Read Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684) Online
Authors: Aviva Chomsky
Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684) (20 page)
Two additional, interrelated changes in the past decades have contributed to the increase in demand for landscaping services. First, the ranks of the super-rich who hire landscaping companies to maintain their palatial grounds have increased. Second, middle- and upper-middle-class suburban families that once might have maintained their own yards are now too busy and are contracting out services that they or their children used to provide. As the industry grew, the new jobs were filled by immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants.
One of many companies to expand and transform in the new era belonged to Nikita Floyd. The
Washington Post
described its trajectory:
In the early 1990s, Floyd had fewer than a dozen employees, all of them black. Today, 73 percent of the Washington area’s landscaping workers are immigrants, along with 51 percent of office cleaners and 43 percent of construction workers. . . . Floyd’s 20 wintertime workers are all men from El Salvador, except for two black women who manage the office. In the summer, he employs twice as many men, all immigrants. Floyd’s experience illustrates immigrants’ impact. Once just a guy with a lawnmower, he runs a business with annual sales of more than $2.5 million. He credits immigrant employees for his business’s growth and pays about $10 an hour, with no work and no pay in inclement weather. It’s grueling labor in the winter; a man can spend the day stabbing a spade into frozen dirt or be asked to shimmy up a tree with a chainsaw in one hand and no netting below.
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Like the farm and meatpacking associations discussed earlier, the California Landscape Contractors Association is strongly opposed to the criminalization of immigrant work and implicitly acknowledges its industry’s reliance on the undocumented. Calling for legalization, the association notes that “[t]he status quo is untenable, as it puts employers in a strange ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ situation where they can never be sure of their workforce.” The industry operates under a continuous labor shortage, the association explains:
The landscaping industry relies heavily on an immigrant labor force. Landscaping is physically demanding work. It is performed in hot, cold, and sometimes rainy weather. Some landscaping jobs are seasonal. American-born workers increasingly are not attracted to such jobs. Because landscaping work involves outdoor manual labor, it is to some extent young person’s work. Yet America has an aging workforce. At the same time, the landscape industry is growing and therefore has a need for more workers, partly because this same aging population tends to enlarge the market for landscaping services. Immigrants, who tend to be young, address this unmet need for younger workers in the landscape industry.
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NEW JOBS: NANNIES
Landscaping is not the only personal-service job that has proliferated with the use of undocumented immigrants in recent decades. A number of high-profile public figures have been embarrassed when reporters uncovered their use of undocumented domestic workers. Lawyer Zoe Baird, who had worked for the Carter administration and the Department of Justice, was withdrawn as President Bill Clinton’s nominee for attorney general when it was revealed that she had employed undocumented workers as chauffeur and nanny. Then Clinton’s second choice, Kimba Wood, was withdrawn for the same reason.
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When Mitt Romney was running in the Republican primary in 2007, in large part on an anti-immigrant platform, the
Boston Globe
published an investigation showing that undocumented workers maintained the 2.5-acre lot around his home in Belmont, Massachusetts.
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California Republican gubernatorial candidate and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman fired her nanny of nine years during the campaign when she allegedly first learned that she was undocumented.
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And Bernard Kerik stepped down from his nomination as chief of the Department of Homeland Security in 2004 when it was learned that he too had hired a nanny who lacked documents.
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But not only the super-rich hire nannies, landscapers, and house cleaners. In 2001, sociologist Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo described the proliferation of services in the previous twenty years that had transformed middle-class life in heavily immigrant Los Angeles. At the time she was writing, Los Angeles was still in the vanguard; a decade later, what she described had become commonplace throughout the United States.
She writes:
When you arrive at many a Southern California hotel or restaurant, you are likely to be first greeted by a Latino car valet. The janitors, cooks, busboys, painters, carpet cleaners, and landscape workers who keep the office buildings, restaurants, and malls running are also likely to be Mexican or Central American immigrants, as are many of those who work behind the scenes in dry cleaners, convalescent homes, hospitals, resorts, and apartment complexes. . . . Only twenty years ago, these relatively inexpensive consumer services and products were not nearly as widely available as they are today. The Los Angeles economy, landscape, and lifestyle have been transformed in ways that rely on low-wage, Latino immigrant labor.
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The number of gardeners and domestic workers in Los Angeles doubled between 1980 and 1990.
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The inexpensive nature of these services—in part because of the often undocumented immigrant labor that provided them—helped to sustain an illusion of upward mobility for people in the working and middle classes.
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This illusion overlays other changes in the US economy over the past fifty years, as the rapid expansion of the middle class that began in the post–World War II era slowed and then reversed in the 1970s, to be replaced by growing economic inequality. Paradoxically, Hondagneu-Sotelo found that increasing social inequality led to greater numbers of people employing domestic help. The middle class works harder to maintain its standard of living and must increasingly rely on low-cost services provided by the more impoverished.
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Formerly, domestic workers were found mostly in the employ of upper-middle-class suburbanites. By the 1980s, employers came to include “apartment dwellers with modest incomes, single mothers, college students, and elderly people living on fixed incomes. They live in tiny bungalows and condominiums, not just sprawling houses.” Even Latina domestic workers found themselves employing other immigrant women to clean, cook, and care for their children, while they provided those same services to their wealthier clients.
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Tellingly, Los Angeles was the vanguard. In the 1990s, “when Angelenos, accustomed to employing a full-time nanny/housekeeper for about $150 or $200 a week, move[d] to Seattle or Durham, they [were] startled to discover how ‘the cost of living that way’ quickly escalate[d]. Only then [did] they realize the extent to which their affluent lifestyle and smoothly running household depended on one Latina immigrant woman.”
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As the Latino immigrant population spread from the Southwest to other parts of the country, access to the services it provided also became more widespread.
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Business Review
reported, “[N]annies [are] a growth industry in slow economy.” With more parents working, and child care expensive or unavailable, the nanny industry fills the gap.
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The
Arizona Republic
reported, “[U]nconventional work schedules, increased awareness and flexible care options have ignited growth in the nanny industry. At the same time, parents have a desire for more personalized care.”
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The
New York Times
commented on the widespread nature of the so-called nanny problem with regard to the Zoe Baird case: “As everyone learned before a conveniently childless candidate ended the search for an Attorney General, the hiring of illegal caregivers is an endemic labor practice, among paralegals and secretaries as well as $250,000-a-year executives, in cities like New York, Los Angeles or Miami—points of entry to the United States as well as centers of immigrant population. Cities with a baby sitter or nanny labor force tend to lack even the fragile, faint day-care networks that exist in other parts of the country.”
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NEWSPAPER DELIVERY
Newspaper delivery, of course, has been around for a long time. But today’s newspaper delivery system is something entirely new. No longer does a neighborhood kid walk or bike through the streets tossing papers into his neighbors’ yards. Today, 81 percent of paper deliverers are adults, and a large proportion of them are undocumented immigrants. A look at the structure of the industry will help explain why.
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In many areas of the country, newspapers are delivered through a system of independent contractors—the same system construction companies use to evade their legal responsibilities as employers. The newspaper publisher works with a contracting company, which in turn hires workers who must sign a contract confirming that they are not employees but independent contractors. In Connecticut, all fourteen respondents to a survey of newspaper publishers in the state confirmed that they used this system.
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Likewise in the Boston area, the
Wall Street Journal
,
New York Times
, and
Boston Globe
are all distributed by a single company, which hires contractors to deliver all three in a given area.
As independent contractors, workers may not receive the minimum wages and may not be eligible for workers’ compensation or unemployment benefits. (States and courts have varied as to how they treat these cases, but newspaper publishers overwhelmingly insist that their deliverers are contractors, not employees.) In a case where independent contractors sued and appealed for class status in a class action suit, the US District Court–Southern District of California described the job in the following terms:
Plaintiffs deliver the North County Times to the homes of subscribers. Each morning, the newspaper carriers arrive at one of several distribution centers in San Diego County. The carriers arrive at different times. Although they generally arrive between 1:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m., some arrive earlier or later. The arrival time varies depending on the day of the week.
The carriers are contractually obligated to deliver the assembled newspapers by 6:00 a.m. each weekday and 7:00 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday.
Upon arrival, the carriers are responsible for assembling the newspapers. Some assemble the papers at the distribution center—those that use the distribution center pay a rental fee—and others assemble the papers elsewhere. Assembling the newspapers may involve folding or inserting the following: newspaper inserts, sections, pre-prints, samples, supplements and other products at NCT’s direction. The carriers pay for their own rubber bands and plastic bags used to assemble the papers. Some carriers buy the rubber bands and bags from Defendant, and others purchase them elsewhere. The carriers also pay for their own gas and automobile expenses they incur delivering the newspapers.
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Contractors sign up to deliver papers 365 days a year, starting no later than 4 a.m. every day. They cannot miss a day unless they can arrange for their own replacement, must own a car, and have a valid driver’s license. They have to maintain and buy gas for the car, driving hundreds of miles a week. All for less than minimum wage. During winter weather emergencies, when public transportation is shut down and the governor of Massachusetts calls a state of emergency, closing public offices and begging residents to stay at home and businesses to remain closed until the plows can clear the streets, independent contractors receive a curt message with their newspapers. “SNOW IS EXPECTED . . . WE WILL BE WORKING. IC’S ARE EXPECTED TO DELIVER THEIR ROUTES. PLAN ACCORDINGLY: BE EARLY; DO NOT ALLOW YOUR CAR TO BE BLOCKED IN; EXPECT TO HAVE TO SHOVEL OUT.”
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It’s a job, in other words, made for an undocumented immigrant.
CONCLUSION
Overall, the rise in undocumented workers over the past several decades has gone along with a rise in the invisible, exploited labor that they perform. The generally unacknowledged work that they do is a crucial underpinning to the standard of living and consumption enjoyed by virtually everyone in the United States. But, clearly, an economic system that keeps a lot of people unemployed and another group trapped in a legal status that restricts them to the worst kinds of jobs does not really benefit everyone.
Some have argued that the influx of undocumented workers depresses the labor market, lowers wages for less educated workers, and creates more competition for jobs at the lower end of the pay scale. Labor economist George Borjas has made this argument most persuasively, and many commentators who argue that we should restrict immigration base their arguments on his work.
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Other economists, however, have found that the low-wage labor of undocumented immigrants actually increases the wages and employment of even low-paid citizen workers. By increasing productivity, low-paid undocumented workers can increase capital available for investment, hiring, and wages. Because undocumented workers add to the population, their consumption stimulates the economy.
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One recent study tried to document the expected economic impact of deportation versus legalization of the undocumented population of Arizona. The study found that legalization would be far more beneficial and deportation far more costly for American citizens.
Undocumented immigrants don’t simply “fill” jobs; they create jobs. Through the work they perform, the money they spend, and the taxes they pay, undocumented immigrants sustain the jobs of many other workers in the US economy, immigrants and native-born alike. Were undocumented immigrants to suddenly vanish, the jobs of many Americans would vanish as well. In contrast, were undocumented immigrants to acquire legal status, their wages and productivity would increase, they would spend more in our economy and pay more in taxes, and new jobs would be created.
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