The following op-ed appeared in the Asheville Daily Planet this month.
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North of the Border
by Cecil Bothwell
In the late 1970s a friend of mine moved to Tucson, Arizona, where he took a job with a roofing contractor. Over the next ten years he became a hot-mop expert, endlessly repeating the process of installing layers of tar paper, steaming liquified asphalt, and gravel. Working on top of buildings in southern Arizona in summer heat, carrying buckets of stinking molten tar and spreading tons of gravel is about as unpleasant a job as I have ever done. And I did it, joining him on a couple of jobs when I traveled there in the early 80s.
When I worked with Terry he told me that I was the first Anglo he had seen on a roofing job other than himself. The Mexicans he worked with, day in and day out, had often commented on that fact as well. At least in those decades, no white person cared to do that work, although it paid well and there were plenty of roofs, new and old, that needed mopping.
This past fall there was news from farms across the country that crops were going unharvested for lack of migrant farm hands. Immigrant workers were in short supply, and farmers asserted that it was fear of federal enforcement that was keeping undocumented agricultural crews away—although the Great Recession may have played a role as well. Other reports indicate that the immigrant tide has shifted during the current employment doldrums.
One onion farmer near Vidalia, Georgia, was quoted to the effect that he tried hiring some field hands through a local temp agency but that none of the people who showed up lasted half a day. The work was too hot and too hard, and his local hires walked off the job.
Some would posit a genetic factor in the willingness or ability of Mexican workers to engage in brutally unpleasant work for pretty meager wages, but that’s obvious nonsense. Human beings who are acclimated to hot weather adopt coping skills, as did Terry, changing diet, water intake and clothing habits. And anyone who needs a job badly enough can drive himself to do what needs to be done, as the temp workers in Vidalia clearly did not.
America needs its immigrant work force. There is simply no getting around that fact. However, politicians of a certain stripe are eager to fan the flames of racial prejudice and nationalism . They pretend that building walls or enlisting more police will solve our nation’s woes, and peddling fear of the “other” is an easy game.
The principal scare tactic is to claim that undocumented workers are stealing jobs. To the extent that this is true, it isn’t because employers prefer non-English-speaking employees, but because they will either do work others will not do, are more expert at the work needing to be done, or … and this is the biggie … will do the work for less money. And the reason those people will work for less is because they are in no position to demand fair wages or safer working conditions, because they are “illegal.”
If one deems this to be unfair, either to the citizens who miss out on jobs due to cheap competition, or to the workers so-employed (and I do, on both counts), the obvious solution is to streamline the path to citizenship.
Meaningful immigration reform must include more work permits for seasonal workers and an expedited process for naturalization. It is beyond crazy that people who live here, work here and raise their families here wait ten and fifteen years to obtain citizenship, and no one whose family arrived on this continent voluntarily in decades or centuries past has any basis for yammering about today’s newcomers. Where did you say you’re from?
The other complaint one hears is that undocumented workers pay no taxes. That argument is fallacious on multiple counts. Low wage workers pay approximately nothing in income taxes. Their tax burden comes from sales and gas taxes, both of which are paid regardless of the card in your wallet. Immigrant workers who offer fake Social Security numbers to employers who then withhold taxes are actually benefitting the rest of us, since they pay into the system with no chance to ever benefit. And those who rent or buy homes contribute property taxes like anyone else.
No fence, no border patrol, no rash of deportation is going to “fix” immigration. And while the hate-mongers spew their invective, our food is rotting in the fields.
