My friend told me at lunch today that he'd learned over Thanksgiving that his brother, who lives in a major Texas city (not Dallas), told him he'd just sold his landscaping business.
"It's because of illegal immigration," my friend said. "My brother can't compete with the other landscaping businesses. He used to hire illegals himself, but quit because his business was getting to be big enough to attract IRS attention. He's tried to make a go of it using non-illegal labor, but he's losing money to the competition. They're still using illegal labor, and taking a chance with the feds."
My friend added that his father, a die-hard Bush backer, had finally gotten sick of Bush over the illegal immigration issue. "I told my dad that Bush at least had tried to get an immigration fix through Congress, but Congress wouldn't pass it," said my friend. "It didn't matter at all to him. He's furious at the federal government because of this immigration thing, and he blames Bush. He stuck with Bush through the war and everything else, but now he's had it."
I mentioned to my friend that I'd talked to "Ed," a guy in Louisiana whose father was having a similar problem with his own landscaping business. But here's the wrinkle on the Louisiana case: there are very few, if any, Mexican migrants, illegal or otherwise, living in that particular part of Louisiana. The only unskilled labor there is unemployed black men. But according to Ed and "Bill," both of whom are white and who live in that town, you can't hire blacks, or anybody else, to do landscaping work for competitive wages. Bill told me that as recently as 10 years ago, when he needed help with a day job on his small farm, it was easy to find unskilled labor -- that is to say, black labor -- in his town. Not any more.
"A few months back, I went over to [a part of town] where I used to be able to hire guys, and asked if anybody wanted to come spend the day helping me do odd jobs around the place," Bill said. "They wanted to know how much I was paying. I told them I paid minimum wage. Not a single one of those guys would agree to do it, even though not a one of them holds a job, and they were doing nothing but sitting around shooting the breeze."
Bill, who is elderly and lives on a fixed income, said he had no choice but to drive on and make arrangements with family members to get the work done.
When I told Bill's story to my Dallas friend, he replied that when his brother was employing illegal Mexican workers, he'd pick them up at the informal day labor site, which was in a poor, mixed-race neighborhood. There was usually a crowd of black men there too, but they weren't offering their services as day laborers. They were just hanging out. Dallas Guy said that his brother's Mexican workers would usually request that he drop them off at their apartment complex, their church or some other place, because they were being harrassed at the end of the day by the unemployed black men.
Now, you certainly may take all this with a grain of salt. I'm just passing along the results of two conversations I've had in the past few days having to do with illegal immigration, unskilled labor, race and economics. To be honest, I'm not sure what conclusions to draw. I put it out there for discussion. Do these stories resonate with what you readers are seeing and hearing where you live? We talk here from time to time about how middle-class Americans, white and otherwise, depend on illegal immigrant labor, almost all of it from Latin America, to keep their consumerist lifestyles going, but the middle class doesn't want to face its own moral responsibility. I have heard over the past two years from various managers of businesses that depend on unskilled labor that legal or not, the only people they can hire who will do the work, and will do it with hustle and dependability, are Latino immigrants. As a general matter, whites and blacks both consider this kind of work beneath their dignity, my sources say.
What do you think?
Again, this is anecdotal, so take it for what's it's worth. But from what I'm picking up, it's a potentially ugly part of the national immigration conversation that's certainly being talked about, but not openly.
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Remember Roger Miller's old song, "King of the Road"? One line in it was "Two hours of pushing broom, Gets an eight-by-twelve four-foot room." That is, 2 hours of minimum-wage labor gets a room for the night. Got, that is. The song was current in the late '50s, IFIRC. Minimum wage then was close to a dollar an hour. So one could get a room for the night for two dollars. Try that now. Minimum wage is $5.10. Nobody rents rooms for ten bucks a night, or $300 a month. A full-time minimum-wage worker makes $1200 a month, and has to spend at least half of it on housing. If that worker has one or more non-working family members, the situation becomes utterly untenable.
If employers really can't afford to pay a wage that a single person can live decently on, much less raise a family, that isn't an issue of work ethic, or even employer ethics. It's a problem of the entire economy, that needs a far closer examination than anybody I read has bothered giving it.
Illegal aliens can work for near-minimum wages, because they mostly aren't trying to support families in the US economy, and they pare housing costs to the bone by living several single workers to a room and spending all their waking hours working, since they can't spend the time with their families. American workers are demanding--the nerve of them!--to make enough money to raise American families and live with them, and be able to spend some waking time with them.
We could, of course, follow the old South African model of declaring a whole class of native-born workers to BE illegal aliens, forbidding them to bring their families with them, and making them live like--well, like illegal aliens. And then we could pay them the same way. Oddly enough, nobody seems to be considering that possibility. Yet.
Wow. The thread has got itself some legs. Race, economy, and bigotry can get a pot boiling evidently.
Allow me to add the one missing ingredient needed to take this campfire into bonfire status.
"Anecdotal", Rod's disclaimer abused one more time. Earlier this year a group of us construction oldtimers were discussing the sad state of our young help. One of the contributors happens to be a teacher who teaches some classes on construction trades at a high school.
One of us offered the observation, guess who, that the problem was the femininization of the work force because of the single parent family plague. My guesstimation of the source of the problem is the nature of women versus the nature of men.
Women, unfairly I know, come with the burden of family. That's why they're first and foremost collaborators when it comes to problem solving. They know they can't do it all and are willing to collaborate to get the job done.
Men, because collaboration is admitting you can't do it all, ie weakness, assume working harder or faster or longer will suffice.
Us oldtimers agreed that you could spot a single parent raised boy on the job immediately. You really have to work to get the "just do it" out of them. Where a boy with a strong male presence in his upbringing instinctively digs in and puts his back into it the female raised boy will look around for help.
The teacher told us he can really see in his students. The girls and female raised boys cave in and want to quit as soon as boredom or tired comes to the party while the male raised boy will be getting it done. The good thing he noticed is the female raised boys will usually have the male brought out in them with the exposure to the male raised ones.
A couple of points. One, this came to mind as I was getting after it, the old get the hands and back getting it and the mind will take a stroll and have some fun. Two, if we look at the Hispanic culture, male dominated, versus the American black culture, single female parent households, we see defined what us oldtimers were discussing about white boys. Three, the problem is marriage.
Marriage as we have it now has two problems. Existing culture with it's male domination is a failure under the pressure of modernity. There was an appearance of success when it's inherent weakness was out of sight, men aren't divine. And the single female parent doesn't work any better. We need a realistic and meaningfull definition of marriage.
"Where there is a lack of available labor, payrolls will naturally increase - assuming the employer has to get a job done. I recall Burger King offering fantastic wages (for the job description) in New Orleans after Katrina due to the lack of workers."
I offer you the scenario that happened here in Iowa last year. Swift & Company was busted for having a few hundred illegal workers at several plants, one of which was nearby. Word is that nearly 40% of their workforce was hauled off that day to be deported back to Mexico. What did Swift do?
They immediately put out ads for the jobs at higher pay rates, and local workers flooded the place.
People will work at really nasty jobs (Swift is a meatpacking operation) if the pay is high enough. Swift decided that rather than pay what the going labor rate was, they would import workers who would work at a lower rate.
By the way, we are STILL waiting for the feds to indict any of the management at these plants for violating the hiring laws. To date there has been NO enforcement at that level...NONE.
In the America of the past, where companies were more closely tied to the communities in which they were placed, your equation would hold. However, thanks to the lax enforcement of immigration laws against employers, hiring illegals is now considered just one more business tool.
As someone who has been a temp in warehouses on and off for over a decade - last stint briefly in 2006 for a month between academic jobs - this discussion seems to have missed a few things about these kinds of jobs. Discussing the role of narcotics policy may seem to be off-topic here, but I think it is a mistake to overlook it.
First off, let me get something straight. Is it a bigger crime to fail a drug test (odds are marijuana - I doubt a lot of places will pay the big fees for hair tests that would catch a lot more than that) or to enter the US illegally? Why should failing a drug test disqualify one from a manual job? What a fair number of temp companies that supply industrial laborers will do is not test unless there is an accident - a positive test will often allow the company to avoid having to pay anything if they are sued. Some of the anglo (white and black) temps (mainly in New England, but also in Tennessee) would make it pretty clear that they did use narcotics at least to some degree, and/or had prison records. Should they not work? This isn't always a matter of lazy workers, but rather employers preferring one (cheaper) kind of labor linked to illegality over another.
Now one certainly could make many arguments as an employer why hiring people who use narcotics of different sorts would be a bad idea. But I think an unintended result of the focus on testing for many manual labor jobs - as opposed to being an entertainer or a pundit or an attorney, because I guess it doesn't matter if one is intoxicated in any of those professions - is that it provides another rationale to hire illegal aliens.
Part of the issue is that the impact of the use of narcotics varies so much by class. Poor people generally face much harder penalties - drugs tests for lower-paying, manual labor jobs; a stronger sense among managers and employers of their inability to work; and of course, less opportunity to avoid jail time due to their limited access to legal support. I was a volunteer for my parish in a group that held Bible study for prisoners for over a year, and sometimes would go to hearings just to see how the judge would hear their cases. People who could present themselves as misguided middle-class people would get out of jail time despite repeat violations - and some of these people in jail away from court were making it pretty clear they would get high as soon as they got out. If a prisoner did not seem to fit the model - or just happened to be Native American - back to jail they went. Only prison could apparently redeem them. The higher up the class ladder you go, the penalties become less severe as a whole - to the point that visits to the Netherlands or southern Mexico in part to get high are now so common.
How accurate is all this as a whole? Would people now disqualified by drug tests work at manual labor work if there were no tests? Obviously, I don't know...
Swift had reached an agreement with the government that as long as they verified their employees through a federal database, they would be immune from prosecution. Swift did abide by government enforcement efforts, it is just that workers were using false documents that satisfied government verification checks.
And all but one of the Swift plants was unionized with workers making well above $15 an hour. In that sense, the employer was doing everything it could to keep up with the industry and the market. These weren't workers making minimum wage.
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