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Immigration
The following article originally appeared in Salt of the Earth. It is posted here for private use only. It may not be reprinted in whole or in part without the permission of Salt of the Earth magazine.
Why is there such a backlash
against immigrants?
Kevin Clarke
SOME HAVE COME FORMALLY DRESSED in their best Sunday clothes; others have arrived right from their jobs in jeans and work shirts. Some have come together as families; even families of two and three generations are present here. Others are couples or single men and women. They have come from many countries—Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico—and they have come from neighborhoods all over Chicago's South Side.
But they have all come to the basement of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church for the same reason. To work through the final stages—the photos, the paperwork, the interviews—that will move them from something called "legal permanent resident" status to U.S. citizenship. Inside, about a dozen volunteers from the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) wait to walk these hopeful Americans through the at-times perplexing process.
Many have waited years to take this step. Julio Escalante first came to the United States almost 40 years ago from Honduras to work on the docks in New Orleans. He is 63 now. "I came here because of the job opportunities, in search of better conditions, in search of a future," he says. Like countless other legal immigrants, Escalante has put off taking these final steps to citizenship for years. Many cling to a hope of someday returning permanently to their homeland. Others hesitate because of the bureaucratic hurdles set up within the citizenship process itself.
"I wasn't interested [in citizenship] at first," he says, "but now I think I should become a citizen . . . so I can be worthy of all the benefits that government provides its citizens. I should have done it a long time ago."
One of the major reasons Escalante came to the United States—his daughter—Maria, is with him here today, also finishing up her citizenship application. She was a child of 3 when her father brought her here, and in her manner and accent there is little to suggest that she is not "American" already. Maria has also brought her U.S.-born children along to watch as two generations of their family become citizens. Her two children are classic embodiments of the American vision: from the many, one. Their father is a young American-born man of Polish stock—proof that the melting pot still simmers in Chicago.* * * THERE ARE MANY VOICES TODAY BEING RAISED in concern about immigrant families like the Escalantes and the thousands of Escalante families throughout the world who hope one day to somehow find their way to America.
"Immigrants are being blamed for a lot of problems they are not responsible for," says Frank Sharry, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum in Washington, D.C.
"With the help of politicians and anti-immigration groups, the American people are being peddled a narcotic called: 'blame the immigrants.' They're distorting the debate and providing easy answers to complex problems. As a result, we're on the verge of slamming the doors on a group of people, who, I think, make America strong."
John Swenson heads the U.S. Catholic Conference's Office of Migration and Refugee Services. "We're in one of our periodic spasms of nativism," he says.
"They're all remarkably similar," says Swenson of these periodic blips. "Immigrants are welcomed during the good times, times of economic optimism. In the downturns, we've reviled them."
Such "spasms of nativism," according to Swenson, are less related to the realities of the immigration experience than they are to the economics and politics of the times.
"The tide will turn again when the country is feeling better about itself, when we're more confident in the economy."
ANTI-IMMIGRANT RHETORIC builds on a few basic assumptions, many of them questionable. Foremost among them is that there is no longer any economic room at the inn for contemporary immigrants—that too many are trying to rush the door.
Perhaps contrary to public perception, most immigrants—85 percent—still enter the U.S. legally. But that doesn't matter much to critics of current immigration policy, who believe too many immigrants are arriving on U.S. shores for the culture and the economy to absorb.
The Urban Institute, a Washington-based policy-research agency that studies immigration-related issues, estimates that somewhere around 1.1 million people emigrate to the United States each year: 700,000 legal immigrants, 100,000 to 150,000 refugees, and perhaps as many as 300,000 undocumented immigrants (those who have entered the U.S. illegally or overstayed legal visas). About 400,000 foreign-born residents either die or return to their nations of origin each year for a net population gain of 700,000 each year.
The best estimates put the current number of undocumented immigrants residing in the U.S. somewhere between 2 and 3 million—roughly 1 percent of the total U.S. population. Taken altogether—both the documented and the undocumented—foreign-born residents still represent less than 9 percent of the nation's population.
That's a lot of people—over 22 million—but that percentage actually represents one of the nation's historic lows in immigration. In the early 20th century, when most immigrants were arriving from Europe instead of Latin America and Asia, as they are today, almost 16 percent of the U.S. population was foreign born.
"This idea that we are somehow being swamped is ridiculous," says Swenson. And, say critics, it is but one of several misinformed assumptions the American public seems to have about the current state of immigration.
Assumption: immigrants cost too much.
POLITICIANS WHO ARE TEMPTED TO FALL BACK on family hagiography to criticize the assumed reliance of current immigrant groups on public aid might want to take a closer look at the record.
"My ancestors, and most of our ancestors, came to this country not with their hands out for welfare checks, they came here for the opportunity for freedom and the opportunity to work," Texas Congress member and Ways and Means Committee Chair Bill Archer intoned in support of a welfare-reform proposal that would cut legal immigrants off public aid.
And yet a 1911 census study reviewed by the Wall Street Journal indicates that more than half of public-welfare recipients in 1909 were immigrants. Immigrants then were three times more likely to be on the dole than native-born Americans.
TODAY, WHEN REFUGEES ARE EXCLUDED from their numbers, only 2 percent of working-age immigrants who entered the U.S. during the 1980s collect public aid—meaning that today's immigrants are less likely than native-born citizens to collect welfare.
The Journal reports further that at the turn of the century more than two thirds of public hospital and asylum beds were filled with immigrants. Today, immigrants are responsible for 6.5 percent of Medicaid disbursements.
But do the lower percentages among contemporary immigrants translate into net social gains? Well, that depends on whom you ask.
A study by Donald Huddle at Rice University concludes that immigrants in 1992 consumed $42.5 billion more in public services than they contributed in taxes.
A counter study conducted by the Urban Institute, however, finds deep flaws in Huddle's methodology.
Citing the vast economic participation of immigrants in the U.S. economy—not the least of which is the billions in tax dollars collected from undocumented immigrants who have no hope of ever cashing in on government largesse—that study reports that immigrants represented a net gain of $25 billion in taxes versus social-service costs in 1992.
Still another study by the Center for Immigration Studies faults the previous two, then reports that immigrants cost the U.S. $29 billion in the same year.
But all those numbers, frankly, don't matter to pro-immigrant advocates, who remain confident that in the long run immigrants contribute far more to American culture and society than they derive from it.
AT LOCAL LEVELS, WHAT MAY BE DRIVING public perceptions of immigrants hogging resources is the fact that most tax revenue generated by immigrants goes to the federal government in the form of income and Social Security taxes. As a result, states—which often bear the brunt of social costs of immigration—don't get as big a cut of the immigrant revenue pie as they arguably should.
Also distorting perceptions is that a substantial percentage of "immigrants" receiving public-aid are actually those entering the country as refugees—a group of people who, by definition, are disadvantaged and in need of more short-term government support. Fifteen percent of refugees are currently receiving some form of government assistance.
Despite the rhetoric, under current law about the only government help undocumented immigrants can get is emergency health care and food through the WIC program for pregnant women and women with small children.
Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for food stamps or for Aid for Families with Dependent Children. Many legal immigrants also don't apply for those programs, advocates say, because they're either unaware of them or uncertain if that aid would jeopardize their status in the United States.
PERHAPS THE HIGHEST COST OF IMMIGRATION to government is the public-education tab immigrants' children represent. Each year the U.S. spends $11.5 billion to educate the children of both legal and illegal immigrants, out of a total education budget of $226 billion. Virtually all of that $11.5 billion is picked up by the seven states—California, New York, Florida, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Texas, and Illinois, in that order—where most immigrant groups have settled.
A few years ago it would have seemed merely distasteful to argue that the U.S. should not provide for the education of all its resident children, regardless of status. These days, however, it seems to many that position sounds downright reasonable.
* * * IT WAS BAD LUCK THAT BROUGHT DORA CABRALES to the United States—a brother ill with hepatitis and parents worried that they couldn't get the treatment he needed in Mexico. Cabrales' parents left with her brother and came into the United States as undocumented aliens. Because of their status, her parents could not come and go freely between the United States and Mexico. It would be years before she would see them again while she and the rest of her family lived with their grandparents.
Finally, her father had saved enough to reunite them all in Chicago, and 22 years later Cabrales is waiting patiently in line to have her fingers pressed into an ink pad and her fingerprints recorded on a government form. The brothers, including the one whose health led to this family exodus, are all grown with families of their own. Her brothers and parents have already become citizens.
"I'm the last holdout," she says with a smile. Cabrales' story ironically provides ammunition to both camps in the immigrant debate—the family as the classic American success story or examples of economic refugees taking advantage of a porous border to seek a better standard of living.
But that's a dispute that is far from Cabrales' mind today as she cleans the ink from her fingers and fixes her hair before her application photo is taken.
"I'm working here; I already feel like a citizen.
"I want to become a citizen because you can be more involved in things when you are a citizen," Cabrales says.
"I want to be more involved in my daughters' school. Now my [school board] vote will count," she says. "I just need this stamp of approval."
Assumption: immigrants take jobs from "real" Americans.
SUSANNA PITTMAN GETS CALLS ALL THE TIME at her office. They are from both legal and illegal immigrants, uncertain about their status or the status of a family member or friend. They call her looking for answers and for help.
She also gets calls from other people in the Texarkana, Arkansas area. People who know her office works with immigrants; people calling because they've got a dirty job to do for little pay and no benefits—to clear a field, work a yard or a ranch. People calling because they've heard that immigrants are hard workers and that they don't make any trouble about labor laws—particularly if they happen to be undocumented.
"They must think I have a bunch of [undocumented] immigrants hanging in my coatrack," Pittman says about her de facto employment service.
Pittman is experiencing firsthand the national schizophrenia that's evolving around the issue of immigration in the United States.
U.S.-born citizens only seem to question whether or not America should still be the land that welcomes all that "wretched refuse, yearning to breathe free"—tempest tossed or otherwise—until they have a job that wants getting done cheaply and well, particularly one that nobody else seems interested in taking.
Pittman points to one large poultry processing company in Arkansas that is notorious for sending employment "subcontractors" in vans down to border towns to recruit workers for the dirty and low-paying work of preparing America's chickens for Sunday roasting.
Many immigrants will arrive with freshly acquired working papers that are worthless to the undocumented immigrants but offer a legal screen to the company that hires them.
PITTMAN OFFERS ONE CLUE TO THE NATION'S double thinking on immigration issues.
Consider how the INS does its work.
"The border patrol doesn't [make raids] at places where people live. The border patrol goes to places where people work—and I don't see too many of them working in jobs that anybody else wants.
"The reasons so many [undocumented] aliens are working in these chicken factories is that they're lousy jobs."
It's hardly a matter exclusive to Arkansas. In California, where the outcry against illegal immigration has been the fiercest, it is the state's service and agricultural industries' reliance on cheap labor that attracts most of the undocumented workers into the United States in the first place.
Robert Moser is director of the Refugee and Immigration Service for Catholic Charities in San Diego, California.
"In this particular border area," he says, "it is still the maid, the gardener, the field hand that they depend on for their daily labor—yet they don't want them to live here," says Moser.
"This is the source of the injustice and the confusion because you can't have it both ways."
Assumption: immigrants are protected by American labor laws.
A WORKER AT THE IMMIGRATION OFFICE for the Denver archdiocese says Catholics, especially, should be mindful of the threats to today's immigrants when grappling with the pros and cons of U.S. immigration policy.
Many Catholics, after all, can draw on bitter memories of their own grandparents' treatment at the hands of the Know-Nothings of a previous nativist backlash. It's a collective memory that should encourage most Catholics to be faithful to the new immigrants who hope to reach these shores.
John Swenson adds that Catholics must also be mindful of the immigrants who are already here—and the many among them who are suffering.
Many worried conservatives argue for the reduction of current immigration levels. Some of their friends in the free-market camp, however, cry out for more, imploring that immigrants are important components of America's economic machinery and arguing for higher quotas.
But the enthusiasm of free-marketers for immigration is not necessarily good news for immigrants, says Swenson.
Guided by the characteristically Catholic notions of the common good and human dignity, "the thing [Catholics] should worry about is rendering human beings to an economic unit.
"The fact that [some] immigrants are in this country illegally does not shed them of their humanity. They should be accorded certain basic rights—their human dignity—rights to health care, education for their children, decent shelter and work."
NO MATTER HOW IMMIGRANTS HAVE ARRIVED on these shores, many are contributing to the nation's economic machinery under exploitative and dangerous conditions at subminimum wages. Undocumented workers—from Asian women laboring in California sweatshops to Irish construction workers accepting hazardous jobs without insurance coverage in New York—are especially vulnerable to unscrupulous employers.
Susanna Pittman, for example, has worked with undocumented immigrants who have been paid as little as $1 an hour for their labor, forced to work 6« days a week, 12 hours a day, fired at the slightest complaint or after an on-the-job injury has diminished their usefulness to an employer.
Assumption: policies that affect immigrants will have no impact on the rest of us.
WHEN THE CURRENT PROPOSALS ARE TAKEN as a whole, Moser worries that what he is witnessing is not just a roundup of undocumented immigrants but a sure if subtle erosion of the rights and privileges that most Americans have come to take for granted.
It's already happening in California, he says, where acquiring an account with a local utility company has become an agonizing effort to demonstrate legitimacy.
"We've got clerks becoming law-enforcement officers and law-enforcement officers becoming clerks."
The USCC's Swenson is concerned that it is a situation that will prove irresistible to the forces of discrimination. Will people with darker skin or "funny" accents be the only ones stopped and asked to present their "national ID cards"? Will citizens of Latin descent be unfairly treated in their workplaces or when they apply for jobs? It's a trend that is even reaching into Catholic ministries. Gregory Kepferle, director of parish social ministry for Catholic Charities in Oakland, California, reports that in the wake of California's Proposition 187 campaign, people at one parish's St. Vincent de Paul chapter started asking Hispanics to present their green cards before letting them use the food pantry.
"Will the country trade off some of its traditional freedoms in an attempt to control immigration? Do we really want to militarize the border?" Swenson asks.
OTHER PROPOSED CHANGES IN IMMIGRATION POLICY offer critics a distressing if bountiful list of unintended consequences to target. Civil libertarians can find plenty of rhetorical fodder in plans for national identity cards and worker registries. Economists worry over how changes in family reunification policies will affect Asian groups, who owe their many success stories to their reliance on a sturdy extended-family network.
Physicians, teachers, and social workers complain about having law-enforcement duties added to their already crowded job descriptions. And health experts say attempts to save money by cutting the undocumented out of the health-care system will not only present a long-term health risk to all citizens but will most likely mean ultimately spending more money through a reliance on the much costlier emergency-care system.
In a lot of ways, says Frank Sharry, many of the proposals regarding immigration control don't make a lot of practical sense; in some instances, they're downright counterproductive.
Sharry thinks he has an explanation.
"The debate over immigration is about more than just how many people come in and how to enforce the rules," he says. "The impact of immigration is so emotional because it gets at who we are as a nation."
The fight over who gets in, how, and why, he suggests, may ultimately have more to do with a nation's collective uncertainty about its future cultural complexion than it does with any projection about an immigration-inspired economic downturn.
WHILE PREVIOUS IMMIGRANT WAVES came from specific countries or regions, today people come into the United States from over 40 different nations from across the globe. Never before has the diversity of immigrants coming into the United States been so great.
"Historically this nation has been a place where people of different languages and faiths and cultures have come together and carved out a great nation," says Sharry. "They've created this unprecedented city on a hill where what you contribute is more important than where you've come from.
"What is so different about the immigrant groups who are coming today? Whether you're saying they're different because they have a different skin color, or the world's a more complicated place, or the same opportunity no longer exists here—whatever—I think you're wrong.
"In a way, this is not a debate about immigration; it's a debate about whether we're strong enough and confident enough in ourselves as a nation. I'm confident that today's immigrants will be tomorrow's middle class."
Moser agrees. "Why do people look at Asians, Hispanics, and Africans and say, 'They're taking over'? Why can't these people become Americans and contribute just as much as previous immigrants did?" Why have people lost the faith that "what made us great will continue to make us great"?
Moreover, Moser wonders what our future symbols will be and what they will say about our values as a people and as a nation.
In the past, national symbols like the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island were tokens of freedom and opportunity to people all over the world. How much richer, Moser asks, were these symbols to the collective American spirit than the walls, barbed wire, and trenches offered up today?
* * * IT HAS BEEN A GOOD DAY for the UNO volunteers—not too busy but a steady flow. On busy Saturdays they can expect as many as 300 people. They've processed the paperwork for perhaps 100 applicants today.
Things are likely to get busier in the coming months as more legal residents, hearing the anti-immigrant rumbling emanating from Washington, begin to understand that getting their citizenship now might not be such a bad idea.
It is late afternoon now, and a few latecomers are arriving at the basement door. The new arrivals listen attentively as a UNO worker explains how the process will work, pointing to the various stations around the basement that will mark their progress through the application.
Upstairs, in the church sanctuary, people are dressed in their finest clothes. Upstairs in the church sanctuary the parish is holding a monthly christening service for its newest members, the children born American citizens whatever the status of their parents, the children who represent the next generation of Americans for the families gathered here today—and for all of us.—END
© 1997 by Claretian Publications