Enrique's Journey (31 page)

LANDS LEFT BEHIND

The exodus of immigrants has been bittersweet for the countries they leave as well. It has provided an escape valve for countries with enormous economic problems, such as Mexico and Honduras. The outflow of workers has kept unemployment from climbing even higher.

Immigrants also send huge amounts of money from the United States to their families back home—typically one in ten dollars they make. This brings $30 billion a year to Latin America alone. The cash flow makes up a whopping 15 percent of El Salvador's gross domestic product and is Mexico's second largest contributor to the economy, after oil. Recipients use money sent back by immigrants for food, clothing, and medical expenses and to educate children. Grandparents who get money to care for children left behind would be destitute without the payments.

Immigrants who return to their home countries also bring skills acquired while living in a more technologically advanced country, says Norberto Girón of the International Organization for Migration in Honduras. They bring lower levels of tolerance for corruption and stronger demands for democratic processes, says Honduran immigration expert Maureen Zamora. Immigrants' desire to communicate with families back home in Honduras has resulted in improved telephone and Internet services.

But the separation of children and parents has had lasting negative consequences. Huge groups of parentless children have fueled rampant growth in juvenile delinquency and gangs in Honduras, says Glenda Gallardo, principal economist with the United Nations Development Program. “If your mom leaves you, if she disappears, it marks you in a way for life,” she says.

The Mara Salvatrucha, 18th Street, and Mao Mao gangs control whole neighborhoods, where they impose a “war tax” on taxis, bicycles, or buses passing through. A disproportionate number of the 36,000 gangsters in Honduras come from families in which the mother has migrated north, says Zamora. Grandparents, guided by guilt that the child they are raising isn't with his mother, go light on discipline. They also worry that if the child complains and gets moved to another relative, the money the mother sends may go elsewhere as well.

A public advertising campaign launched in 2002 is one sign Honduras is facing damage caused by family separations. The advertisements run on television and radio, and are plastered on billboards at the Tegucigalpa bus station, where Hondurans head north. “Father, mother,” reads an advertisement with a young girl on a swing. “Your children need you. Stay here. In Honduras there are opportunities to get ahead. Discover them!”

“We are seeing a disintegration of the family,” warns Norberto Girón, the Honduran migration official. “Keeping the family together—even if they are poor—is more important than leaving and improving their economic conditions.”

IMMIGRANT NATION

Each year, the United States legally admits nearly a million people, more than twice as many as in the 1970s. Another 700,000 arrive illegally, up from 200,000 to 300,000 a year in the 1980s and early 1990s. Today, 36 million residents of the United States were born in another country; nearly a third of those live in the United States illegally. The number of immigrants coming into the country in recent years is the highest ever recorded. And while the proportion of the population that is foreign-born, at 12 percent, is still lower than the all-time high of 15 percent in 1890, it has risen from 5 percent in 1970.

More than six in ten residents of Miami and four in ten of Los Angeles are from another country. Some Mexicans and Mexican Americans have jokingly dubbed the influx
la reconquista—
the reconquest of lands once held by Mexico.

Enrique and Lourdes disagree about the impact of this on the United States. Enrique says that were he an American citizen, he would want to curtail illegal immigration. Like most on his paint crew, he explains, he gets paid cash under the table and contributes no taxes on what he earns. He uses publicly provided services, including emergency medical care. And he sends a portion of his income to Honduras, rather than spending it in his community.

Lourdes disagrees. Yes, she says, her daughter was born at a public hospital, and she received welfare for a time. Still, she pays taxes and is entitled to those services. To her, immigrant labor is the engine that helps drive the American economy. Immigrants like herself, she says, work hard at jobs no American wants to do, at least not for minimum wage with no health benefits or paid vacation time. Immigrants' willingness to do certain backbreaking jobs at low wages provides goods and services to all Americans at reasonable prices, she says.

Many Americans understand that being born in the United States, with all the opportunities that entails, is a matter of sheer serendipity. They are happy to share a bounty few countries possess. They want the United States to provide desperate people a shot at a better life.

Others believe that the wave of immigrants from Latin America is blowback, of sorts, for U.S. policies. In recent decades, the United States has supported, and sometimes even helped install, repressive regimes in Latin America. These regimes, they note, propped up economic elites who resisted reforms and perpetuated unequal political and economic systems. This fueled poverty, civil wars, and the resulting economic crisis that is now pushing so many to migrate to the United States.

Employers in the United States see other benefits. Enrique's former boss in North Carolina argues that he must pay native-born workers more than immigrants—yet they work slower, balk at putting in overtime, and don't want to do the hardest jobs. Enrique says native-born painters take a lot of breaks and demand to be paid extra for overtime hours. One of Enrique's co-workers in North Carolina agrees, adding, “Americans say: If they fire me, I can get a better job.” The co-worker says that being in the country illegally motivates him to do good work and keep his employment stable. His family in Honduras, he knows, depends on the money he sends. It would be tough to get another job because he is in the country illegally and doesn't speak English.

Many experts say immigrants help the economy grow and prevent businesses that rely on cheap labor from being forced to close or go abroad. In some low-education occupations, according to a 1997 study by the National Research Council that is considered among the most comprehensive assessments of the effects of immigration, a quarter to a half of all hours nationwide are worked by immigrant women. Immigrant production of goods and services, the NRC found, added a modest but significant $1.1 billion to $9.5 billion to the nation's $7 trillion economy.

American households benefit, too. Immigrants lower the cost of nearly 5 percent of all goods and services that people in U.S. households buy, according to the NRC. That means cheaper food and clothing. Because of immigrants, certain services—child care, gardening, car washing—are within reach of more Americans. Immigrant women who work as nannies and caregivers provide something invaluable: kindness and nurturing, often at the expense of their own children, says Kristine M. Zentgraf, a sociology professor at California State University at Long Beach.

Immigrants' biggest contribution, others say, is how their presence brings new blood, new ideas, and new ways of looking at things that drive creativity and spur advances. A disproportionate number of the nation's high achievers, the NRC study noted, such as Nobel laureates, are immigrants. Indeed, it is often the most motivated people who are immigrants. Who else would leave everything they know, cross Mexico on top of freight trains, and come to a place where they have to start from scratch?

BENEFIT AND BURDEN

Some opposition to immigration is racism, a resistance to change, a discomfort with having people around who don't speak the same language or have similar customs. Yet some of the negative consequences of immigration are real, and are becoming increasingly evident as more women and children arrive.

Overall, the NRC said, immigrants use more government services than the native-born. They have more children, and therefore more youngsters in public schools. This is especially true for immigrants from Latin America, whose households are nearly twice as large as those of the native-born. It will cost the government two and a half times as much per household to educate their children, the study found.

Immigrants are poorer, have lower incomes, and qualify for more state and local services and assistance. Immigrant women receive publicly funded prenatal and obstetric care. Their U.S.-born children are entitled to welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid. Compared to native households, immigrant families from Latin America are nearly three times as likely to receive government welfare payments.

Because immigrants earn less money and are less likely to own property, they pay lower taxes. Some immigrants receive their salaries in cash and pay no taxes at all. In all, immigrants and their native-born children pay a third less tax per capita than others in the United States, the NRC study found. Households headed by immigrants from Latin America pay half of what natives pay in state and federal taxes.

The fiscal burden to taxpayers is greatest in immigrant-heavy states such as California, where an estimated one in four illegal immigrants live, and where half of all children have immigrant parents. Local and state governments shoulder the biggest cost generated by immigrants: public education. An average nonimmigrant household in California paid $1,178 more in state and local taxes than the value of the services they received. Conversely, immigrant households paid $3,463 less than the value of the services they received, the NRC found.

The crush of immigrants has hastened the deterioration of many public services, namely schools, hospitals, and state jails and prisons. Classrooms are crowded. Hospital emergency rooms have been forced to close, in part because so many poor, uninsured, nonpaying patients, including immigrants, are provided with free mandated care. In Los Angeles County, jails have had to release prisoners early because of overcrowding caused, in part, by criminal immigrants. A 2001 University of Arizona study found that in the twenty-eight southwestern border counties of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas, the cost of arresting, prosecuting, and jailing illegal immigrants who commit crimes amounted to as much as $125 million per year. The Center for Immigration Studies, which seeks reduced immigration levels, found that in 2002, nationwide, households headed by illegal immigrants used $26.3 billion in government services and paid $16 billion in taxes.

Those hardest hit by the influx of immigrants are disadvantaged native-born minorities who don't have a high school degree—namely, African Americans and previous waves of Latino immigrants. They must compete for the same low-end jobs immigrants take.

Wages for high school dropouts, who make up one in fourteen native workers, have dropped in recent years. Between 1980 and 2000, a Harvard University study found, the influx of immigrant workers to the United States cut wages for native workers with no high school diploma by 7.4 percent, or $1,800 on an average salary of $25,000.

Sometimes, whole industries switch from native to immigrant workers. In 1993, I looked at efforts to unionize Latino janitors in Los Angeles. Previously, the jobs had been largely held by African Americans, who had succeeded in obtaining increased wages and health benefits. Cleaning companies busted their union, then brought in Latino immigrant workers at half the wages and no benefits.

In 1996, I went to an ordinary block of two-bedroom homes in East Los Angeles to understand why nearly a third of California Latinos had supported Proposition 187, a voter initiative to bar illegal immigrants from schools, hospitals, and most public assistance. The measure passed and was later struck down by the courts.

For residents of the block, support for Prop 187 wasn't a nativist reaction or scapegoating in tight economic times. They said ill feelings toward illegal immigrants were grounded in how the newcomers had affected their neighborhood and their lives. For them, the influx had meant not cut-rate nannies and gardeners, but heightened job competition, depressed wages, overcrowded government services, and a reduced quality of life.

The newcomers who moved into the neighborhood were poor. Residents estimated that the block's population had tripled since 1970; up to seventeen immigrants were jammed into one small stucco house. Some lived in garages without plumbing, using lawns to relieve themselves. The second- and third-generation Latinos on the block felt it was their working-class neighborhoods that bore the brunt of a wave of impoverished, unskilled workers. Immigrants were arriving at an unsettling pace, crowding them out of jobs and lowering wages. Immigrants weren't just taking jobs natives didn't covet; they competed for work as painters, mechanics, and construction workers.

In the 1980s, the RAND Corporation, a Santa Monica think tank, found that the benefits of immigration outweighed the costs. By 1997, they had reversed course. The economy wasn't producing new jobs for high school dropouts, an increasing proportion of whom—roughly half—were unemployed. RAND said some native adults had become unemployed because of immigrant competition. They recommended the country slash legal immigration to 1970s levels.

Some immigration experts question whether it makes sense to allow so many immigrants with low levels of education from poor, underdeveloped countries when the United States needs to compete globally in industries requiring high levels of education, creativity, and know-how. Mexican immigrants arrive with an average of five to nine years of education.

Others experts focus on how adding more than a million immigrants a year to the United States' population affects overcrowding of parks, freeways, and the environment. Immigration accounted for more than half of the 33 million new U.S. residents in the 1990s. With nearly 300 million people, the United States has almost five times as many residents as when Ellis Island welcomed new arrivals.

In Los Angeles County, the surge in immigrants helped cause the poverty rate to nearly double, to 25 percent, between 1980 and 1997. The effect, at least in the short term: a sea of poor and working-class neighborhoods amid islands of affluence.