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| Street corner jobs? |
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| Friday, 21 April 2006 | |
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By Domenico Maceri “They’re standing on the corner, trying to be picked up for day jobs,” stated Glenna Twing, with clear disgust in her voice, referring to presumed undocumented workers in Mesa, Arizona. To Twing, illegal immigrants who broke American laws deserve nothing but contempt. Twing’s comments reflect an inability to see the tragic situation of desperate people looking for work. Looking beyond the “crime” undocumented workers may have committed makes you understand them as human beings. The people standing at a street corner are driven by a desire to work which will enable them to feed families either in the U.S. or in another country. They are in a country whose language they mostly ignore. They live in fear of being grabbed by immigration authorities and ending back in their home country whose poverty they tried to escape. Making it to the U.S. is not just dangerous but also expensive for them. Because of the crackdown at the border, entering the U.S. means having to hire a smuggler. That costs about $2,000 to $ 3,000, an expensive proposition. When they are in the U.S. and get hired for a day’s work, they are often paid little and it’s not unusual being cheated. Their vulnerable position makes them unlikely to complain if the verbal agreement with a contractor is broken. Of course, not all undocumented workers stand at a street corners looking for work. Many of them find more “stable” jobs in agriculture picking fruits and vegetables. Why do they get hired to do that work? Simple. Americans simply will not do it. The pay is low and the work is hard. It can also be dangerous. Some undocumented workers die of heat stroke in California’s hot summers where temperatures sometimes reach more than 100 degrees. But lately growers have been having a tough time finding enough people to pick crops. The lack of agricultural workers is due to a considerable extent on the crackdown at the border. Crossing into the U.S. from Mexico used to be relatively simple. Now the easy entry points have been eliminated and entering the U.S. requires the services of a smuggler and crossing in isolated areas in the Arizona desert. It can be a deadly journey. Several hundred people die on a yearly basis as they try to get to jobs in agriculture that Americans reject. But if people work in agriculture they become invisible. Unless you think about the person who picked the lettuce you’re having in your salad. Or the fruit you are about to eat. If people are standing at a street corner, waiting for someone to pick them up in a truck for a day’s job, they cause concern. In this case, undocumented workers are near our houses and that bothers us. We’d also be bothered if we saw the working conditions of those who sew most of the clothes we wear. Often they work in almost unbearable conditions and are paid less than a dollar an hour. But these people work in far away countries and we don’t see them. The person standing at a street corner, though, is a constant reminder that poverty exists. We wish it did not, but it does. Poverty also means being powerless. If undocumented workers had power, they’d change the law which would enable them to sell their services just like companies can sell heir products across borders through NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). Ironically the crackdown at the border has reduced the availability of undocumented workers and companies are beginning to feel the pinch. Thus there is some serious discussion about guest worker programs to provide cheap manual labor to America’s labor-starved companies. Hopefully, if a guest workers program is set up, it will not be an echo of the infamous Bracero program of the 1950s. ==================== Domenico Maceri (www.languageblogger.blogspot.com), PhD, UC Santa Barbara, teaches foreign languages at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, CA. |
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