Imagine that it is June 1964 and Congress is getting set to vote on the Civil Rights Act. What do you think will happen if the New York Times sends a reporter to Greenville, South Carolina to gauge the mood of public opinion? The South has changed since then, of course. For one thing, most white folks have the good sense these days not to espouse open racism. If they don’t like the idea of creating a path to citizenship for the people who pick their vegetables, clean their motel rooms, and look after their children, they attribute their reluctance to the rule of law, not their distaste for brown people or their desire not to see them vote. You aren’t as likely to hear people throw around terms like “spics” and “wetbacks.” Instead, you get stuff like this:
“The people who are coming across the border — as far as I’m concerned, they are common criminals,” said Bill Storey, 68, a retired civil engineer from Greenville. “We should not adopt policies to reward them for coming into this country illegally. I have all the regard for them in the world if they come through the legal system, but not the illegal system.”
It’s a simple idea that seems to make perfect sense. If you entered the country illegally, then you broke the law, and you are therefore a criminal. Why should your crime be ignored? Why should you be rewarded with citizenship? I get the sentiment. But it’s just too simplistic.
To see why, all we have to do is look at what happened in neighboring Georgia when they passed a harsh anti-immigrant law.
Georgia’s tough anti-illegal-immigrant law drove a sizable fraction of the migrant labor pool out of the state, and as a result, “millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops [are] unharvested and rotting in the fields.” The jobs the migrants did paid an average of $8/hour, without benefits, a wage that is so low that the state’s probationed prisoners have turned it down. Guest-writing in the Atlantic’s economics section, Adam Ozimek doesn’t believe that the farms would be viable if they paid wages that legal American workers would take: “it’s quite possible that the wages required to get workers to do the job are so high that it’s no longer profitable for farmers to plant the crops in the first place.”
Georgia farmers were put at a competitive disadvantage because they could no longer rely on cheap undocumented migrant workers who were still available to pick the crops in other states. They couldn’t attract American citizens to do the job at anything near the pay rate they had been giving the migrant-workers. Even probationary prisoners quit after a day or two of poorly-compensated hard labor. The result was rotting produce and an inability to compete.
Now, there are a lot of ways you can look at that situation, but one thing you really need to keep in mind is that these workers are needed, and if they hadn’t entered the country illegally, they would have to be invited. When you think about it that way, it makes a lot less sense to think of them as common criminals. If we don’t want to pay a lot more for our produce, we need immigrants to do this work. We should be allowing them to immigrate legally and become citizens and earn the minimum wage.
There is an underclass in this country that is making motel beds and doing landscaping and picking fruits and vegetables, and the low pay they receive serves less to depress wages than to provide a subsidy to people who pay directly or indirectly for their services.
If the Republicans don’t like these folks because they are Latino or because they don’t think they will vote for the conservative ideology, maybe they can find some white people in the former Soviet Union to do these jobs. Otherwise, they need to stop bitching and accept economic reality. These undocumented workers are here because there is a demand for their work. If we recognized that and legalized their entry into the country, we’d have a much fairer system. But you won’t see ANY Republicans calling for that.
People shouldn’t be surprised that conservatives like a system where brown folks work the fields but don’t have full citizenship rights and the ability to vote.
Long-term, we can’t exploit people in order to get cheap lettuce. It’s bad enough for people to spend their lives earning poverty wages while operating cash registers at Walmart but it’s inexcusable to make people earn poverty wages doing brutal and, during the southern summer, sometimes dangerous work out in the fields.
I think you’re right on with this. This issue was how I got involved in political activism in the first place, and I’m the author of one of the first studies to document the economic value of undocumented labor and am doing other work on that now for a major foundation. A couple of points, though.
Undocumented farm workers sometimes receive low pay and are exploited for their undocumented status, as do other workers in other industries, but this is not the case generally. Currently rural wages are quite high relative to the skill sets required and undocumented, and there is not good, systematic evidence that undocumented workers are paid less or depress wages generally in rural areas. It is true, however, that agricultural, food, and manufacturing industries in which rural, mostly undocumented immigrant labor is employed can not possibly pay more and remain in business because they are such low-margin operations in the first place. The exploitation narrative is usually just wrong and serves to bolster the anti-immigrant side of this debate.
This does not mean that farmers are not wealthy people — as a class they are one of the wealthiest in the U.S. But it means without being able to access a market for labor that is willing to live in a rural area and do farm work, most rural employers will just have to close up shop altogether, reducing employment for natives as well as immigrants. The products they make or grow can just be imported from other countries where workers are paid much lower and treated more poorly than in the U.S., as they are during much of the growing season in the U.S. already. So there is a market-driven limit to the amount that farm workers, or anyone else, can ever be paid.
Finding workers isn’t just a problem in farm work either. Even very high pay employers in places like the oil fields of North Dakota and the gas fields of Pennsylvania are having trouble finding workers at any price. Why? Because people just don’t want to live or travel to rural areas to do such work, period — even if they are unemployed in the cities and suburbs where they live. It’s a fact of life. Only immigrants consistently want to move to rural areas to find work, and they have provided this engine for rural development throughout US history.
There is a big split among Republicans regarding immigration. One is hard-pressed find a single farmer, silo factory CEO, oil-well operator, or manufacturing employer anywhere who isn’t in favor of completely open borders among this long-standing GOP base. Yet one is also hard pressed to find many of them who will take a stand on immigration reform publicly. They feel the pressure of their racist peers and neighbors who aren’t employers, and they remain conflicted about how to engage publicly. So it remains an issue where they wait for someone else to “carry the water” among Republicans.
This means that reform can only happen during brief windows of opportunity, the last one of which was Bush’s immigration reform proposal which was defeated by Democrats who didn’t like the work visa provisions. Other provisions in this legislation are also going to be problematic or deal breakers for lots of people, possibly even me, but in immigration policy especially, perfection is the enemy of the good.
Some just need for there to be an underclass – a group lower than them in the food chain – someone to feel superior to. And they are willing to forgo things like fair wages and health insurance for themselves and their own families in order to keep this underclass from getting it. And of course the wealth-hoarders understand this unfortunate character defect all too well and exploit it at every opportunity. Keep the unwashed masses divided against each other, keeping each other down, and most of them won’t realize where the wealth they’ve all created together – and deserve a piece of – is being diverted to.
let the crops rot..
then again, they saw the rotting crops, and STILL won’t change the law.
fuck ’em for thinking they can force prisoners to do that slave labor.
fuck ’em.
It was nice of the NYT to talk to a retiree who had little skin in the game. Might get a less nuanced reaction from brickmasons, roofers, painters, carpenters, and drywall installers. In some areas there’s been a fairly broad displacement of small contracting firms in these specialties from the good ole boys to Hispanic-owned firms. This was a process that began in NC in the mid 1990s. And it began as a competitive bidding race to the bottom. Now, after the construction collapse, things are brutal for everyone. Those guys would have let the NYT reporter have an earful.
And likely you would find similar attitudes in other places where construction has been hard-hit.
And those good ole boys who run small companies are the backbone of the Republican party in the smaller counties almost everywhere.
The good ole’ boys and the hispanic immigrants need to get together and form an association (dare I say Union) to combat the race to the bottom. Of course, it isn’t that simple or clean. Heads will be broken, on both sides. And if West Virginia is any precedent, shots were be fired, and hit their targets! The sausage making analogy applies double or triple to the labor movement.
The New York and Chicago construction trades unions would have to not work to undercut them for it to be successful. I refer back to the failure of the textile workers strike of 1938 as a result of Massachusetts and New York and other textile union workers not wanting to desegregate their locals. Sorta left their “low wage competition” in the South hanging out to dry.
But your idea is correct for large jobs. Most of the folks I was referring to were one to four guys working for homeowners or on small jobs. And the owner of the business is working alongside his help.
I’m an American Indian. Whenever I hear white people make these statements about illegal immigrants and wonder how they would feel if my ancestors had taken such an attitude towards the white invasion of our country.
Of course they like it. It’s been a way of life in Georgia (for example) for over 400 years. At least these days people are forced to come here due to our economic policies collapsing small farms in Mexico and Central America, and not because they were, you know, kidnapped them at gunpoint. In some folks’ minds, that just means we save on ammo. The idea that they might ever count for more than 3/5 of a person is pretty well incomprehensible.
(shrug) let the south rot.