A New Deal For Some Of The Region’s Labor Force
The thousands of people here illegally from Mexico, Poland, Ireland, Colombia, China and other countries who prepare our Cantonese soup with dumplings, deliver our tuna sandwiches on wholewheat toast, press our shirts and blouses, sweep under our beds, and prune our shrubbery may have reason to be pleased that President George W. Bush has announced what appears to be genuine and wholesale immigration reform.
Bush proposed this week that the United States set up an expanded system of ‘guest workers’, similar to what is in place in many countries in Europe, which would allow people from other countries to work here for a limited number of years. He also proposed amnesty for those who are already here who apply, and to expand the number of ‘green cards’ given that would allow people to work here indefinitely.
This system, if it plays out as it has in Western Europe, has its own flaws and problems. Germany, for example, is still figuring out how to handle guest workers from Turkey who have now been in the country for two or three generations. But despite such a new system’s potential flaws, it would still be light years ahead of the current system, where millions of people work here illegally in what is really a kind of indentured servitude. Minimum wage laws, required overtime pay and health and safety laws are essentially optional when it comes to illegal workers because they fear approaching any legal authority.
What’s sometimes overlooked in discussions about illegal immigration is that our current immigration policy is really a labor policy. By allowing, with one eye closed and one hand behind our back, millions of people to cross our border illegally and work here illegally we are not so much doing them a favor as setting up a source of cheap,exploitable labor. Southern California, New York and other regions would shut down if the laws on the book prohibiting employers from using illegal immigrants were enforced, or if the borders were suddenly made non-porous.
These issues are especially pertinent now, because in the economic boom of the 1990s the number of people working here illegally swelled dramatically.
According to various estimates, more than 10 million people are in the United States illegally, several times the number a decade or two back. And of course, a huge number are here in the tri-state region.
Given this, it will be interesting to see how the politics of this issue plays out. Where will Wal-Mart, a company that has profited from having illegal workers clean its hallways at night, stand on this issue? Will business groups support or oppose establishing more clarity into who works and how?
However it plays out, few regions will be affected more than ours. Along with Southern California and the Southwest, we have one of the highest percentage of legal immigrants, which usually means a higher than average share of illegal immigrants. Latest census figures show that Manhattan is essentially a gleaming pyramid supported on a huge base of foreign-born labor, of which some percentage is here illegally. In the wider metropolitan area of 20 million people, on average 42 to 50 percent of the population were foreign born, while in Manhattan the figure is 18 percent. How we handle illegal immigration and illegal labor is a key regional issue precisely because so much of our labor force is affected by these questions.
The illegal immigration issue has a way of popping up every few decades. In 1987, as a graduate student at Columbia Journalism School, I did a story for a reporting class by taking a subway out to the immigration center in Queens and talking to people applying for amnesty under the Immigration Act of 1986. This act legalized immigrants here before 1982, and for the first time made it illegal to hireillegal immigrants. But this did not change things as much as planned because illegal labor was so crucial that police essentially stopped enforcing this section of the law.
What is so potentially praiseworthy about Bush’s plan is that it not only sets up an amnesty plan similar to the 1986 act, it sets up a system where future workers would be here legally, without having to wait a decade or two for some rights. Right now, it’s only the high-skilled, higher paid workers, such as Indian software writers, who get to work here temporarily with rights and privileges.
No doubt Bush’s initial proposal will be only the first step. Congress is the body that actually writes the bill, and what emerges from under the white dome of the Capitol will almost certainly look very different than what went in. But Bush, the former governor of Texas, apparently sincerely believes in immigration reform. He was prepared to back a reform measure before Sept. 11 pushed it from the table. If he manages to reform the now exploitive and oppressive system of illegal immigration and undocumented labor, he will have marked his presidency with a laudable achievement.
–Alex Marshall, an independent journalist, is a Senior Fellow at RPA and editor of Spotlight.