Catherine A. Traywick

Writ­ten for The Media Consortium

A new study about the effects of immi­gra­tion on U.S. employ­ment sup­ports the long-standing argu­ments of immi­gra­tion advo­cates: Rather than dis­plac­ing Amer­i­can work­ers, immi­grant labor actu­ally makes our econ­omy stronger. Kevin Drum has the details at Mother Jones.

Now, with reports that undoc­u­mented labor­ers are a main­stay of dis­as­ter relief efforts all over the coun­try, Amer­i­cans are begin­ning to get a sense of the unsa­vory work rel­e­gated to many immi­grants, and the high price immi­grants pay for the sim­ple priv­i­lege of employment.

Undoc­u­mented work­ers dri­ving wages up

Going back to Mother Jones, new research exam­in­ing the rela­tion­ship between immi­gra­tion and U.S. employ­ment found that—contrary to con­ven­tional anti-immigrant wisdom—immigration does not neg­a­tively affect Amer­i­can employ­ment. Instead, immi­gra­tion dri­ves wages up by push­ing low-wage Amer­i­can work­ers into higher-paying jobs.

Here’s how it works: As less-educated immi­grants grav­i­tate towards work that requires fewer Eng­lish lan­guage skills (like man­ual labor), their less-educated Amer­i­can coun­ter­parts move on to higher-paying, communications-intensive work that cap­i­tal­izes on their com­par­a­tively bet­ter Eng­lish lan­guage skills. This nat­u­rally dri­ves wages up, and makes for a more pro­duc­tive econ­omy overall.

The irony, as Drum notes, is that those who com­plain about immi­grants steal­ing Amer­i­can jobs are the same peo­ple who want immi­grants to learn Eng­lish and assim­i­late as quickly as pos­si­ble. “If they did,” Drum argues, “then they’d just start com­pet­ing for the higher pay­ing jobs that natives now monopolize.”

Stiffed in New Orleans

The real­ity of being an undoc­u­mented worker in the U.S. is starker than most Amer­i­cans real­ize. Not only are immi­grants doing work that most would rather not, they are also often clean­ing up the messes that Amer­i­cans leave behind.

Five years after Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina dev­as­tated New Orleans, undoc­u­mented labor­ers remain a key com­po­nent of recon­struc­tion efforts. Ini­tially drawn to the city by the prospect of work and the Depart­ment of Home­land Security’s deci­sion to sus­pend employ­ment immi­gra­tion enforce­ment, many undoc­u­mented labor­ers relo­cated to New Orleans to assist with rebuild­ing. But, as Elise Foley reports at the Wash­ing­ton Inde­pen­dent, their immi­gra­tion sta­tus ren­ders them espe­cially vul­ner­a­ble to ram­pant wage theft, threats of depor­ta­tion and work­place violence.

The sit­u­a­tion is so dire for many work­ers that numer­ous non­profit groups have ini­ti­ated projects in the city and are call­ing for leg­is­la­tion to com­bat the prob­lem. How­ever, a key con­cern is that ris­ing anti-immigrant sen­ti­ment in other parts of the U.S. could exac­er­bate dif­fi­cul­ties in New Orleans. If such sen­ti­ment results in even greater labor abuses or renewed immi­gra­tion enforce­ment, whole com­mu­ni­ties of peo­ple who have been ded­i­cated to rebuild­ing the city could find them­selves with­out liveli­hood, or even be displaced.

Exploited undoc­u­mented work­ers clean up oil spills

Given the real­ity that undoc­u­mented work­ers are  charged with some of the dirt­i­est and most unsafe work Amer­i­can employ­ers have to offer, it shouldn’t be sur­pris­ing that U.S. com­pa­nies rely on immi­grant labor to clean up their worst messes. Not only do undoc­u­mented work­ers have fewer employ­ment options, their immi­gra­tion sta­tus ren­ders them far less likely to report unsafe work­ing con­di­tions, expo­sure to haz­ardous mate­ri­als, and underpayment—making them espe­cially attrac­tive to employ­ers look­ing to save money or hide bad behavior.

So, nat­u­rally, undoc­u­mented work­ers were called in to deal with the cat­a­strophic BP oil dis­as­ter in the Gulf of Mex­ico (though their com­pli­ance only earned them the undue atten­tion of Immi­gra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment) and, more recently, an oil spill in Michigan.

As Todd A. Hey­wood at the Michi­gan Mes­sen­ger reports, one com­pany in par­tic­u­lar has come under fire for hir­ing and then exploit­ing undoc­u­mented labor­ers. Hall­mark Indus­trial, a Texas con­trac­tor hired to clean up the oil spill, allegedly paid its work­ers only $800 for up to 100 hours of work per week. Addi­tion­ally, the com­pany sub­jected them to unsafe and haz­ardous work­ing con­di­tions, and even failed to pro­vide work­ers with on-site toilets—forcing work­ers to relieve them­selves in the areas they were charged with cleaning.

Just 24 hours after the Michi­gan Mes­sen­ger broke the story, Hall­mark Indus­trial was fired from the oil spill clean up, its con­tract ter­mi­nated by the com­pany which hired it, Gar­ner Envi­ron­men­tal Ser­vices, Inc. Whether that’s a vic­tory is ques­tion­able. Fol­low­ing the ter­mi­na­tion of the con­tract, 40 undoc­u­mented work­ers were arrested in Texas, on a bus char­tered by Hallmark—presumably just returned from Michi­gan. While the ter­mi­na­tion of the con­tract ensures that its work­ers won’t be sub­jected to fur­ther work­place abuses, it also ensures that those same indi­vid­u­als must begin the dif­fi­cult task of find­ing sim­i­lar work elsewhere.

Unem­ployed in Cal­i­for­nia labor camps

Clearly, despite an inex­orable will­ing­ness to per­form low-wage man­ual labor, undoc­u­mented work­ers are not imper­vi­ous to the unem­ploy­ment epi­demic. In U.S. labor camps—where migrant agri­cul­tural work­ers can find sea­sonal or even long term lodg­ing near ranches—farm work is increas­ingly harder to come by.

As David Bacon high­lights at New Amer­ica Media, both undoc­u­mented immi­grants and legal “guest work­ers” are adversely affected by the reces­sion. While the lat­ter pos­sess work visas and may there­fore stay in the coun­try legally, both groups live together in the same labor camps, where they remain, iron­i­cally, unem­ployed. Given the present eco­nomic cli­mate, there isn’t enough work for even the lowest-wage work­ers. And in spite of their legal sta­tus, even guest work­ers are barred from apply­ing for unem­ploy­ment benefits.

The reces­sion has cast both undoc­u­mented and legally sanc­tioned agri­cul­tural work­ers into cir­cum­stances even more dis­mal than those adver­tised by UFW when it launched its “Take Our Jobs” cam­paign ear­lier this sum­mer. Out­lin­ing the long hours, low pay, and back-breaking labor asso­ci­ated with farm work, UFW satir­i­cally invited Amer­i­can cit­i­zens to replace the scores of over­worked and undoc­u­mented labor­ers that keep our agri­cul­tural indus­try afloat.

Though meant to be a tongue-in-cheek response to the mis­con­cep­tion that immi­grants steal Amer­i­can jobs, the cam­paign exposes a real, if unfor­tu­nate, truth about undoc­u­mented work­ers: Even as their pres­ence dri­ves Amer­i­cans into higher pay­ing jobs, Amer­i­cans employ­ers are all too happy to sub­ject the undoc­u­mented to the worst indignities.

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