America's Economic Refugees

In an overregulated economy, the best preparation for survival may be a Third World education

Glenn Garvin from the November 1993 issue

(Page 2 of 8)

They sew designer jeans in backstreet warehouses. They tend fastidious gardens on the elegant side of town. They sell fried plantains from their back porches. They drive rickety gypsy cabs. They tend children in makeshift home day-care centers. They vend cheap toys and exquisite hand-crafted jewelry on street corners. They wash dishes in steamy restaurant kitchens. They install drywall for unlicensed construction crews. They hustle painted velvet portraits of Elvis at flea markets. They repair cars in their driveways.

What links these seemingly disparate jobs is that government regulations make it difficult to do them legally, or the pay is low, or both. That makes them unattractive to many Americans. But Third World immigrants simply don’t care. Penurious employers and overbearing governments are nothing new to them.

"I was walking along Roosevelt Avenue in New York recently–that’s in Jackson Heights, a heavily Hispanic area–and I saw a street vendor who was handing out leaflets," says Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, a Johns Hopkins sociologist who studies the informal economy. "I took one, and it was announcing a meeting of a new organization dedicated to stopping police harassment of vendors.

"I was a little surprised, because most of these vendors are illegal immigrants,and they usually keep a low profile So Iasked him ‘You don’t have papers do you?’ I thought he was gomg to slap me. ‘Papers?’ he said. ‘Who cares about that? We’re just trying to stop the police from taking our goods and locking us up.’

"To him, cops are the bad guys. As a member of the international work force, he judges his right to work as a fundamental human right that no cop, and no state, can abridge."

It’s common to hear politicians and self-proclaimed ethnic leaders complain that immigrants are exploited. Some of them clearly are mistreated–cheated out of agreed-upon wages, denied medical care for on-the-job accidents, or even beaten by abusive employers. Almost inevitably that kind of abuse is directed at illegal aliens who cannot seek redress from a legal system that will expel them if it can lay its hands on them.

But abuse is a separate matter from low wages and unpleasant working conditions. Where politicians see exploitation, immigrants often see opportunity.

"The political figureheads have a lot different agenda than the people on the street," says Los Angeles business consultant Jose Legaspi, himself a Mexican immigrant. "The people on the street come from another country, and they want a job–any job. They may get minimum wage, or even less, but it’s a lot more money than they’ve ever had before.

"All of the sudden they can have a nicer home than the one they left, a refrigerator–which maybe they never had before–and a clunky car–which no way could they ever have had. Then they start advancing, learning English, new job skills. Maybe they go to trade schools, or learn nursing or office work. Maybe only their children will be able to do that. But either way, it’s better than it was in their country. In other countries, a lot of times, they would work for worse wages all their lives, and that’s it. There’s nothing to learn or no way to learn it.

"You can call some of these conditions exploitation, and maybe some of them are. But they give the immigrant a way to advance. Native-born American poor people, the ones who’ve been here three generations or more, a lot of them can’t advance because they’ve bought into the welfare mentality–that the law entitles you to certain things,and you shouldn’t work unless you can have them. By his willingness to accept lousy jobs–to be exploited, if you want to call it that–the immigrant is going to do better in the long run."

The most fundamental factor that sends so many immigrants to the informal economy is their legal status–or, more properly, their lack of it. Some 300,000 foreigners slip across U.S. borders each year, most of them looking for work. But the last round of immigration legislation, in 1986, required employers to demand proof of citizenship or a work permit before hiring, which has made it much more difficult for an illegal immigrant to hire on at, say, McDonald’s. He’s more likely to find work with an employer who shares his interest in staying out of sight of the authorities.

"We have to work practically in a clandestine manner," says Miguel, 45, who came to Miami last year from Nicaragua on a legitimate business visa that has long since expired. In Managua, he taught mathematics at the Polytechnic University. (He left because he was sick of the Marxist domination of higher education that persists in Nicaragua even after the Sandinistas’ 1990 electoral defeat.) In Miami, he works in construction, demolishing drywall on renovation projects. He is bemused by his career change.

"There are advertisements in the newspapers for mathematics teachers at some of the [bilingual] high schools here," Miguel says, shaking a finger for emphasis. "I could do that job. But I can’t get the permission. When I was much younger, I had experience as a cook at McDonald’s in Managua. There’s an advertisement in the newspaper for cooks at McDonald’s here. But I can’t get the permission....Businesses need workers, and we Nicaraguans want to work. But the government won’t let us. It’s a little contradictory, no? It’s a vicious cycle, no?"

But Miguel’s story illustrates more than the contradictions in American attitudes about immigration. It also demonstrates some of the complexities in the informal economy. Contrary to what you might expect, his job pays $4.25 to $5.00 an hour, depending on the project–that is, minimum wage or better. So if his boss is willing to pay legal wages, why does he hire illegal aliens? Because the whole company is illegal, operating without a contractor’s license. And why is that? Because Dade County, though still in a construction boom as it repairs the damage done by last year’s hurricane, makes it extremely difficult to get a contractor’s license–a little protectionist hanky-panky between the county government and the big local construction firms, who didn’t want to share their windfall with any newcomers.

The predictable result has been an explosion of unlicensed construction, fueled by the twin appetites of homeowners to get their houses repaired and Miami’s huge immigrant population to work. "Even before the hurricane, there was a lot of unlicensed work," says Pepe Collado, an organizer for the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. "Now it’s just ridiculous. I would say at least 60 percent of the construction work in Dade County is being done without licenses and permits."