Well . . . undocumented workers of the U.S., unite!
We didn’t notice anything different today here in the Great White North. The fact is, I don’t know the legal status of any of the immigrants who work around but not directly in the employ of my company. I don’t know if they’re unionized or whether they get a living wage or where all of them were born or when they came to New England. But I do see the same faces everyday — including today. The café staff, the cleaners, the landscapers, the guys pulling network cable, the construction workers: Everybody was there.
Personally, I suspect that the issue of immigration will be resolved in a way that’s most favorable to the immigrant workers: a path to legalization and better pay and working conditions. I also suspect that there will be more border security — possibly even a fence — though it won’t do anything but shift people around and make us look foolish.
I’ve never lived in a border state (though I’ve visited a few) so my arguments about immigration are not complete. In fact, I’m not opposed to people coming to America to work and raise families and live the (somewhat) good life. I don’t know if it depresses other low- or semi-skilled laborers’ wages. But it definitely does keep employers’ expenses — insurance, benefits, taxes — down. Nor do I know if immigrants do jobs Americans won’t do or if they deprive Americans of jobs. But I can say that I saw loads of white folks cooking, cleaning, mowing, painting, and building in Iowa, a place where my relatives stock supermarket shelves, drive big trucks, and service cars. I’ve seen people of all ethnicities and ages working alongside each other in fast food (along with me).
What continues to bother me is that, while the workforce I see near my office and home looks a bit like the local communities of Framingham and Milford on the low end of the wage scale and like the wealthy suburbs of Weston, Wayland, Westwood, and Wellesley on my end, it doesn’t look a lot like the broader Mass Bay community. The Cape Verdeans, Vietnamese, Irish, and Portuguese are rarely seen outside the city. Much worse is that I very, very rarely encounter the city’s significant native-born African American population except when I go into Boston proper.
Boston has a long and conflicted history with its black residents, proclaiming freedom and tolerance while allowing segregation and racism. It doesn’t appear to be changing, even as we grow more comfortable with diverse suburbs and immigrant labor at the office.
What to do?
Show me the person who knows anything about ‘solving’ the race and immigration issues in this country and you’ll also be showing me someone who is used to being disagreed with. There just aren’t any simple answers to the deeply-interrelated issues of race, class, and immigration.
Then again, it hopefully counts for something that white, upper-middle-class (ex-)midwesterners like us are thinking about the issue.
p.s. The New Republic’s Gregg Easterbrook, in an otherwise football-oriented article, discusses the use of the term “undocumented arrivals”, “as if the problem was their paperwork had been misplaced”. He thinks (and I agree) that it’s important to use language to be clear about the issue, which is that they entered the country illegal. [This, despite the fact that the U.S. currently accepts more legal immigrants than all of the other countries in the world, combined.]
Marshall, I suspect you’re attempting to draw attention to my choice of the phrase “undocumented workers of the U.S. unite.” I very much agree with your assessment that we should use language that accurately reflects the legal status of people in the U.S.
This is why I tend to call this group of people — both workers and their families — “illegal immigrants” when we want to talk about the larger issue. In this context, the important issue is how and why people leave their own country and come here, how long they can stay if they enter legally, and what can be done to change laws.
But I was specifically concerned in the post with workers I see everyday, so it seems perfectly fine to call them “undocumented workers.” The key is that they work and that it’s visible and valuable, yet there is no good way for us to reward them for their labor and the contributions to the American economic engine. There is no way for them to become legitimate documented workers like you and me.
I personally think that given the kind of work that many illegal immigrants / undocumented workers do — picking fruit and vegetables, cutting up our meat and poultry, wielding power tools and building things, cooking, cleaning, landscaping — deserves the same kind of wages, protections, and benefits that other workers receive as a right of law. We may have a labor system of legals and illegals, but we don’t have equal protection under the law if some people are intimidated because of legal status. (This is a problem of businesses behaving badly because they can.)
I’m also working up the nerve to wonder aloud about the uncomfortable causes why so few African-Americans show up in my ethnically diverse neighborhood, my high tech workplace, and the service sector jobs I see everyday. Nicholas Lemann wrote that we’re not good at having discussions about white-black interactions in the U.S. And I suspect what I don’t see in the suburbs is a symptom of the lack of discourse (much less the actual problems we would be discussing).