Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684) (18 page)
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Authors: Aviva Chomsky
Productivity was also an issue. “Producers expressed great concern with the quality of work from domestic workers.” According to data provided by one onion producer, “A migrant worker was twice as productive as a non-migrant worker in planting Vidalia onions.”
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As one Georgia farmer remarked, “American workers are not interested in getting dirty, bloody, sweaty, working weekends & holidays, getting to work at 4 a.m. 2 mornings a week & at 6 a.m. 5 mornings a week.”
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Experiments with criminal offenders who are out on probation—and required to work as a condition of their probation—backed up the farmer’s opinion. One crew leader “put the probationers to the test . . . assigning them to fill one truck and a Latino crew to a second truck. The Latinos picked six truckloads of cucumbers compared to one truckload and four bins for the probationers. ‘It’s not going to work,’ [the crew leader] said. ‘No way. If I’m going to depend on the probation people, I’m never going to get the crops up.’”
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As Philip Martin explains, most workers won’t spend more than ten years working in agriculture. “As it is currently structured, fruit and vegetable agriculture requires a constant inflow of workers from abroad who are willing to accept seasonal farm jobs.”
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Farm labor is so marginal, strenuous, and low paid, that if workers achieve legal status, they quickly move into other sectors. Thus “farmers and their political allies . . . oppose simply legalizing unauthorized workers, which would enable them to get nonfarm jobs. Instead, farmers agree to legalization only in exchange for large guest-worker programs that give employers considerable control of foreign workers.”
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Sixty years ago the folk singer–songwriter Woody Guthrie asked somewhat rhetorically, “Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards? Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?” In the ensuing half-century, the United States has only deepened its “modern agricultural dilemma.” It has devised a vast and multifaceted agricultural system that depends upon desperate workers for its survival. True, for many Mexicans—from the Bracero days to the present—low-wage, temporary, migrant labor in the United States offers a viable or even hopeful alternative to poverty at home. But this merely means that the US agricultural system depends upon the existence of a lot of extremely poor people in Mexico.
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While modern large-scale agricultural systems produce vast amounts of food, they have also created large-scale problems: “high capital costs; environmental deterioration of farmland through erosion, salinization, compaction, and chemical overload; pesticide and chemical fertilizer pollution of lakes, streams, and groundwater; unhealthy working conditions for farm workers, farmers, and farm families; dependence on an extremely narrow and destabilizing genetic base in major crops; dependence on nonrenewable mineral and energy resources; the destruction of rural communities; and the increasingly concentrated control of the nation’s food supply.”
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Other critiques examine the consumption side: the increasing reliance on overprocessed, high-sugar, and fatty foods, fast food and junk food, and the lifestyle diseases like heart disease and diabetes that have resulted.
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As we in the United States confront the problems in our agricultural and food production system, the problem of labor scarcity and continued reliance on impoverished, undocumented workers has to be central to the discussion. Given the way the agricultural system currently works, farm labor is so precarious and so harsh that only displaced migrants, the majority of them rendered illegal by US laws, are willing and able to carry it out. Paradoxically, most of these migrants were in fact displaced from centuries-old systems of subsistence agriculture in Mexico by precisely the same agricultural modernization that now demands their labor elsewhere. A truly comprehensive approach to immigration reform would look at these interlocking economic and structural systems, not merely make more narrow changes in immigration law.
We must recognize the basic irrationality, immorality, and unsustainability of the food production system. Farmers overwhelmingly oppose the harsh state-level immigration laws that make it more difficult for them to find the seasonal workers they need. In the short term, simply making it legal for immigrants to work in agriculture would address the needs of both farmers and immigrant farm workers who are undocumented. The larger problems await a longer-term and more profound reform of the global agricultural system. We can begin by acknowledging that our access to relatively cheap and abundant food in the United States exists because of the hard labor of poor Mexicans, in their country and in our own.
CHAPTER 6
If the US agricultural system has relied on Mexican labor as it developed over many decades, meat processing and construction are two industries that shifted to heavy use of Mexican and Central American—and, in particular, undocumented—immigrants at the end of the twentieth century. This shift coincided with the trend of outsourcing, when manufacturing plants began to shift their labor-intensive production abroad. Manufacturing employment declined from a high of 20 million in 1979 to 11 million in 2012.
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Meatpacking and construction couldn’t exactly be moved abroad. But meatpacking could be moved out of heavily unionized urban centers like Chicago into the rural Midwest. Construction boomed in new regions, with employment doubling between 1970 and 2006 to a high of 7.7 million.
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Both industries increasingly employed immigrant, and undocumented, workers.
CONSTRUCTION
While the manufacturing sector was shrinking in the last decades of the twentieth century, construction was expanding. But this industry was also changing profoundly. Unionization plummeted, from 40 percent in the 1970s to only 14 percent in 2011. Unions lost ground especially in the high-growth area of residential construction, which was being buoyed by low interest rates and subprime loans through the first decade of the new century. But as employment rose, working conditions and wages deteriorated. Immigrants and especially undocumented workers increased their presence in the workforce.
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The low wages of undocumented workers helped contribute to the housing bubble by making building costs artificially cheap.
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In Las Vegas, the population doubled to almost 2 million between 1990 and 2007, and the share of immigrants in the city’s population also doubled during the same time span from 9 percent to 19 percent. Many of the newcomers worked in hotel construction and tourism-related services in the booming city: half of the state’s construction workers were Latino immigrants. By 2008, Nevada had the largest percentage of undocumented workers of any state, 12 percent.
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Houston’s 1970s oil boom likewise spurred a jump in construction. “The record-breaking construction of office buildings, shopping centers, storage facilities, apartment projects, and suburban homes in the 1970s and early 1980s created an insatiable demand for Mexican immigrant labor. Undocumented workers from rural and urban Mexico became a preferred labor force, especially among construction employers who paid low wages and offered poor working conditions.”
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The Greater Houston Partnership estimated that 14 percent of Houston’s construction workforce was undocumented in 2008, more than any other job category.
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In Texas as a whole, one in thirteen workers—about a million total—labored in the construction industry as of 2013. Half of them are undocumented. A study by the Workers Defense Project in Austin showed that 41 percent of Texas construction workers are subject to payroll fraud, including being illegally classified as independent contractors instead of employees. Employers use this method to evade their legal responsibilities for payroll taxes, minimum wages, working conditions, and benefits. Working conditions are so dangerous that one in five construction workers in the state will require hospitalization for job-related injuries. “More construction workers die in Texas than in any other state,” the study discovered.
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In New Orleans, only days after Hurricane Katrina hit, the federal government waived employer sanctions provisions, allowing employers to hire workers without documents. Soon after, it waived prevailing federal wage standard requirements for contractors working on federally funded reconstruction projects. These exemptions set the stage for an influx of low-paid, undocumented workers.
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US census figures showed that some one hundred thousand Hispanics moved into the Gulf Coast after Katrina. Hispanics made up half of the labor force working in reconstruction, and half were undocumented. Undocumented workers formed “the backbone of post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction,” reported
USA Today
.
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Curiously, while the workers remained undocumented, it was ostensibly not illegal for them to work, at least during the first month and a half, because of the employer sanctions waiver.
Overall, undocumented workers made up a quarter of the workforce in New Orleans in the months following the hurricane.
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Almost 90 percent were already in the United States and moved to New Orleans from other areas, primarily Texas (41 percent) and, to a lesser extent, Florida (10 percent).
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Unsurprisingly, undocumented workers faced lower wages and poorer working and living conditions than those with documents.
When Hurricane Ike hit southeastern Texas in 2008, undocumented immigrants performed a significant portion of the cleanup work. “All across southeast Texas, roofs need repair, debris must be discarded and towns hope to rebuild. Hurricane Ike’s destruction is sparking one of the largest rebuilding efforts the state has seen in decades, but at the same time is highlighting a thorny facet of the region’s labor force: A lot of the recovery work will be done by illegal immigrants,” reported the
Houston Chronicle
.
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When the housing boom went bust after 2008, strangely, statistics showed that construction wages began to rise. What was actually happening was that the lower-paid newcomers were the first to lose their jobs, so that the rise in wages was more apparent than real. Individual workers weren’t receiving better wages; there were just fewer construction workers employed overall.
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MEATPACKING
Like construction, meatpacking is an industry that is very difficult to outsource. In some ways, the work process in meatpacking more resembles that of other large manufacturing plants than it does construction, in which most workers are employed by small companies and contractors. But while industries like textiles or electronics can transport the raw materials and the finished products over long distances to save on the costs of production, this strategy is not practical for dealing with a perishable, bulky, and sometimes cantankerous product. So like construction, meatpacking has relied on bringing immigrant workers to the point of production, rather than sending production to countries where it is cheaper.
Lance Compa summarizes how in-sourcing happened in Nebraska, in a process repeated throughout the Midwest:
From its founding as a territory in 1854 until the late twentieth century, Nebraska was mostly populated by white Americans of European origin, joined by a minority of African-Americans. Omaha was always an important meatpacking center because of its proximity to livestock and feedlots. Immigrant workers from southern and eastern Europe made up most of the meatpacking labor force in the early twentieth century. In the 1940s and ’50s, the children of these immigrants, along with African-American coworkers in key roles, formed strong local unions of the United Packinghouse Workers. As happened in the industry generally, in the 1980s and 1990s, many meatpacking businesses closed plants that provided good wages and benefits. Following closures, company owners often relocated plants to rural areas. In Omaha, some companies later reopened closed factories employing low wage, new immigrant workforces without trade union representation.
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Wages in meatpacking fell 45 percent between 1980 and 2007. The downgrading of meatpacking jobs proved “devastating to the standard of living for workers in an industry that once sustained a blue-collar middle class.”
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As both wages and working conditions deteriorated, immigrant workers became the mainstay of the labor force. By the late 1990s, fully a quarter of meatpacking workers were estimated to be undocumented.
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In the climate of heightened calls for immigration enforcement, the meatpacking industry attracted attention. In 1999, the INS launched Operation Vanguard in Nebraska, subpoenaing the employment records of every meatpacker in the state. After reviewing all 24,000 employee records received, the agency identified 4,700 cases in which the employee’s legal status was in doubt. It presented employers with the list and required all of the “suspects” to appear for interviews with the agency. It seemed clear to the meatpackers that “INS’s intention was not to apprehend potentially unauthorized employees, but to ‘chase off’ those workers who were present in illegal status.”
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In chasing them off, the operation succeeded. Only one thousand of the workers dared to appear for their interviews. The others simply left their jobs. Overnight, the state’s meatpacking industry lost 13 percent of its workforce. Meanwhile, of the one thousand interviewed, thirty-four were determined to be unauthorized to work and were arrested and deported. “Meatpacking company officials . . . believe that a substantial number of these employees [who disappeared] were authorized to work but chose not to appear because of the intimidation inherent in any such interview (for example, from questions such as ‘are you
or any members of your family
not authorized to be present in the United States?’).” The Nebraska Cattlemen’s Association estimated that its members lost $5 million and the state economy as a whole lost $20 million as the result of the operation.
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