Today I went to a rally. Again. This one, with a band of 5th graders performing Lean On Me, was for a member of my community, a father who supports his family working as a laborer, who pays his taxes, who complies with all the authorities have asked of him. His only fault is to have been born in a neighboring country, and to have come here, 18 long years ago, when there was a need for people like him to do work American born people were not available to do. There was a need for his work, but there was no way to be given the official blessing of the government. Undocumented. Unsigned, unsealed, unstamped– unsanctioned by anyone but the job market.
Luis is his name. Today he is in a jail in Louisiana, far from his family, and he has been told that all the documents, all the hundreds of phone calls, all the witnesses to his place in our community, are in vain and that he will be sent back to Mexico on Tuesday. Now this may not be true. He has not signed anything, has been shown no official document. His deportation is also undocumented, at least for now.
If the worst arrives, he will be sent to Mexico City, where at least the family has a cousin. Then what? He can look for work, in an economy ravaged by its interaction with ours– between the War on Drugs, that has in fact contributed to the growth of the power and reach of the cartels, and the dispossession of small growers by land-grabbing multinationals, the job market is flooded with laborers.1 He can go stand, with others like him, at the market early in the morning, and hope to get a day's work. If he gets the minimum wage,he'll take home almost $5 for the day. 2 If he gets that. Not a lot to send home to the family, after eating and sleeping somewhere... Back here, his wife can look for a second job, his teenage son can maybe get some after-school work. Their younger son can hang out at the neighbor's while they work to replace their father's income. There are always solutions for people willing to work, right?
What is all this for? What American is going to do the job that he was doing? Where I live, the landlord is renovating an apartment. Who is doing the work? An immigrant, from Russia. Thank goodness he was able to get his “papers” in order.
And whatever happened to the “magic hand” of the free market? If the market did not need Luis, he would not have stayed here. He did not take anyone else's job. Now maybe, just maybe, we should give more value, both more money and more prestige, to the kind of work that immigrants have been doing for us, and maybe in that case, more young Americans would be doing some of that necessary work, but for now,these jobs will most likely be unfilled.
Didn't anybody notice what happened in 2010 when Arizona and other states passed that restrictive law against immigrant labor? Between understaffed farms, drops in tourism, and the loss to business of money normally spent by immigrant or migrant families, these states lost billions. 3 But I guess it isn't really the economy, stupid, when you have a bigger point to make. Better to live in a community of “real Americans” with a depressed economy, than to get richer through the presence of people who don't look or talk like “us”.
1.http://www.reuters.com/article/economy-mexico-wages-idUSL2N0CR1TY20130404
2.http://www.wageindicator.org/main/salary/minimum-wage/mexico
3.http://business.time.com/2012/06/14/the-fiscal-fallout-of-state-immigration-laws/