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Immigration See other Immigration Articles Title: Confronting the real issues of illegal immigration Confronting the real issues of illegal immigration Monday, May 02, 2005 Recently, President Bush renewed his call for a guest-worker program for immigrants to fill jobs that "no American is willing to take." But what exactly are these jobs? American citizens pick crops; they wash dishes; they clean up construction sites. The truth is that, with nearly 8 million unemployed, there is no such thing as a "job that Americans won't do." For American workers, the problem with undocumented immigrants is not their presence but their legal status. In one industry after another, an increase in undocumented workers has meant a decrease in wages. Because they live with the knowledge that their employer can deport them with a single phone call, these workers accept conditions that no American citizen would put up with. This is why farmworkers, for instance, are so often cheated out of minimum wage, forced to work in fields sprayed with toxic chemicals or made to live in huts without modern plumbing. This is what "Americans won't do" -- nor should we. But as long as workers are too scared to complain -- no matter how low the wage or how bad the conditions -- job standards in these industries will always be too low for Americans to accept. Unfortunately, the Bush proposal doesn't solve this problem; it makes it worse. Guest workers will not be granted a visa for the United States, but for a particular employer. If their employer decides he doesn't like them -- for any reason -- they will be kicked out of the country. Thus, the Bush proposal simply offers a stamp of legality to current practices without changing anything in the dynamics that are destroying American jobs. Working conditions in these industries will still be dismal because they will still be based on the level of what's acceptable to people who cannot afford to displease their supervisors. The most important supporters of the president's proposal are a coalition of business lobbies called the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition. From their name, one might assume that the group is concerned with securing visas for highly trained specialists. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. The coalition pushing Bush's proposal reads like a who's who of the service industry: the National Restaurant Association, the American Health Care Association, Associated Builders and Contractors, and the National Retail Federation, among others. For business lobbyists, the "essential workers" who need to be brought in from Central America include waiters and waitresses, nurses and orderlies, groundskeepers and housekeepers, meatpackers and construction workers. For the past 20 years, millions of American families have had their dreams destroyed as manufacturing jobs were exported to Mexico or China. For the people left behind, the one hope was to find work in the service industry -- hospitals, supermarkets, hotels and construction sites -- that simply cannot be moved abroad. With the Bush proposal, we are now witnessing an attempt to destroy job standards in the service industries just as surely as they were undermined in manufacturing. If the workplace cannot be moved to Mexico, these employers reason, let's bring Mexico to the workplace. According to corporate lobbyists, the critical challenge facing the country is how to keep business going "when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs." One wonders what planet these people are living on. Are we really supposed to believe that, with 8 million unemployed Americans, there are millions of construction and hospital jobs going begging? The truth is that our nation's problem is exactly the opposite of that pitched by employer associations. It's not a shortage of workers, but a shortage of decently paying jobs. But if the president succeeds, wages in these industries, like in manufacturing, will be driven down to the level of the most desperate and fearful worker. The only way out of this is by granting amnesty for everyone who is already working here -- not citizenship, but full legal rights. Amnesty is not about "rewarding illegal activity," it's about protecting the quality of American jobs. When no employee in the United States is afraid to insist on fair treatment, wages and working conditions will be restored to decent levels. Until that happens, no matter what rhetorical dressing the Bush administration puts on things, its policy is still the same: big employers using exploitable immigrants to destroy the American job market. Gordon Lafer is a professor of labor studies at the University of Oregon. He spent the past semester as a visiting professor of Migration Studies at the Universidad Latina in Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico.
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