U.S.A.-- A Country Of Economic Refugees

Not my housekeeper, Juana

My housekeeper, Juana, is from El Salvador. The only way I know she's an American citizen is that we talk about who she's voting for every time elections roll around. Unlike Mitt Romney, I'm not running for office so I have no idea who's on the gardening crew. I know Roberto, the main guy, is American because he was born in L.A. But I'm not sure what the status of his employees are. I suspect the Gang of 8 proposals aren't really meant to make their lives any easier. As Joshua Holland explained in The Fifteen Biggest Lies About The Economy, "the idea that immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, take jobs from the native-born and keep wages low and taxes high is so deeply embedded in our discourse that even many progressive-minded people have come to believe it [and] that people believe immigration plays a much greater role in the plight of many U.S. workers than it actually does." But just because that's a widely-held belief, it doesn't make it true.

Here is the reality: new immigrants (legal or not) have a negative short-term impact on local governments’ fiscal situation, but over the long haul, they contribute more in taxes than they take in services. Immigrant labor may have a negative effect on wages for a small group of Americans, but that’s anything but established, and the positive contributions-- including their contributions to native workers’ wages-- are enjoyed by a much, much larger group of Americans. All of these factors are very small in relation to the economy as a whole, and almost none of the rhetoric about how immigration hurts working people is justified by the data.

...The Corporate Right, which has made strange bedfellows with immigrants’ rights activists in recent years, has pushed a narrative that’s very different from the one embraced by the nativists. Corporate America argues that newly arrived workers take jobs that Americans won’t do. Yet that’s only partially true; many unauthorized immigrants fill nonunion jobs that are impossibly crappy, pay poverty wages, and are rife with workplace violations, and they work those jobs side by side with millions of natives and legal residents. The reality is that there are not enough Americans who are willing or able to tolerate poverty wages and other workplace abuses.

At the same time that spending on immigration enforcement was going through the roof, the resources allocated to enforcing overtime, minimum wage, workplace safety, and other protections for workers were cut and cut again. According to research conducted by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, the number of workplaces that fell within the jurisdiction of the Department of Labor’s wage and hour division more than doubled between 1975 and 2004, and the number of workers in those establishments increased by 55 percent. Yet during that period, the number of inspectors available to enforce basic labor standards declined by 14 percent, and the number of “compliance actions” the agency completed plummeted by more than a third.

Those who advocate more law enforcement to tackle the immigration issue often invoke images of the United States descending into anarchy-- of a nation losing control of its borders and therefore its sovereignty. There is anarchy in America, there is lawlessness, but you’ll find a lot more of it in the kitchen of your favorite diner than along the Rio Grande.

Unfortunately, there’s not much in the way of nationwide data on workplace violations, but we do have a large body of local and state studies, and all point to the same conclusion: they are simply rampant at the lower end of the economy and among vulnerable populations.

Consider the findings of just a few of those studies, as compiled by the Brennan Center:

• A 2004 study of two hundred workers conducted at multiple sites in Fairfax County, Virginia, found that

• 54.6 percent were paid less than agreed on.
• 53.1 percent reported nonpayment for work done.
• 35.6 percent said they’d been victims of racial discrimination.
• 25.8 percent had been given bad checks.
• 16 percent reported that they’d been subject to violence on the job.
• 14.9 percent said they’d received threats from employers.

• A 2002 study of chicken processors found that six in ten plants failed to pay workers overtime.

• In a 1998 study of restaurant workers in Los Angeles, only two out of forty-three establishments complied with basic labor laws.

• A 2005 study of grape pickers in California’s Central Valley found that half of all workers reported pay stubs that reflected less than the total number of hours worked, and half reported that they had not received all of the overtime pay they were owed.

• A 1998 study looking at workers in the restaurant, garment, hotel, and motel industries-- all occupations with large numbers of unauthorized workers-- found that only one in twenty restaurants complied with minimum wage laws and only a third of hotels and motels were in compliance, as were only four of ten shops in the garment industry.

Study after study reported similar findings. And it bears repeating: although these illegal jobs are clustered in industries in which many unauthorized workers toil, millions of legal immigrants and U.S. citizens work those same jobs and are also victims of widespread employer abuses. According to one 2003 study, the percentage of workers being ripped off via minimum wage violations is not that much lower for natives than it is for immigrants-- 13 percent versus 9 percent among women and 9 percent versus 6 percent among men.

Most of the focus of the immigration debate in this country has been on the immigrants themselves, especially unauthorized immigrants. But very little attention is paid to the other side of the transaction: the incentives that U.S. companies and households have to hire an unauthorized worker over a citizen.

For one thing, enforcement efforts rarely target employers. As the Washington Post noted, while “federal immigration authorities arrested nearly four times as many people at workplaces in 2007 as they did in 2005... only 92 owners, supervisors or hiring officials were arrested in an economy that includes 6 million companies that employ more than 7 million unauthorized workers. Only 17 firms faced criminal fines or other forfeitures.” Those raids devastate workers’ families, but they represent little more than an inconvenience to employers, who have little reason to improve working conditions when they can hire new employees who are just as easy to exploit.

Illegal immigrants sell their labor on a black market that’s similar in many ways to those for other illicit goods and services, such as the drug trade. The sellers’ incentives are well-understood: the lion’s share of those who have moved to the United States in the last decade are economic refugees, fleeing home countries where they can’t eke out a dignified life. Human traffickers, who can realize enormous profits from shipping people across national boundaries, provide for the market; their incentives, again, are well-understood.

The buyers, of course, are Americans-- and not only corporate America. Middle-class households and many small firms use illegal labor, but their side of the transaction goes largely undiscussed. Without looking at both sides of the coin-- demand, as well as supply-- it’s impossible to arrive at a reform agenda that can result in an effective, humane, and sustainable system of immigration control.

An unregulated sector of the economy, rife with illegal jobs, is the largely unexamined “pull factor” for much of the (low-skilled) immigration to the United States. Most recent immigrants work at jobs that fall somewhere between what’s available in their native countries and the kind of jobs one would expect to find in a highly advanced economy. They also tend to be jobs that can’t be easily outsourced to countries with an abundance of cheap labor.

A good example of these kinds of jobs can be found in New York City, where the cost of living is among the highest in the country. A report in Crain’s New York Business News found that in underregulated New York restaurants, green grocers, retail corner laundries, and private households, “Typically, workers will be quoted a flat weekly salary of $300 and then have to work 60 hours a week, receiving an effective wage of $5 an hour with no provision for overtime.”36 New York State’s minimum wage was $7.15 per hour, and federal and state laws require overtime pay for any hours worked over forty per week.

In order to create a sustainable model for immigration control, we need to look at decreasing the demand for workers who are willing to fill those jobs. This means breaking Americans’ addiction to exploitable labor. As long as there are $5-per-hour jobs in New York City that few natives can afford to work, and millions of workers who don’t have jobs that pay that much in poorer countries, we’ll have a large number of people who want to migrate to our shores. As long as our immigration system doesn’t permit enough of them to migrate legally, we’ll have an “illegal immigration problem.” It’s simply the law of supply and demand at work.

Yet it’s not true that all unauthorized immigrants work those kinds of jobs. There’s no question that employers are sometimes legitimately unable to find citizens or legal residents to fill even decent jobs. That’s especially true in rural communities, where young people tend to take off for the big city and the population is aging and in decline. In 2007, I spoke with Oklahoma state senator Harry Coates soon after his state passed one of the most restrictive immigration laws in the nation. Employers in Oklahoma weren’t only having problems filling low-paying “McJobs,” he told me. “In the oil fields, they’re paying $18 to $20 per hour to start,” he said, “but they can’t find enough willing workers to fill the jobs. We’ve told our young people to work with their minds, not with their hands.” Coates added, “We’ve shot ourselves in the foot by running off willing workers for willing employers.”

Progressive immigration and workplace reform would focus our enforcement resources on cleaning up the bottom end of the labor market: on the jobs that bring people to our shores, rather than on the immigrants who work them. Guaranteeing workers-- immigrant and native alike-- the right to organize and enforcing wage and overtime laws would equalize the price of hiring unauthorized and legal workers and would go a long way toward addressing the demand for illegal labor without the ugliness of raids and deportations.

Once the goal of eliminating substandard and often illegal jobs-- un-American jobs-- from the U.S. workplace is accomplished, there would be far less resistance to new workers coming in to fill jobs that can’t be staffed by Americans. Public opinion research shows that when people perceive the economy to be functioning well for them, much of the anxiety over immigration disappears.

Instead we get a bigoted, right-wing ideologue like Ted Cruz sitting on the Judiciary Committee's Immigration, Refugees and Border Security subcommittee singing tunes for his Know Nothing base:

Cruz Claimed Obama Wants Immigration Reform Bill To “Crater” So Democrats Can Use It As “A Political Wedge.” According to Ted Cruz in an interview with the Dallas Morning News, “[Obama’s] behavior concerning immigration leads me to believe that what he wants is a political issue rather than actually to pass a bill. What he wants is for the bill to crater, so that he can use the issue as a political wedge in 2014 and 2016. That is why I believe the president is insisting on a path to citizenship for those who are here illegally. Because by insisting on that, he ensures that any immigration reform bill will be voted down in the House.” [Dallas Morning News, 3/24/13]

Cruz: “I Do Not Support The Dream Act And Categorically Oppose Amnesty.” In an interview with the blog Conservatives in Action published on Cruz’s campaign website, Cruz said, “I do not support the Dream Act and categorically oppose amnesty. I categorically oppose amnesty and I strongly support legal immigration for those that have followed the rules and come here to pursue the American dream.” [TedCruz.org, 7/18/11]

Cruz: “End Benefits Like In-State Tuition For Illegal Aliens.” According to the Texas Tribune, Ted Cruz said, “We need leaders who will get serious about enforcing the border: triple the border patrol; use walls, fences, and technology; end sanctuary cities; repeal Obama’s newly ordered amnesty; and end benefits like in-state tuition for illegal aliens." [Texas Tribune, 6/25/12]

Cruz Called On Romney To End Obama’s “Deferred Action” Policy Toward Young Undocumented Immigrants. According to the Huffington Post, “Ted Cruz, a Republican senatorial candidate from Texas, said Monday he thinks presidential candidate Mitt Romney should end President Barack Obama's deferred action policy, going beyond Romney's line that he doesn't need to because he'll fix the problem quickly through Congress. Asked by Telemundo whether Romney should reinstate deportations of young people granted deferred action, Cruz said, ‘I do.’ ‘I think it is without authority, and we're a nation of rule of law, and it is not defending anyone's freedom to be undermining rule of law,’ he said of President Obama'sJune announcement that his administration would grant work authorizations and deferred action-- reprieve from deportation concerns for two years-- to some undocumented young people.” [Huffington Post, 8/28/12]

Cruz Attacked Primary Opponent’s Support For Guest Worker Program. According to Fox News Latino, “Cruz went on the offensive against Dewhurst on illegal immigration-- a key issue in the state that shares the longest stretch of U.S.-Mexico border-- calling attention to Dewhurst’s 2007 support of a guest worker program for the state’s undocumented immigrants, announced at a speech in South Texas. Cruz called the guest worker idea more expansive than President Obama’s decision to call off deportations for immigrants without criminal records who came here illegally as children-- a policy that Cruz opposes and called ‘illegal.’” [Fox News Latino, 7/18/12]

Cruz Supported Border Wall, Including Possibility Of Confiscating Private Property. According to Fox News Latino, “Cruz also distinguished himself from Dewhurst with his full-throated support for a border wall estimated by the Department of Homeland Security to cost $7.3 billion, or $6.5 million per mile. Cruz defended the border wall proposal even if it meant expropriating private property-- a position that the debate’s moderators, WFAA reporter Brad Watson and Gromer Jeffers of the Dallas Morning News, said contrasted with Cruz’s message of fiscal conservatism. ‘One of the specific powers and responsibilities of the federal government is to secure the borders,’ Cruz said. ‘Property can be taken with due process of law and just compensation.’” [Fox News Latino, 7/18/12]

Cruz Criticized Idea Of Providing Green Cards To Unauthorized Immigrants. According to the Washington Examiner, “Sen. Ted Cruz signaled yesterday on FOX News that he was concerned about allowing illegal immigrants to get a green card-- reportedly part of the Gang of Eight Senate bill for immigration reform. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., supports the idea of allowing illegal immigrants to apply for a green card after a 10-year wait. ‘The problem with the green card is the green card is a permanent legal residence status, and anyone who has a green card is eligible for citizenship within five years,’ Cruz explained to FOX News host Sean Hannity. ‘And so, if someone can get a green card, that is a path to citizenship.’” [Washington Examiner, 4/2/13]