What America Owes its “Illegals”

Rush Limbaugh has been expecting liberals to start “whining” about the $5000 fine undocumented immigrants will have to pay to gain citizenship under the new immigration bill, but most liberals have been too busy chortling about the immigration-induced split in the GOP to make their own case against the bill. So let a mighty whine rise over the land: Undocumented workers shouldn’t be fined; they should get a hefty bonus!

All right, they committed a “crime” – the international equivalent of breaking and entry. But breaking and entry is usually a prelude to a much worse crime, like robbery or rape. What have the immigrants been doing once they get into the US? Taking up time on the elliptical trainers in our health clubs? Getting ahead of us on the wait-lists for elite private nursery schools?

In case you don’t know what immigrants do in this country, the Latinos have a word for it—trabajo. They’ve been mowing the lawns, cleaning the offices, hammering the nails and picking the tomatoes, not to mention all that dish-washing, diaper-changing, meat-packing and poultry-plucking.

The punitive rage directed at illegal immigrants grows out of a larger blindness to the manual labor that makes our lives possible: The touching belief, in the class occupied by Rush Limbaugh among many others, that offices clean themselves at night and salad greens spring straight from the soil onto one’s plate.

Native-born workers share in this invisibility, but it’s far worse in the case of immigrant workers, who are often, for all practical purposes, nameless. In the recent book There’s No José Here: Following the Lives of Mexican Immigrants, Gabriel Thompson cites a construction company manager who says things like, “I’ve got to get myself a couple of Josés for this job if we’re going to have that roof patched up by Saturday.” Forget the Juans, Diegos, and Eduardos – they’re all interchangeable “Josés.”

Hence no doubt the ease with which some prominent immigrant-bashers forget their own personal reliance on immigrant labor, like Nevada’s Governor Jim Gibbons, who, it turns out, once employed an undocumented nanny. And as the Boston Globe revealed late last year, Mitt Romney’s lawn in suburban Boston was maintained by illegal immigrants from Guatemala.

The only question is how much we owe our undocumented immigrant workers. First, those who do not remain to enjoy the benefits of old age in America will have to be reimbursed for their contributions to Medicare and Social Security, and here I quote the website of the San Diego ACLU:

Undocumented immigrants annually pay an estimated $7 billion more than they take out into Social Security, and $1.5 billion more into Medicare… A study by the National Academy of Sciences also found that tax payments generated by immigrants outweighed any costs associated with services used by immigrants.

Second, someone is going to have to calculate what is owed to “illegals” for wages withheld by unscrupulous employers: The homeowner who tells his or her domestic worker that the wage is actually several hundred dollars a month less than she had been promised, and that the homeowner will be “holding” it for her. Or the landscaping service that stiffs its undocumented workers for their labor. Who’s the “illegal” here?

Third, there’s the massive compensation owed to undocumented immigrants for preventable injuries on the job. In her book Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights, Jennifer Gordon reports such gruesome cases as a Honduran who died from inhaling paint while sanding yachts in Long Island and a Guatemalan worker whose boss intentionally burned him with hot pans of oil for not washing dishes fast enough. “Death rates for Latino workers,” Gordon reports, “have risen over the past decade even as workplace fatality rates for non-Latinos have fallen.”

When our debt to America’s undocumented workers is eventually tallied, I’m confident that it will be well in excess of the $5000 fine the immigration bill proposes. There is still the issue of the original “crime.” If someone breaks into my property for the purpose of trashing and looting, I would be hell-bent on restitution. But if they break in for the purpose of cleaning it – scrubbing the bathroom, mowing the lawn – then, in my way of thinking anyway, the debt goes in the other direction.

Comments

[belinda]

very interesting look on this situation . . .

[Hattie]

What I think is wrong is to use the labor of others while at the same time looking down on them.
I'm a radical on the subject of immigration: I think we ought to let Mexicans and central Americans live in the U.S.A., work here, and take citizenship if they want. Same for Candadians. No more borders.
Europe has adjusted to open borders, and so could we.

[Hattie]

That's Canadians, of course.

[Jon]

I'm a bus driver. My company serves a couple of wealthy suburbs. Recently, the county commissioners were about to eliminate night, weekend and early morning service because "nobody" rides those buses. The move was blocked by a coalition of restaurant owners who explained that they would have to go out of business if their workers didn't have bus service. Hundreds of restaurant workers, janitors, housekeepers and laborers ride these buses, but they just didn't entry into the commissioners thinking. The wealthy are surrounded by thousands of invisible little busy bees who make things happen at a level they do not care to notice.

[dennis]

It is astounding to me that the author of Nickel and Dimed cannot see that the major cause of low wages in this country (aside from greed) is the artificially inflated demand resulting from illegal immigration. It's not as if the government is trying to help poor people, but even if it were trying and adopting sensible immigration rules they would be defeated by the illegals and the scum who employ them. One of the overriding principles in which this country and its citizens take extreme pride is the sense of justice and fairplay that is, in theory, honored here. Illegal immigrants are not observing this rule of conduct and deserve nothing (save some grudging admiration for their tenacity maybe) from our government except a ticket back to their homeland. It is amazing to me that people like Barbara get hung up on whether or not these illegals are treated with dignity and respect (proper behavior I agree) when the key point is - they are illegal. You can get into all the cost/benefit anlysis you want and frankly i vastly prefer to see the uneducated of South America coming here to take low paying jobs over the educated Europeans coming to take our middle class jobs away, but the fact reamins - illegals exacerbate the poverty problem and do it by breaking the law. You cannot support this.

[Maya's Granny]

I once worked for a migrant health center in California and on certain farms it was common for workers to be picked up by the INS on payday, before the checks were distributed, and deported. Everyone who had contact with the workers knew it, we tried to warn them that they were working in a perilous situation, but the need to earn money to send home was so great that they took the chance. And, we all knew that the grower had a deal with the INS.

[realpc]

If illegal workers were not here, there would be more jobs for unskilled Americans, and those jobs would pay much better. Why hire an unskilled American for a competitive wage when you can get an illegal immigrant for below minimum wage?

How can Barbara E. possibly not think of this? She's so worried about unskilled Americans, yet likes to see their jobs stolen illegally.

And if America is such a lousy country, by the way, why are people trying so hard to get in? Americans want to stay here, and most of the world would like to be here also. Why, if it's such a miserable system?

Progressive ideology makes very little sense.

[paperpusher666]

The fine of $5000 isn't high enough if U.S. citizenship is considered to have an economic value. In many cases, they pay the coyotes more to be smuggled across the border.

Birthright citizenship, which arose from the need to give former slaves the status of citizens, must be stopped if there is to be any meaningful reduction in illegal immigration. Few developed countries grant automatic citizenship to anyone born there unless at least one of the parents is a citizen.

About forty miles north of the border with Mexico, there is a border station on Route 95 in Yuma, AZ. When I stopped to show my ID, I asked the border patrolman why there was a station there. He told me that 95 was a major smuggling route for illegal immigrants who were heading to Phoenix.

What annoys me about the Mexican immigrants is that they don't assimilate. My maternal grandparents were from Czechoslovakia, and even though they spoke Slovak at home, they learned English. Offering English as a second language in the schools rather than forcing the parents to learn English along with their children was a big mistake.

[realpc]

I think I figured out what Barbara E. wants. Let everyone in who wants to immigrate, with no restrictions. Force busiensses to pay them, and all workers, at least a living wage.

Of course, this will result in unemployment. But we could simply have the government create jobs. And the rest of the unemployed would get a living wage from the government.

Paying for all that is no problem -- just raise taxes on wealthy business owners. Oh wait a minute -- the business owners would be paying high salaries and benefits to unskilled workers, so they might not be wealthy any more. Ok then, just raise taxes for all the government workers. The government pays them, and they pay the government. Like perpetual motion. Hey, it might work.

[Hattie]

paperpusher: Mexicans do too assimilate, and they would assimilate even faster if it weren't for persistent mainstream racism and cultural chauvinism.
Czech immigrants don't come up against such barriers to acceptance; it really is a stretch to equate the immigrant experiences of Czechs with those of Mexicans.

[Jacqueline]

So there are people who broke our laws to come into our country because they are desperately poor with families to feed. Desperate enough to work for less than minimum wage, no health benefits, no workers comp and no social security retirement credits, doing the jobs that, supposedly, no American will do. Maybe No American can afford to work for that same low pay because we are not the ones getting helped with free medical care, free housing and free transportation to and from the fields, the wealthy homes, the construction sites and the food processing plants. But who really benefits from the give-aways and amnesty given to the law-breakers?

The law-breakers benefit because they can get treatment for free at any US hospital. Unlike the poor and uninsured American, illegals don't have miniscule savings/checking accounts (which contain at most, next month's rent) that will be seized for non-payment of medical bills. They don't own a home on American soil, however mortgaged to the hilt and however humble and modest, that can be seized in lieu of unpaid any hospital bills. Their babies born here, known as "anchor babies", automatically get granted citizenship status which entitles them to welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, SSI and a "free" public education. But none of this is free: it comes at a price, a price borne by poor and needy Americans who can't get any help at all.

Poor Americans with disabilities or who are otherwise "unemployable" and who lack any family resources are routinely denied Medicaid, SSI and welfare unless they happen to be single mothers with young children. Meanwhile, the anchor babies grow up here on the dole getting all kinds of help at the expense of the taxpayers.

Not to digress, but the most heavily taxed form of income is that on workers: the earned income tax. The rich, whose income derives mainly from passive sources such as investments, pay a much smaller percentage. So this burden is borne by the taxpaying citizens of this country who are least able to afford it (especially if you're low-income but self-employed!).

The public schools where illegals' kids get a free education are paid for by the property taxes levied on low-income elderly homeowners, working-poor homeowners (you know, those victims of downward mobility), and everybody else who owns a home.

Now many illegals make enough money to buy cars - which they drive without insurance or even a drivers license. When they get in an accident and injure, permanently disable or maybe even kill a poor American working-class stiff who was on their way to work - driving legally to get to their McJob - who pays for that? Not the illegal immigrant! And not the greedy rich who illegally hire them and thus bring them here in the first place! But I can assure you with a mathematical certainty that the American citizens who ends up disabled under such circumstances gets denied the help from SSI, welfare and Medicaid while they fight for decades to get that pittance of SSI and Medicaid after their lives have been ruined.

Meanwhile, our eviscerated social safety net programs (which were supposed to help poor Americans) are even more strained - to the breaking point.

And what do the governments of countries where illegals hail from do about any recompense to our citizens so harmed by their citizens (who came here illegally or who came legally but stayed here illegally)? Try suing - then enforcing the judgment - against someone who can conveniently skate back out of the country like thieves in the night, after they caused an accident leaving your life totally ruined and without any recourse. All the cheap produce in the world, all the cheap landscaping of the wealthy people's lawns, and all the cheap processed food in the world does not begin to compensate for the very real pain and very real losses suffered by poor Americans under the status quo.

Speaking of cheap produce, landscaping, construction and food processing plant jobs - whoever said no American would not do that sort of work? Seems to me that wealthy people on both sides of the political aisle have a vested interest in giving the illegals everything at the expense of poor and needy law-abiding American citizens. That vested interest is in maintaining dirt cheap prices for others' labor thus reducing the cost of services benefitting them and perpetuating a slave class to ensure their own socioeconomic position. Before illegal immigrants, L-1 and H-1B visa workers (many who become illegals when they over-stay their visas) unemployed poor Americans and prison chain gangs picked the produce and did all these jobs that "no American wants to do".

Laslty, there is the costs of increasing the building of more prisons. More prison space is needed when illegals break the law, such as one recent serial killer from Mexico, all the countless drug mules and weapons smugglers. I would say they (the illegals and their country's government) owes us - big time.

In sum, Barbara you are wrong. We, the 75% of Americans (who comprise the working classes) do NOT owe illegal immigrants anything.

[Hattie]

Well, there is no doubt about it: people who used to have it pretty good are now leading crappy lives, and it is not their fault. It is not the fault of the Mexicans either.
Guess whose fault it really is.
Answer: international capitalism.

[realpc]

Hattie: "Czech immigrants don't come up against such barriers to acceptance"

What could you possibly be thinking? I don't know about Czech immigrants, but Irish, Italian, Chinese, Korean and Jewish immigrants faced tremendous barriers to acceptance, but they assimilated anyway. They did their best to succeed, instead of making excuses.

[Jennifer]

There's no conflict between what she wrote in Nickle and Dimed and what she wrote here.

Immigration may be depressing wages in certain sectors (though the extent of this is usually overtstated), however, the problem here, from her consistently pro-labor stance in both writings, is that globalization allows capital to move all over the world in search of the cheapest labor while anti-immigration policy forbids labor from moving all over the world in search of the best pay.

[Charley]

Jennifer! Bravo! That is exactly right. Capitalism wants cheap labor, so they send low wage jobs to Mexico, which depresses their economy, so Mexicans move here for higher wages. Hey, maybe we should have one wage standard for the whole world. No wait, that's socialism!! Imagine that...

peace! Charley

[promentalbackwash]

BE, I feel for you, casting your pearls before swine like you do.

Why blame the immigrants for depressed wages, when the problem is employers paying people under the table? You can round people up and send them back all you want -- as long as employers are permitted to pay people under the table with no crackdowns, Americans will get the same under-the-table wages immigrants now get.

And I'm sure most of the people bitching the loudest about the illegals are the first ones who will start bleeding internally when oranges cost $5 apiece.

[chris]

Typical Barbara E deception. She starts this article by citing ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS, then drops the adjective denoting their legal status and continues the article implying their entitlement to life in the US exceeds the rights of actual citizens. All of this breezes by readers whose blood pressure is conditioned to rise at the sight of Rush Limbaugh’s name in print.

She rhetorically asks about the crimes of ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS, suggesting they’ve done no more than engage in a little breaking & entering. Of course that’s a flat-out lie. First, illegal immigrants break the law by slipping into America. I don’t blame them for their desire to come here. I’d like to fix it so they can. But we do have laws.

Second, America’s hospitals have become maternity wards for pregnant illegal immigrants who give birth to American Citizens. That’s how they ensure themselves of legal rights in this country. That’s bad. Very bad.

After clogging the maternity wards of US hospitals, the offspring, these new American citizens who came through the back door, flood our public schools with children who fail to graduate from high school. The children of illegal Mexican immigrants don’t graduate. They drop out. They don’t go to college. They don’t climb like the Asians of today or the Europeans of the last two centuries.

What’s more is that the Mexican government knows it benefits from oiling the door at the border. Which countries actually imprison their citizens? Cuba. Yes. North Korea. Yes. All muslim theocracies. Yes.

Where do Haitians go when they leave the Haitian hellhole? Do they slip over the border separating Haiti from the Dominican Republic on the other half of the island of Hispaniola? Maybe some do. But many find ways to cross miles of open shark-infested waters to sneak into the US. Great. What’s the secret of the Dominican Republic? Let’s try their tactics.

Barbara opines on what the Latinos do after reaching our shores. Well, yes, they seem to get work. Often unpleasant work. Some cut lawns. I grew up cutting lawns. I will cut my lawn today. But the country has seen an explosion in demand for yard maintenance. Kids no longer take these jobs. Why? I’m not sure. But that’s okay. The immigrants can have the lawn-cutting jobs if they want them.

Are the lawn-cutter illegal immigrants? Probably. What about the people who clean offices? Some are illegal, I’m sure. But others aren’t. In NY City many of the people cleaning offices are newly arrived Russians or others from the former Soviet Union. They are not illegals. Most members of that group expect to rise from office cleaning to something more. I’ve worked with many Russian immigrants. In my experience they moved off the bottom rung with remarkable speed.

Meanwhile, the Mexicans and other Latinos who come here to work at the worst low-wage jobs create huge burdens on social services. Hospitals, schools, police. Schools in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn were over-run, seriously overcrowded with the offspring of illegal immigrants. Moreover, Sunset Park sees more than its fair-share of violent crime. Guess who commits it? Mexicans, or other Latinos, especially those with gang affiliations. Murder is still a problem in the Latino community. The only factor mitigating the crime problem is the increase in the number of whites in the Sunset Park neighborhood. The housing stock is good. And it is getting more expensive as whites acquire the better properties and, by their presence, replace criminals. Some people like to call this phenomenon Gentrification. I like to call it Out with the Bad and In with the Good.

Thus, despite Barbara’s inane claim that we owe illegal immigrants back pay, it’s a fact that they owe us for theft of services. Unpaid hospital bills; unpaid school bills heaped on taxpayers; unpaid income taxes.

So let’s repair the system. Create a Guest Worker Program. Let people come here to work. Let them EARN citizenship by paying their taxes. But let’s open this program to workers at every level. Not just the clowns who mow the lawns and pick the fruits and vegetables. Let’s get the engineers and scientists here too. Those guys participate in the H-1B visa program. But the number of H-1B visas issued each year is a fraction of the demand. How stupid. Thousands and thousands of people want to come here to work at high-paid positions, pay their taxes and live. Why turn them away when they will become net benefits to the country? Why exclude them while offering the deal of the century to immigrants who will generate net costs to taxpayers?

To increase the success of opening our borders to Guest Workers, we must ELIMINATE the minimum wage. Doing so will minimize the benefit of hiring a recent immigrant who can be exploited. It will encourage English-speakers to come here. Eliminating the minimum wage will encourage upward mobility. It will spur the desire to get off the bottom.

But let’s forget all the nonsense of implementing the plan that is currently before Congress. Let’s just start a plan by which people EARN citizenship through payment of income taxes. That would be all the incentive necessary to get full compliance. We can start tomorrow. No ridiculous and impossible attempts to assess the history of current illegal residents.

Meanwhile, our Medicaid program would become the Universal Healthcare plan envisioned by Democrats. If our Guest Workers were honest workers, paying taxes to cover their bills, it might be possible to collect enough revenue to meet their medical expenditures.

Leave it to Barbara to pretend that an immigrant died from an illness contracted by on-the-job hazards. She finds ONE example. Meanwhile, the annual number of murders committed by illegal immigrants is a lot higher.

Furthermore, illegal immigrants often remit money back to the family in Mexico. Thus, they not only steal municipal services, their small incomes are spent in support of people in other countries.

Meanwhile, immigrants love WalMart. The people from Mexico want to shop at WalMart. Naturally, Barbara and her crew will say NO to that. Instead, Barbara et. al. will demand that low-paid immigrants shop at more expensive stores whenever it’s possible to force them to do so. Currently there are no WalMarts in New York City. Too bad. All shoppers are waiting breathlessly.

It’s ironic. Democrats are falling all over themselves to bring in millions of people from other countries who will work for less. But the same clowns want to stop WalMart from selling products at lower prices than their competitors. Thus, we race downward. Dems want to increase our base of workers at the bottom of the income scale. But they also want to increase the cost of everything those low-paid workers buy. That’s an idiotic collision of economic currents. But, that’s Dems for you.

One last point. The basis for citizenship must change. No more citizenship granted to a person born on US soil. Like European nations, citizenship should depend on the citizenship of one’s parents. Not just dropping from the womb into America.

[Hattie]

Well, p.c. when it comes to immigration, I prefer thinking to reacting.
Capital wants the cheapest labor possible, so it has fled to the cheap labor countries. Most of our consumer goods are manufactured outside the U.S.
But much work still has to be done on location. Illegals do the work that can't be sent offshore: construction, agricultural work, food prep, yardwork, childcare, eldercare, housework, and so on.
If anti-immigration people are sincere, they will of course not use the labor of these people. They will do all such work themeselves or they will hire people at fair wages to do it.

[promentalbackwash]

Chris, y'know, it's funny. I'm an ex-New Yorker and I know dozens of current New Yorkers, including my father and brother. I don't know a single one who complains that there's no Wal-Mart in New York City. If you want to shop there that badly there are plenty of them in northern New Jersey and several on Long Island also, just a few miles away. No one is stopping you from going there. If you don't own a car you can rent a Zipcar for a couple of hours.

But here's a big reason many of us don't want Wal-Mart (or any other chain, for that matter) taking over the world: When you let one company have 100% of the market, they will jack up their prices through the roof. Why shouldn't they, if they're the only game in town?

[chris]

promentalbackwash, you wrote:

"When you let one company have 100% of the market, they will jack up their prices through the roof."

That is one of silliest reasons I've heard in years for depriving people of a basic consumer desire.

You obviously have no grasp of the economic concept of Monopoly. Like Microsoft, WalMart is not a monopolist.

However, by preventing the low-cost provider from entering a market, you will succeed in allowing everyone else to charge more. But you're another person who doesn't care that keeping WalMart out of NY City means all NYers pay a little more than necessary for pretty much everything.

You wrote:

"Why shouldn't they, if they're the only game in town?"

Really. For your own good. Repeat Economics 101.

You wrote:

"I'm an ex-New Yorker and I know dozens of current New Yorkers, including my father and brother. I don't know a single one who complains that there's no Wal-Mart in New York City."

It's not the first topic of discussion among most people.

Try asking your friends and relatives if they would like to spend less when they shop. If they are well heeled and shop at exclusive stores, they might say "No."

They might prefer expensive brand names and boutique shopping. Price be damned. That's good.

But there are a few million NYers who live in lesser circumstances and want to spend less. They want WalMart.

I support their desire to spend less. Milk in convenience stores is at least $3.89 a gallon. How much do you pay?

Meanwhile, the convenience stores and bodegas all over the city hire and fire illegal immigrants. WalMart does not depend on illegal immigrants like most small cash-oriented businesses that operate in this city.

[Wally Whiteman]

Hey, I am actually reading Aunt Hattie and agreeing with what she wrote.

What day is it ? time ? Is this a dream ?

Well the crusty old gal does have a few good things to say.

Now just wait and have her annoying Aussie sidekick jump in, if she hasn't already.

As for illegal immigrants, you should make moves to make them LEGAL quickly so they can start contributing to the tax system.Why waste your time beating up on them ? They are here to stay and you need to realize the world is changing.

White picket fence euphoria is no longer an option.

[Barbara E]

Jacqueline: Where is this free housing, free medical care and free transportation immigrants get? I guess all the immigrants I see on buses or lining up at discount clinicas or crowding into unsafe housing just don't know their rights, huh?

[ThatDeborahGirl]

All those comments about depressed wages make me laugh.

It's so easy to blame Mexican immigrants for the few jobs that they get and white folks willingly employ them for.

Why don't we stop our tide of jobs going overseas to India and China? We don't make Wal-Mart (and other stores like them) stop flying the American flag everywhere when nothing in the store has had a "Made in America" sticker on it since the 80's?

No one gave a damn about illegals doing jobs until they weren't enough to go around and NAFTA is to blame for job scarcity, not Mexican immigration, legal or illegal.

Next time you get a customer service rep from India or that cute little blouse that was "made in China" or buy yet another car that may have been assembled here but was machined abroad, remember that you just paid for another job to shipped overseas.

Quit blaming brown folks for the sake of blaming brown folks and put the blame squarely in the lap of government (us by the way) where it belongs.

[Wally Whiteman]

Oh Deborah Girl,

NAFTA has nothing to do with job scarcity in the US you fool.

Pick up a newspaper and read the business section before you make stupid remarks like that.

You are right about blaming yourselves though. Maybe 2 % of merchandise in Walmart is made in Mexico and about 0 % is made in Canada.
Next time you walk away with 5 prs of Old Glory elastic waist slacks for 50 bucks, you have made the situation worse.

BTW, most Japanese cars sold in the US contain more than 60% of US made components. Without Japan, you would be close to a 3 rd World country (with snow).

[ThatDeborahGirl]

Wally,

Name calling is so very childish - grow up.

I don't know what rock you've been living under but there is more than enough evidence by now that NAFTA has done more harm than good to the American worker and reduced jobs here.

Here's some things for you to read. Free your mind and the rest will follow.

http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/bp173
http://www3.uakron.edu/worldciv/pascher/nafta.htm
http://www.vdare.com/francis/nafta.htm