They Should Feel Lucky...
This morning, the New York Times ran a story about the effect of illegal immigration on a working class community on Long Island. The story was focused on one particular resident, an Italian American truck driver who was upset that the children of illegal immigrants are using his schools. He was also upset that his neighbors were willing to profit from illegal immigration by renting rooms to immigrants and hiring them to do menial labor at low wages. The guy was convinced that the gaggle of immigrant laborers who gathered at a local gas station every morning were depressing wages for miles around.
He may be right. Because we are dealing with an underground economy, we will never really know how much working class wages are affected by illegal immigration. However, the sheer numbers of immigrants working in agriculture, construction, landscaping and as domestic makes it difficult for me to believe that it has no effect on the wages paid for these types of jobs. Oddly though, the presence of illegal immigrants isn't the problem. The problem is the "they are lucky" syndrome, as in "they are lucky to have any work at all" or "they are lucky because that is a lot of money in Mexico."
The "they are lucky" syndrome is what people use to justify the fact that they are able to get a room painted, a yard cleared, their home cleaned, or their kids supervised for a low price. It is what we use to soothe our consciences when we know we derived some savings by the fact that a worker was poor and vulnerable.
Some of the "they are lucky" crowd argue that immigrants have made a choice to come to our country and thus cannot complain about what they are paid. This is fatuous. Do you really think immigrants leave their homes and families because they want to? I suspect, if asked, many if not most immigrants will tell you that, were it not for grinding poverty or political oppression, they would have been more than happy to stay local. Our immigrants are not like American students on a semester abroad. This isn't some kind of fun adventure for them. Its not like the "Susie Moves to the Big City to See if She Can Make it" sitcom.
Some of the "They are lucky" crowd even see themselves as virtuous for hiring immigrant labor in the first place. But that is where the charade just gets ridiculous. Ask yourself, why immigrant laborers are willing to work on the cheap. Is it because they have some unnatural attraction to low wage labor? Are they nursing a martyr complex? I suspect not. Immigrants work for cheap because the have to. They are poor and thus are forced into the grim calculus which yields that something is better than nothing. They are often here illegally, so they have no real standing to argue and are easily intimidated by the threat of legal intervention. They are a disparate group with little means to organize themselves and they have no foothold in our society that they can leverage. In short, they are at our mercy.
So really, it is not "they" who should feel lucky, it is us. Were it not for immigrant labor, we might have to pay middle class wages for many of the menial tasks we take for granted. You see, every time our contractor hires an immigrant to work for $7/hr, every time we get our lawn cut by a crew of minimum wage Mexicans, every time we buy a laughingly cheap can of Campbell's Chicken Noodle, and every time we get a pedicure by a young Korean lady who can't speak English but works for tips, we are leveraging the poverty and insecurity of immigrants to their detriment and the detriment of our countrymen. We are using their sad situation to capture an economic benefit.
Some may argue that such is the American way, and with American corporations scouring the globe for a cheaper set of seamstresses, I can't argue. But I can argue that it is not the right way. It's a downward elevator for us all. Every major religion has taught that it unethical to use someone's needs against them, that it violates some very basic moral duty to expolit someone else's vulnerability for your own gain. We know that. We know you can't charge a sick person more for medication than a healthy one, and we know that you should not low ball someone's pay becuase they are desperate to feed their children. But the lure of really cheap stuff, and the attraction of not callousing our middle class hands with menial labor is overwhelming. We should feel lucky.
He may be right. Because we are dealing with an underground economy, we will never really know how much working class wages are affected by illegal immigration. However, the sheer numbers of immigrants working in agriculture, construction, landscaping and as domestic makes it difficult for me to believe that it has no effect on the wages paid for these types of jobs. Oddly though, the presence of illegal immigrants isn't the problem. The problem is the "they are lucky" syndrome, as in "they are lucky to have any work at all" or "they are lucky because that is a lot of money in Mexico."
The "they are lucky" syndrome is what people use to justify the fact that they are able to get a room painted, a yard cleared, their home cleaned, or their kids supervised for a low price. It is what we use to soothe our consciences when we know we derived some savings by the fact that a worker was poor and vulnerable.
Some of the "they are lucky" crowd argue that immigrants have made a choice to come to our country and thus cannot complain about what they are paid. This is fatuous. Do you really think immigrants leave their homes and families because they want to? I suspect, if asked, many if not most immigrants will tell you that, were it not for grinding poverty or political oppression, they would have been more than happy to stay local. Our immigrants are not like American students on a semester abroad. This isn't some kind of fun adventure for them. Its not like the "Susie Moves to the Big City to See if She Can Make it" sitcom.
Some of the "They are lucky" crowd even see themselves as virtuous for hiring immigrant labor in the first place. But that is where the charade just gets ridiculous. Ask yourself, why immigrant laborers are willing to work on the cheap. Is it because they have some unnatural attraction to low wage labor? Are they nursing a martyr complex? I suspect not. Immigrants work for cheap because the have to. They are poor and thus are forced into the grim calculus which yields that something is better than nothing. They are often here illegally, so they have no real standing to argue and are easily intimidated by the threat of legal intervention. They are a disparate group with little means to organize themselves and they have no foothold in our society that they can leverage. In short, they are at our mercy.
So really, it is not "they" who should feel lucky, it is us. Were it not for immigrant labor, we might have to pay middle class wages for many of the menial tasks we take for granted. You see, every time our contractor hires an immigrant to work for $7/hr, every time we get our lawn cut by a crew of minimum wage Mexicans, every time we buy a laughingly cheap can of Campbell's Chicken Noodle, and every time we get a pedicure by a young Korean lady who can't speak English but works for tips, we are leveraging the poverty and insecurity of immigrants to their detriment and the detriment of our countrymen. We are using their sad situation to capture an economic benefit.
Some may argue that such is the American way, and with American corporations scouring the globe for a cheaper set of seamstresses, I can't argue. But I can argue that it is not the right way. It's a downward elevator for us all. Every major religion has taught that it unethical to use someone's needs against them, that it violates some very basic moral duty to expolit someone else's vulnerability for your own gain. We know that. We know you can't charge a sick person more for medication than a healthy one, and we know that you should not low ball someone's pay becuase they are desperate to feed their children. But the lure of really cheap stuff, and the attraction of not callousing our middle class hands with menial labor is overwhelming. We should feel lucky.
posted by Jack Reed at 1:50 PM
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