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March 9, 2000

I.N.S. Looks the Other Way on Illegal Immigrant Labor


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    By LOUIS UCHITELLE

    CHICAGO -- 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.



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