Today is Cesar Chavez Day here in California. This is a holiday for schools and state and city workers, but not for federal government workers like myself.
You can read more about Cesar Chavez here.
I bring this up because Congress is currently considering two pieces of legislation that propose rather different methods of curbing illegal immigration. (No, Cesar Chavez was not an illegal immigrant. Go read the article already, I'll wait. Back? Great.) The House's version would make it a felony to be an illegal immigrant, which means that once caught, you could never become a legal immigrant. You're out, deported, and if you apply, you'll fail the application process.
In other words, your best bet at that point is to try to get in as an illegal immigrant.
Mind you, perhaps the House version is presented in the hopes that we'll jail illegal immigrants instead. In California, where the jails are already so full that we're releasing non-violent offenders early, that just doesn't seem likely.
Once you're back in as an illegal immigrant (and felon), the House version proposes mandating that employers check Social Security Numbers before hiring laborers. It strikes me that perhaps the members of the House have never actually seen illegal immigrants hired, especially for field work. In case you haven't, the way it typically works is that a bunch of people show up at a gas station or freeway underpass or park where they've heard that people hire day laborers; a guy pulls up with a pickup truck, and points to the number of people he needs. They hop in the back of the truck, and away they go. There's not a lot of checking of papers, and if there is, it's not in-depth. These people are not filling out W-2s. There's no phone number the employer can call to see if any given SSN is valid and actually for the person holding the papers. In other words, until the federales bust the crew and drag them downtown for processing, there is simply no accountability here.
The Senate version, which the President has thrown his support behind, seeks to formalize the process. It allows illegal immigrants to stay here as long as they turn themselves in, pay a fine, learn English, pay Social Security and back taxes, work, pay taxes and Social Security, commit no crimes, pay another fine, and wait ten years before being completely legalized. It also provides for a Guest Worker program so that people from other countries can come over, work, and then have to return to their countries of origin after a set period... unless they get a dispensation from their employer on the basis that their services are too valuable for them to be let go.
Supporters of immigration reform have thrown their support behind the Senate's version, but I would suggest that neither version offers a real solution to the issue. The House's version is relatively unenforceable, and the Senate's version, well....
The appeal of hiring illegal immigrants (or legal immigrants who are at mercy of their employers for their visas) is that they have no legal recourse if their employers abuse them. That's why Wal*Mart got away with paying its "undocumented" night crews $2 per day; that's why high-tech companies sponsoring H1B workers can get away with working them 60 hours per week. If the workers complain, threaten to turn them over to immigration or cancel their visas. That'll shut them up.
If you want to stop people from hiring illegal immigrants, give those self-same immigrants the right to complain without fear of reprisal; award whistle-blowers with honorary citizenship (or at least temporary visas). Appeal to the backstabbing instinct. If their employers realize that the staff they used to threaten with has become a dangerous serpent, they'll have to drop the staff. If they drop the staff, they'll have to offer more reasonable wages and work conditions, which means minimum wage; if they can hire legal, documented workers for the same price the undocumented workers are demanding, there will be no incentive to hire illegal labor. And if they stop hiring illegal labor, there will be less incentive for illegal immigrants to come here as illegal immigrants.
Make no mistake, this is a workers' rights issue. As long as we allow people to treat their labor force like second class citizens, we're going to continue to have problems. Since there's no way out of this without some pain, let's at least choose the moral high ground for once.
Cesar Chavez would have wanted it that way.
3.31.2006
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2 comments:
Problem: employment isn't the only major opportunity attracting migrants. The "whistleblower" plan doesn't address one of the major pulls, which is giving their kids access to the U.S. educational and medical system & hence a better shot at life. As long as Mexico's a poor, developing country bordering the last superpower, that's always going to be a big "push-pull" factor in the migration flow.
Also, given the backlog in the immigration system as it is currently set up, creating yet another layer of bureaucracy inside it charged with trying to determine whether complaints against employers are genuine, or just a ploy to stay in country, doesn't seem like a feasible solution to me.
As you say, there's no way out of this without pain, but I don't think that aggressively slamming employers and rewarding illegals is the way out of this, either. At least "guest worker" has the virtue of having a less harmful effect on border states' economies.
Any "guest worker" program that relies on employers to report honestly is equally doomed to failure. If we're going to go the route of a "guest worker" program, then we're going to need another layer of bureaucracy to determine whether employers are abiding by the rules or not; otherwise, you're talking about legislation without enforcement, and that's how we got where we are now. After all, it's already a $10k fine to hire an illegal immigrant, so you'd think we'd've bankrupted the employers by now, but that hasn't happened.
You're right to say that education and healthcare are also huge draws, and it's hard to deny emergency room healthcare while still maintaining the right to privacy that we cherish. The clear answer that usually comes to me, late at night, in those moments of insane clarity, is to annex Mexico.
But then I see what a cockup we made out of Iraq, and I understand why that might not work.
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