What America Owes its 'Illegals'

[babylonsister]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070625/ehrenreich

What America Owes its 'Illegals'

Barbara Ehrenreich


snip//

In case you don't know what immigrants do in this country, the Latinos have a word for it--trabajo. They've been mowing the lawns, cleaning the offices, hammering the nails and picking the tomatoes, not to mention all that dish-washing, diaper-changing, meat-packing and poultry-plucking.

snip//

The only question is how much we owe our undocumented immigrant workers. First, those who do not remain to enjoy the benefits of old age in America will have to be reimbursed for their contributions to Medicare and Social Security, and here I quote the website of the San Diego ACLU:

Undocumented immigrants annually pay an estimated $7 billion more than they take out into Social Security, and $1.5 billion more into Medicare.... A study by the National Academy of Sciences also found that tax payments generated by immigrants outweighed any costs associated with services used by immigrants.

Second, someone is going to have to calculate what is owed to "illegals" for wages withheld by unscrupulous employers: The homeowner who tells his or her domestic worker that the wage is actually several hundred dollars a month less than she had been promised, and that the homeowner will be "holding" it for her. Or the landscaping service that stiffs its undocumented workers for their labor. Who's the "illegal" here?

Third, there's the massive compensation owed to undocumented immigrants for preventable injuries on the job. In her book Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights, Jennifer Gordon reports such gruesome cases as a Honduran who died from inhaling paint while sanding yachts in Long Island and a Guatemalan worker whose boss intentionally burned him with hot pans of oil for not washing dishes fast enough. "Death rates for Latino workers," Gordon reports, "have risen over the past decade even as workplace fatality rates for non-Latinos have fallen."

When our debt to America's undocumented workers is eventually tallied, I'm confident that it will be well in excess of the $5000 fine the immigration bill proposes. There is still the issue of the original "crime." If someone breaks into my property for the purpose of trashing and looting, I would be hell-bent on restitution. But if they break in for the purpose of cleaning it--scrubbing the bathroom, mowing the lawn--then, in my way of thinking anyway, the debt goes in the other direction.

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. K and R

[Tom Joad]

2. a relief from the anti-immigrant crap that so often fills the pages of this forum

[Mnemosyne]

6. Hear, hear! n/t

[alstephenson]

3. K & R

[ixion]

4. kicked and recommended....

[murray hill farm]

5. For starters, an apology.

For the many years of luring them to the USA to do the jobs they do (that truly no american would do...for the pay they receive. americans would do those jobs, but only at a very fair wage) and for the damage to their own culture that has resulted from the "good life" propaganda that has gone on for decades. For the indentured servatude they have endured after falling for the propaganda and being lured into the hellhole that awaits them in the usa. For starters....an apology. And then a promise from the real citizens of the usa, that we will do everything we can to end the exploitation of them in the future. After that, we can begin to pay the back pay that we owe them for the slavery we have allowed to occur to them in order to satisfy the corperate greed.

[uberllama42]

8. Notwithstanding what I said in #7,

I agree that the illegal immigrants are victims in this situation as much as anyone. Coming up with ridiculous excuses doesn't help anyone, but you make a good point that we all bear responsibility insofar as we participate in an economy built around their exploitation.

I have grown increasingly frustrated with the lie of the American dream. Every time someone proposes a remedy for the exploitation of labor in our economy, they s/he is shouted down with "Land of Opportunity!" Just another one of the lies peddled in our schools.

[uberllama42]

7. "Break in for the purpose of cleaning" your property?

That's a baldy ridiculous analogy. No one is jumping the border because they want to do us any favors. They're trying to escape the hellish conditions in Mexico and to feed their families. They don't care about U.S. law because they have bigger problems to deal with. Their effect on American society just doesn't factor into it.

Apologizing for illegal immigrants and imposing some farcical good intention on their presence in the U.S. is just as ludicrous as rabid nativists claiming that they're coming to "destroy white culture".

[Jim Sagle]

9. DLC, cheap labor hogwash!

[hedgehog]

10. How many Colombians come to the US to escape the violence at home

generated by the drug trade which is driven by (ta-da!) Us Consumers!