March 9, 2000
I.N.S. Looks the Other Way on Illegal Immigrant
Labor
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Economic
Scene: Demise of Long-Held Theory on Inflation and Unemployment
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
HICAGO --
Salvador Silva often used to worry that immigration agents would raid
the commercial laundry where he works. If they did, he had a plan. He
would jump onto a table, hoist himself into an air-conditioning duct,
and hide there until the agents left. He practiced this more than
once.
"We lived with the uncertainty of raids," said Mr. Silva, who is 26
and has worked illegally in this country for 10 years, ever since he
walked across a bridge from Juárez in Mexico to El Paso and flew to
Chicago to join a brother. Only now is he beginning to relax. "For the
first time," he said, "I don't fear the raids."
Such raids have all but stopped around the country over the last
year. In a booming economy running short of labor, hundreds of
thousands of illegal immigrants are increasingly tolerated in the
nation's workplaces. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has
made crossing the border harder than ever, stepping up patrols and
prosecuting companies that smuggle in aliens or blatantly recruit
them. But once inside the country, illegal immigrants are now largely
left alone. Even when these people are discovered, arrests for the
purpose of deportation are much less frequent; such arrests dropped to
about 8,600 last year from 22,000 just two years earlier, the I.N.S.
reports.
The agency now concentrates on picking up aliens who have committed
a crime. The rest are in effect allowed to help American employers
fill jobs. "It is just the market at work, drawing people to jobs, and
the I.N.S. has chosen to concentrate its actions on aliens who are a
danger to the community," said Robert L. Bach, the agency's associate
commissioner for policy and planning.
The new lenience helps explain why overall wage increases have been
less than many economists and policy makers had expected, given an
unemployment rate of only 4 percent and a strong demand for people to
fill jobs that pay $8 an hour or less, which is 25 percent of all
jobs. Immigrants -- legal and illegal -- have fed the pool of people
available to take these lower-paying jobs. But Alan Greenspan,
chairman of the Federal Reserve, told Congress last month that as job
growth expands, the pool keeps shrinking. That is one reason the Fed
is raising interest rates to slow the economy before wage pressures
become inflationary.
Mr. Greenspan and many other economists, though, are looking only
at people living in this country, including an estimated six million
illegal immigrants, as potential candidates to feed that pool. But the
more tolerant I.N.S. policy may be inducing more workers to immigrate,
particularly from Mexico, because -- once they manage to get here --
they face less risk in taking a job. That would dilute the labor
shortage -- and the wage pressure that worries Mr. Greenspan. In fact,
it may already be doing so.
"None of us really knows how big the pool of available workers is,"
said Jared Bernstein, a labor economist at the Economic Policy
Institute, "but the more lenient stance can only increase the number
of people available abroad for jobs in the United States."
The commercial laundry industry in Chicago, where Mr. Silva works,
clearly benefits from the Immigration Service's live-and-let-work
approach. Thirty companies wash and iron the city's hospital and
restaurant linens, hotel sheets and towels, and factory uniforms. Half
of their 2,800 employees are illegal immigrants, mainly Hispanics,
according to Unite, the union that has organized most of them in
recent months.
Last fall, Unite negotiated contracts that recognized the illegal
status of some workers, and shielded them. One clause requires an
employer to bar an I.N.S. raid unless the agents have a search
warrant. And a company must notify the union if it gets wind of a
coming raid.
"Sometimes I did not want to go to work," Mr. Silva said. "I saw
reports on TV of immigration raids and people being led away and I
worried that would happen to me. Now the union contract is reassuring,
and I no longer see raids on television."
A third clause states that when former employees are rehired with
new papers -- even new names -- after their original documents are
found to be false, they retain their seniority and resume their old
pay level. Union scale goes as high as $8.75 an hour.
"The Immigration Service has never had the resources to arrest
every illegal alien, and now there is a large number and a demand from
many companies to employ them," said Brian R. Perryman, the agency's
director in Chicago. "Once they come into the Chicago metropolitan
area, with its 6.5 million people, it is hard to stop the process."
A downturn in the booming economy and any resulting uptick in
unemployment could lead the I.N.S. to revive its pursuit of illegal
immigrants at work. Even now, some Republican members of Congress are
pushing for legislation that would step up efforts to prevent illegal
immigrants from working in the United States. Certainly, the more open
policy today stands in sharp contrast to the 1980's and even the
mid-1990's, when unemployment was higher.
The new attitude here is the opposite of the approach in most
European countries, where unemployment rates are higher than in the
United States and governments have tightened immigration laws.
But right now the route to work in the United States is fairly
smooth. One reason is that employment laws are easy for illegal
immigrants to evade. Workers are required to offer proof of
eligibility -- a Social Security card and a picture ID. But
counterfeits are easily purchased for $60 to $80 in this city's
immigrant neighborhoods, a favorite being a rose-colored
resident-alien card, which two immigrants showed to this reporter.
The laminated cards displayed photographs that were accurate but
fingerprints the workers said were not theirs. "The birth date isn't
mine either, or the signature, although the name is right," said Angel
Hernandez Lopez, a 25-year-old Mexican. "For $80, they do everything,"
he said of the counterfeiters.
Employers can be fined for knowingly hiring illegal workers, but
they also risk being sued for discrimination if they challenge
documents that on the surface seem authentic. What's more, the Social
Security Administration checks only once a year for numbers that fail
to match legitimate pension accounts, and when it finds a discrepancy,
it never assumes it is immigrant fraud as opposed to a mismatch
resulting from a divorce, a job switch or a name changed through
marriage.
"We know that illegal immigrants are a factor," said Norman
Goldstein, a senior financial executive at Social Security, "but I
cannot quantify for you how that factor compares with other factors."
When a letter calling attention to a discrepancy does finally go
out, it goes to the employer or the employee, or both, but not the
Immigration Service, which cannot by law be privy to tax matters. Even
when the I.N.S. does get involved, the employee is now usually given
time to correct the problem. For illegal workers that means time to
change names, get new papers or change jobs.
An illegal immigrant is at little risk these days, Mr. Bach said,
"unless the employer turns a worker in, and employers usually do that
only to break a union or prevent a strike or that kind of stuff."
Curtailing undocumented workers, then, rests as much with employers
as with the I.N.S., and in an economy short of workers, employers are
not rushing into action. On the contrary, they want the I.N.S. to go
easier as well on highly skilled, college-educated immigrants -- the
engineers, chemists, computer experts and college professors who now
enter the country on special H-1B visas. A coalition of business
groups is lobbying Congress to raise the ceiling on these visas to
195,000 a year from 115,000.
"In a perfect world, immigration at all levels would be entirely
market-driven, with appropriate protections of course for native
workers," said Sandra J. Boyd, of the National Association of
Manufacturers, who leads the coalition.
Short of this goal, the temporary- help agencies that have sprung
up in storefronts in Chicago's Hispanic neighborhoods are benefiting
from the new leniency. The $5.15-an-hour minimum-wage jobs these
agencies offer are usually the first that arriving immigrants manage
to land. They have settled by the thousands in old blue-collar
neighborhoods like Pilsen, southwest of the Loop. Their growing
presence in this city has given Illinois the nation's fifth-largest
immigrant population, behind California, New York, Florida and Texas.
Six temp agencies near West 18th Street and Blue Island Avenue, in
the heart of Pilsen, become predawn gathering places for immigrants
seeking work. More than 30 waited expectantly one day in late February
at Ron's Temporary Help Services, some perched in what was once the
window display of this former store. An old iron radiator heated the
room.
The immigrants, mostly from Mexico, hoped that Gloria de la Torre,
the 36-year-old manager -- herself an illegal immigrant until three
years ago, she says -- will favor them with one of the jobs that go
out by the thousands each day from 100 agencies like Ron's in Hispanic
neighborhoods. That is up from 50 in 1985, according to Nik Theodore,
research director at the Center for Urban Economic Development at the
University of Illinois in Chicago.
During the peak demand for these workers, from April through
September, more than 30,000 a day are placed by the temp agencies, Mr.
Theodore says, basing his estimate on his field research. The Ron's
office that Ms. de la Torre manages sends out 1,000 workers over three
shifts in those months, she says. But in late February, the flow is
down to 100 a day, and two vans are double- parked outside waiting to
take some immigrants to jobs in the suburbs.
The temp agencies deal in a variety of work -- assembling coolers,
eyeglass cases and other products; making sandwiches for airline
meals; stuffing envelopes; construction; packaging perfumes; painting
machinery; staffing warehouses that ship merchandise ordered over the
Internet.
Motorola is a regular customer, using workers from the temp
agencies to pack computer monitors in shipping cartons, among other
tasks. The agencies, not Motorola, have the responsibility for making
certain that the people sent to Motorola are legally authorized to
work, a Motorola press officer said.
The people Ms. de la Torre sends out all present her with the
necessary documents, which she accepts at face value. Paychecks come
with stubs that detail deductions for taxes, Social Security and, for
those who travel in vans to their jobs, $3.50 a day for
transportation.
"I have never been visited by Immigration," Ms. de la Torre said.
But the precarious status of an illegal immigrant makes them easy
victims for exploitation, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. says. They are filling the
low-wage jobs readily enough, but they lack the bargaining power to
get higher on the pay scale, or upgrade their working conditions, the
labor organization says. That is a big reason they are in demand, it
adds.
Unite's contracts covering laundry workers are an attempt to
counter this situation. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. also called for the
legalization of those already in the country so they can be more
easily represented.
