains, the law requires an employer to make a good-faith
effort to ascertain that applicants have valid identification. However, he
considers that law a political con job because it gives unscrupulous
employers an easy out: They can't be held responsible for not having the
expertise to identify illegal or forged documents, so anything short of
those being written in crayon can pass muster. The biggest abuses, he says,
are of forged immigrant registration cards (green cards) and Social Security
cards.
What frustrates him is his conviction that a procedure is already in place
that would "immediately identify 70% of the illegal workforce." He explains
that as a part of the 1986 immigration law, a voluntary employee verification
pilot program was established, and is still operating. Under the program, the
validity of Social Security cards and green cards can be quickly checked on
all new employees by phone or online. He says the system could easily be
expanded into a mandatory nationwide computer hookup by cross-indexing the
data bases of the immigration service with the Social Security
Administration. The effect would be that honest employers could instantly
ascertain the legality of their workforce, and dishonest employers would
have no excuse for hiring undocumented workers.
Bill Strasberger, a spokesman for the immigration service, says the pilot
program is considered successful. "Employers using it are pleased, and so
are we. It provides verification with confidentiality." Asked if it would be
expanded or made mandatory by Congress, he laughed briefly, then said, "It
really is the direction we need to move in."
Why, then, aren't we doing it? The investigator says that Congress refuses
to make the program mandatory so as not to offend big agribusiness and other
industries that freely employ illegal workers. These industries then take
some of those profits and give generously to members of Congress.
Beck's organization, which advocates immigration control, plans to push for
a mandatory employee-verification law. "The American people would not stand
for a massive deportation, so what we need to do is use this program to dry
up the jobs, then most illegals would gradually go home." If such a law was
enacted, he says, the end result would be American workers gravitating to
those jobs for slightly higher wages. "You'd end up paying 25 cents more for
a hamburger and a dime more for lettuce. Big deal."
This affluent society can certainly afford more expensive hamburgers, but
can it afford the hidden costs that currently make those burgers and fries
dirt cheap? As Beck asks, "How many unskilled illegal migrants do we allow
in? Forty million? Fifty million? What is the end point?"
Jul 26th 2003, 4:26 am
#2
Guest
Posts: n/a
Re: Mexifornia
Oliver D Greene <[email protected]> wrote in message news:<[email protected]>...
> http://www.latimes.com/features/prin...n29jul20.story
>
> July 20, 2003
>
> Undermining American workers
> Record numbers of illegal immigrants are pulling
> wages down for the poor and pushing taxes higher.
>
> By Fred Dickey, Special to The Times
>
>
> The perils of illegal immigration rattle around in the attic of public
> policy like a troubled spirit. We pretend not to hear the dragging chains
> because we don't know how to silence them, but the ghosts will endure,
> especially in California. Because the nation can't control its borders,
> the number of illegal immigrants grows by an estimated half-million each
> year. They come because we invite them with lax law enforcement and menial
> jobs. Their presence makes our own poor more destitute, creating a Third
> World chaos in the California economy that we are only beginning to
> understand.
>
> This affluent society can certainly afford more expensive hamburgers, but
> can it afford the hidden costs that currently make those burgers and fries
> dirt cheap? As Beck asks, "How many unskilled illegal migrants do we allow
> in? Forty million? Fifty million? What is the end point?"
Thanks for posting this article, Oliver.
I agree with one of the main points of the article that illegals are
keeping down wages of the poor and unskilled. The irony, I believe,
is these politicians and racial leaders who go out of their way to
protect and shield the illegals and who are, at the same time,
economically hurting the poor and underprivileged minorities that are
here legally and who they also claim to represent.
I have personally witnessed the deflationary effect illegals have had
on the wages of unskilled labor in the construction industry.
The article also talks about the failure guest worker programs in this
country. Other countries have used guest workers successfully
(Switzerland and Singapore, for examples). A guest worker program can
work here too if clear objectives are established. One objective
should be to make legal all the illegals and grant them permanent
residency if they work hard, stay out of trouble, and not become a
welfare or healthcare burden for say five years. Another objective
should be to allow eager and honest unskilled foreign workers to
offset temporary and long-term labor shortages, allowing them to be
here legally and allowing us to send them home when they are no longer
needed.
The last point in the article regarding the verification of social
security numbers and green card numbers has merit. Of course,
employers of illegals will probably kick, scream, and throw money at
the politicians to fend off such a rational approach to curtailing
illegal immigration.
Hank.
> http://www.latimes.com/features/prin...n29jul20.story
>
> July 20, 2003
>
> Undermining American workers
> Record numbers of illegal immigrants are pulling
> wages down for the poor and pushing taxes higher.
>
> By Fred Dickey, Special to The Times
>
>
> The perils of illegal immigration rattle around in the attic of public
> policy like a troubled spirit. We pretend not to hear the dragging chains
> because we don't know how to silence them, but the ghosts will endure,
> especially in California. Because the nation can't control its borders,
> the number of illegal immigrants grows by an estimated half-million each
> year. They come because we invite them with lax law enforcement and menial
> jobs. Their presence makes our own poor more destitute, creating a Third
> World chaos in the California economy that we are only beginning to
> understand.
>
> This affluent society can certainly afford more expensive hamburgers, but
> can it afford the hidden costs that currently make those burgers and fries
> dirt cheap? As Beck asks, "How many unskilled illegal migrants do we allow
> in? Forty million? Fifty million? What is the end point?"
Thanks for posting this article, Oliver.
I agree with one of the main points of the article that illegals are
keeping down wages of the poor and unskilled. The irony, I believe,
is these politicians and racial leaders who go out of their way to
protect and shield the illegals and who are, at the same time,
economically hurting the poor and underprivileged minorities that are
here legally and who they also claim to represent.
I have personally witnessed the deflationary effect illegals have had
on the wages of unskilled labor in the construction industry.
The article also talks about the failure guest worker programs in this
country. Other countries have used guest workers successfully
(Switzerland and Singapore, for examples). A guest worker program can
work here too if clear objectives are established. One objective
should be to make legal all the illegals and grant them permanent
residency if they work hard, stay out of trouble, and not become a
welfare or healthcare burden for say five years. Another objective
should be to allow eager and honest unskilled foreign workers to
offset temporary and long-term labor shortages, allowing them to be
here legally and allowing us to send them home when they are no longer
needed.
The last point in the article regarding the verification of social
security numbers and green card numbers has merit. Of course,
employers of illegals will probably kick, scream, and throw money at
the politicians to fend off such a rational approach to curtailing
illegal immigration.
Hank.
