Margarito has a decision to make: After more than a decade of living and working illegally in the U.S., is it time to go back home to Mexico? He and his wife lost their jobs recently (he from a pallet factory, she from Burger King, both for having invalid Social Security numbers). He has been looking for other work, but his search is greatly complicated by measure 5-190, a ballot initiative enthusiastically approved by his neighbors and former colleagues that will, if it survives a court challenge, impose a $10,000 fine on anyone in the county who gives Margarito — or any other undocumented worker — a new job.
If Margarito, 39 (who, like the other illegal immigrants in this story, requested that only his first name be used), leaves the U.S., it will qualify as a self-deportation, which has long been a grail of the Galahads who wish to protect America's borders. What could be simpler, after all, than watching the 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants — too many to forcibly remove from the country — simply leave on their own?
To help nudge undocumented workers out the door, states, towns and counties have been busily legislating against them. In Georgia, both houses passed a bill that would make the written driver's license test English-only. Farmers Branch, Texas, continues to fight for the right to require that all renters in town show proof of citizenship. In 2008, statehouses passed more than 200 laws relating to immigration, the majority of them looking to clamp down on illegal immigrants or their employers. And there are plenty of signs that as joblessness grows, so too could populist outrage against undocumented workers and their families. Think of Fox News host Glenn Beck and his suppurating monologues about dark forces allied against real Americans and you can get a sense of the escalated tensions facing illegal immigrants. (See pictures of the fence between the U.S. and Mexico.)
As a candidate, Barack Obama campaigned on a moderate mix of increased border security and a path to legality for long-term residents, but the economic crisis has pushed immigration reform off the White House agenda. At the end of March, Vice President Joe Biden told a summit of Latin American leaders that "it's difficult to tell a constituency while unemployment is rising, they're losing their jobs and their homes, that what we should do is in fact legalize [undocumented workers] and stop all deportation." Congress is similarly disinclined to tackle the controversies of reform this year, so the near future of illegal immigration will ride on millions of decisions like the one facing Margarito.
There's just one problem: illegal immigrants aren't going, at least not yet. Their ties to their home countries have grown too tenuous; their investment in their off-label version of the American Dream is too great. Tougher border enforcement makes leaving a more final and difficult decision. They don't go home because they know they probably won't get to return. This has Americans in St. Helens, Ore., and elsewhere facing a set of decisions of their own: How hard should they press the case against illegal immigrants? And will putting more pressure on the undocumented end up damaging the community in the process?
Payroll City
St. Helens, a town of about 12,00, lies along a riverfront rust belt that extends northwest from Portland as the Columbia River leads to the Pacific Ocean. From the downtown shoreline, where the historic courthouse stands near the chain-link fence surrounding an aging lumberyard, one can watch freighters laden with Chinese goods heading east to Portland and then watch them returning with little or no American merchandise out to the open ocean. (See pictures of the high-seas border patrol.)
It's just one sign that long before there was an immigration crisis in St. Helens, there was a globalization crisis. "This is a timber town that never came out of the recession in the 1980s," says Marcy Westerling, a longtime resident and pro-immigrant activist. Blessed by an abundance of Douglas fir and hemlock, the town once hummed with pulp plants, stud mills and palletmakers. A few decades ago, though, the mighty Columbia began delivering logs from Canada, then ready-made office paper from Asia. The financial swoon of 2008 was just a final insult to what remained of the town's manufacturing base. Most of the major employers have closed in the past six months or drastically cut hours and staff. The town, whose motto in the good times was "The Payroll City," is on the brink of economic ruin or, perhaps worse, of becoming a bedroom community for Portland, with no economic life of its own.
See pictures of the U.S. border patrol tracking illegal immigrants.
Watch a TIME video on border-crossing adventure tourism.
Local contractor Wayne Mayo, 54, has watched this long slump up close. Like many other people in St. Helens, he used to work in the timber industry, as a lumber broker. But his more recent turn, as a general contractor, brought him face-to-face with an economic force he felt he could influence: illegal immigration. Although St. Helens has a relatively small Hispanic community — some legal, some illegal — the town is just 30 miles (about 50 km) from major population centers like Portland and Beaverton, close enough that out-of-town contractors with crews of underpaid, underdocumented construction workers began bidding on jobs around town eight years ago, says Mayo. Local contractors had a stark choice: either go out of business or stop paying their workers enough to support their families. (See pictures of three generations of immigrant workers.)
Mayo is a former lay minister whose brand of genial grievance would make him a perfect AM-radio host. He had long been a presence in the local Op-Ed pages, campaigning vigorously against everything from a porn store near the high school to an unsafe highway pass. He started speaking out on illegal immigration, hectoring elected officials and writing a stream of e-mails to local newspapers. Eventually he wrote a ballot initiative, a bill to levy fines against employers of illegal immigrants. He was outspent and outorganized by regional activist groups — he raised $430, they raised more than $70,000 — but his proposal still won by 15 percentage points. (A more ostentatious second proposition, to post 4-by-8-ft. [1.2 by 2.4 m] plywood signs at certain job sites declaring them for "Legal Workers Only," failed at the ballot box.) Like many others in the fight against illegal immigration, he sees himself as a reluctant warrior drawn to action by federal timidity. If the government had done its job and enforced laws against illegal immigration, he argues, he wouldn't have had to go through the initiative process. "Just start putting a few folks in jail and the world will change," he says.
Mayo's bill has won him plenty of enemies among the illegal immigrants I spoke with. None knew him personally, but they spoke of him with equal parts fear and resentment. "That is the man who started this racism," says Margarito's uncle Ramón. "He is the Deceiver."
But Mayo's supporters are just as impassioned. At a February demonstration against Mayo's law, a passel of counterprotesters, VFW types in trucker caps, spoke reverently about "Pastor Mayo" and the movement he started. Mayo didn't show up for the demonstration because he — shrewdly — didn't want to be seen as endorsing the idea that his opposition to illegal immigration is necessarily an attack on Hispanics in general.
There are inevitably some racial tensions in St. Helens. Most residents probably don't care to know much more about Mexico than what they can glean from the menu of Muchas Gracias or the two other Mexican restaurants in town. Westerling, whose Rural Organizing Project canvassed St. Helens and surrounding towns as it fought against 5-190, says voters were truly undecided about the measure until the fall, when the worsening economy hardened their opinions. "Immigrants are serving as a great dog for people to kick when they're frustrated," says Westerling. But there is a sincerity to the most ardent activists against illegal immigration in St. Helens, a sense that their town is trapped in the swale of a very bad economic cycle and that the undocumented workers might be making things worse.
Travis Chamberlain, 30, shares this sincerity. I met him halfway through the protest march, where Columbia Boulevard starts to sag toward the Columbia River. Tall and broad-shouldered, he was leaning against a stone wall, filming the protesters — for Mayo, he said — with a small Taiwanese Aiptek HD camera. After the marchers passed, Chamberlain lit a Marlboro Light and climbed up the embankment to where his wife Kristy, 30, and friend Heather Douglas, 28, were drinking Starbucks coffee drinks near two homemade signs they had hung for the occasion: "Our Country, Our Jobs" and "We Welcome Legal Immigrants."
See pictures of protests for immigration reform.
See pictures of migrant workers from the gulf states.
Travis pointed past the empty cul-de-sac toward a huge, silent box of a building. "That's where I worked," he said, "the plant with no smoke coming out of it." Even without a college degree, he had been making $24 an hour there, at the Boise Cascade paper mill, which was the town's largest employer. And then he was fired, along with most of the other employees, in January. Kristy had been running a home day-care center, but that income vanished when laid-off millworkers started taking care of their kids themselves. Douglas had her own sorry landmark, the ranch house across the street that her family abandoned because they couldn't afford the payments. The three friends couldn't say illegal immigration had visited all this hardship on them, but they felt it was just another threat to their town. That's why they were protesting the march and why they were supporting Mayo. "[Mayo] has been slandered," said Travis. "I'll take the heat from now on if that helps. Let them come to me."
The Outmigration Myth
Those who battle illegal immigration make an attractively simple argument: Pressuring illegal immigrants will make them go away, thereby saving jobs for Americans. The enthusiasm for the prospect of a great outmigration is such that pundits and politicians began lining up early to take credit for it. Last summer the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which favors tougher enforcement of immigration laws, released a report with the somewhat triumphal title "Homeward Bound." Its authors argued that census data showed that approximately 1.3 million illegal immigrants had left the U.S. from August 2007 to May 2008. At that rate, their number would be halved in five years. Because the drop-off predated the worst of the recession, the report argued, the decline showed that the get-tough policies passed at the end of the Bush Administration were working. Members of Congress like Republican Representative Tom Feeney of Florida were on hand for a press conference with the report's authors. He celebrated the end of "perverse incentives" that had kept illegal immigrants in the U.S. "Obviously," Feeney said, "illegals are getting the message." (Watch TIME's video "Blocking the Border Fence.")
The celebration was premature. It remains almost impossible to accurately track the population of illegals using data from the census, which doesn't ask people their legal status. Harder still is to tell whether people are leaving the U.S. or simply deciding not to enter in the first place. (Many researchers believe it's the latter.) There's anecdotal evidence that more young workers are staying home in the south than before. Border-patrol arrests are down 24% this year on the U.S.-Mexico border. But for those who are in the U.S., the twin pressures — increased enforcement and a worsening economy — have actually made it harder for them to return home.
Salvador, 27, emigrated from El Salvador eight months ago and is resolved to stay. He knows that he arrived at perhaps the worst time in the past 20 years, confronting a cauldron of economic and legal risk, but he says those pressures can't compare with what he faces back home: a young wife who hasn't been able to work since experiencing complications during childbirth four years ago and a rural hometown where the global downturn hit with brutal effect almost two years ago.
One unintended consequence of increased enforcement on the U.S.-Mexico border is that smugglers are charging far more than they used to. Fewer people may be crossing, but those who are already in the U.S. feel more compelled to stay just to pay off their debts. Coyotes charged Salvador $8,500 for his journey; he is paying it off in $150 installments every two weeks (the same amount he sends his family). At that rate, it will take him two more years just to break even on the debt. He doesn't fear detention; he fears failure. "I'm afraid of not making it work here," he says. "It needs to work."
Communities like St. Helens often have more invested in the newcomers' success than they might imagine. A Pew Hispanic Center survey in November found that the median income for noncitizen Hispanics fell at a rate almost six times as high as that of other workers in 2008. In January 2009, a new report said more than half that group reported being worried that their home will end up in foreclosure. Many illegal immigrants are homeowners, and driving them from their houses would be a Pyrrhic victory for any community fighting blight. Salvador's father-in-law Alejandro, an undocumented immigrant who owns a home in St. Helens, says the Anglos who target him hurt themselves. "I own this house and am making my mortgage payments on time," he says. "But what happens if I lose my job? Then the bank takes my house, and this place becomes the city's problem."
See pictures of Americans in their homes.
See 50 authentic U.S. travel experiences.
Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute, says an overlooked complexity of the immigration issue is that one worker's leaving doesn't necessarily equal one job free for an American. "For every job that comes into an economy or leaves, there is a part of another job that comes or leaves with it," he says. In other words, if Salvador and his father-in-law leave, it isn't just the bank that would see its revenues go down. So would the Safeway down the street from their house and the Ace store where they buy spark plugs for their car and hardware for their home. These may be slight hits, but businesses are working on rail-thin margins, and even small reductions in revenues could result in the loss of hours or an entire job for someone else — an American worker. It's a reminder that in St. Helens as elsewhere, undocumented workers, whose numbers grew wildly during the boom years, were an integral part of the growing economy. (See pictures of Mexico's drug wars.)
Papademetriou also argues that undocumented workers will play a role in getting the economy on its feet again. They represent, he says, exactly the kind of workforce that employers will turn to at the first blush of recovery. "If you're going to ramp business up quickly, where are you going to get the workers?" he says. Businesses may have new orders coming in, but they're not going to hire permanent workers until they're sure the recession is over.
Choosing to Stay
All this could be putting St. Helens at a competitive disadvantage to other towns in neighboring counties. Because the choice facing Margarito in the absence of a federal plan on immigration, it turns out, isn't St. Helens vs. Mexico but St. Helens vs. Woodburn, a heavily Hispanic town 60 miles (about 100 km) south with businesses that are still hiring (including at least one firm that just relocated from St. Helens).
Margarito and his wife would not have chosen to go back to Mexico anyway. Margarito's 8-year-old son, one of four U.S.-born children, is autistic. They've tried to find a program in Mexico that would work for him. There was a trip to Puerto Vallarta for dolphin therapy, which yielded little. They went to Morelia — the hometown of Margarito's wife — and found that the public schools would offer him only one hour of special education every three days, compared with 24 hours each week in St. Helens. All of which they could handle in the short term if it meant waiting out the recession in Mexico and returning to the U.S. when jobs were available again.
But they have no such guarantees. So Margarito and his wife will stay in Oregon, but not in St. Helens. One of the couple's last paid assignments in the town was a typical task for people who have been made unemployable by 5-190: a store manager hired them and a friend to clean out the back of the store overnight. "It was disgusting work," says Margarito. At the end of the five-hour job, they were given $60 total, or about $4 an hour for each worker. Margarito cajoled $20 more out of the boss for the three to split, but it's clear to him that he can't raise a family by working in St. Helens anymore.
Over drinks at El Tapatio, a half-empty restaurant near the highway, Margarito, his wife and uncle talked about the financial crisis — how Wall Street had binged on mortgages while Washington looked the other way. The parallels to immigration were pointed: during the boom years, the U.S. binged on cheap labor while politicians neither legalized workers nor prevented them from sneaking across the border. It was a grossly laissez-faire policy that has left everyone — Americans and immigrants alike — with a postboom hangover.
As tempting as it is in places like St. Helens to try to send the illegal immigrants packing, it would be a bit like letting AIG or GM collapse: it might feel good and it might be morally justified, but in the long run it would just increase the misery on Main Street. Like it or not, with more than 10 million Margaritos from coast to coast, illegal America is simply too big to fail.
No comments:
Post a Comment