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Working Poor & Life Chances
Having a sub-minimum wage working class in this country has the effect of benefiting business.
The Pew Hispanic Center found that more than three-quarters of all undocumented immigrants in the United States are from Latin America. Most of them work in agriculture, cleaning services, construction and food industries, according to a 2005 Pew study.
University of Houston history professor Guadalupe San Miguel said employers threaten undocumented immigrants by telling them that other undocumented immigrants are available to do their jobs.
"It creates a group of people [who] do not demand, for the most part, do not demand their rights as American workers," San Miguel said.
In 1942, the United States and the Mexican governments instituted the Bracero Program. The following year, Latin American farm workers were invited into the United States to work in farms under contracts they didn't understand due to the language barrier. The program benefited the U.S. agro-businesses by supplying the cheap labor the industry was lacking. Many of the workers were later forced out of the country without opportunities to become legalized when the program expired in 1964.
"The concerns of social exploitation that some of these migrants suffer is that they're often paid low wages even below minimum wage. Sometimes they're not paid at all," University of Houston sociology professor Nestor Rodriquez said.
The federal minimum wage is $5.15. The Pew Hispanic Center reports the average income of an undocumented family is $27,400. By comparison, the median family income in the United States is $47,700. An American family makes 70 percent more than an undocumented family.
"The employers prefer to hire undocumented workers because they are more manageable," San Miguel said.
Today, undocumented immigrants continue to cross the border illegally to work mostly in U.S. farms and in labor-intensive sectors of the economy.
"Unauthorized migrants have almost an ambivalent status. That is, in our country they're considered to be at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder," Rodriguez said. "But from the perspective of their home countries, they might seem to have a higher status because they're undergoing social mobility as they come into a higher wage labor market."
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 amended earlier laws to better control immigration, but San Miguel says it created more unauthorized migration into the country instead. It placed a limit that allowed only 120,000 people each year to come to the United States from countries in the Western Hemisphere. On the other hand, the Eastern Hemisphere had a limit of 170,000, which included a preference system that favored relatives of U.S. citizens. By the 1970s, that preference system was applied to the Western Hemisphere as well.
Maurice Hew Jr., a Texas Southern University law professor and an expert in immigration law, said the country-specific caps created a backlog of visas and people had to wait years to get legal status to come into the United States.
"Immigration policy has had an impact on encouraging undocumented immigration because for many people that was the only way to come into this country," San Miguel said.
Undocumented immigrants not only contribute to business, but they also pay taxes.
University of Houston economics professor Barton Smith said a substantial proportion of undocumented immigrant workers pay taxes including income taxes and Social Security taxes. He adds they also pay sales taxes just like citizens do.
The Internal Revenue Service created a system that allowed it to collect taxes from undocumented immigrants in 1996. Since then, the IRS has issued 9.2 million Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers in order to collect taxes from persons who are ineligible for a Social Security number.
"While there's some additional cost, I think undocumented immigrants contribute more than they take out," San Miguel said.
University of Houston history professor John Hart said what counts is immigrants' contributions to the economy. He estimates undocumented laborers contribute $540 to $590 billion a year to the economy.
Today, many citizens as well as undocumented immigrants demand immigration reform from Congress. Even if Congress were to pass legislation on immigration, Hew predicts immigration reform probably wouldn't fix the existing immigration problems. He says immigration legislation may become necessary again a few years down the road.
"The evolution of law is not meant to be fast. It's not meant to be deliberate. It's not meant to be efficient," Hew said.
© Copyright World Internet News 2006-07
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