Thread: Imagine if they vanished

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercuryn ... 466161.htm

Posted on Sun, Apr. 30, 2006


THE IMMIGRATION DEBATE
Imagine if they vanished
MONDAY WILL GIVE TASTE OF ECONOMY WITHOUT ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS' LABOR
By Patrick May
Mercury News

Imagine waking up tomorrow and every immigrant living illegally in Santa Clara County has vanished.

Many of the busboys, maids and field hands? Gone. Skilled carpenters, ceramic tilers and roofers? Missing. Landscapers, contractors and factory workers? Nowhere to be found.

What would happen? What would this county, with about 100,000 undocumented immigrants -- one out of every 18 residents -- look like? Would the fallout gum up the local economy as stores closed and construction sites shut down? Would tech workers call in sick because their nannies didn't show? Would luncheons and banquets that grease our social skids be canceled as kitchen staffs went missing?

What about schools? Would teachers face classrooms full of parentless kids? Would the lines at emergency rooms grow suddenly shorter? Would crops in Gilroy simply rot?

On Monday, as millions across the nation take to the streets instead of going to work to protest legislation that would declare illegal immigrants felons and slap up a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, residents in cities like San Jose will be forced to take a look at a world that has long been right before their eyes:

A sprawling community of faceless workers and furtive shadow families.

A vibrant but clandestine economy built on long hours and low wages.

An illusory labor market of applicants with bogus identities and employers who don't want to know.

A population of 100,000 people whose status is as illegal as it is integral to the region's economic, social and cultural well-being.

Imagine them gone.

``I would have to close the business,'' says Los Altos landscaper Job Lopez, who doesn't ask his workers about their status, but suspects many of his day laborers are undocumented. ``I would be out of business. Who else will do the work? I don't think I can find white people willing to do that kind of work.''

The reverberations would ripple outward.

``There's a whole sophisticated network out there of skilled specialists and craftsmen, an entire sub-sector of our economy,'' says Hugo Mora-Torres with the Health Trust, a non-profit that provides services to the poor. If the illegal among them ``suddenly left, that network would unravel, because the truth is not that many people want to work that hard.''

Grand-scale disruption

Interviews with business owners, economists, farmers, social-service providers, clergy, health care experts and illegal immigrants themselves reveal the rough outlines of a grand-scale interruption to Silicon Valley life, where the sum of individual impacts -- from tomato harvests to restaurant kitchens to auto-body shops -- is much greater than its parts.

``If they go away,'' says San Jose home-builder Ahmed Mouada, ``the whole country would be in trouble.''

In a reflection of the scope of this amorphous subculture, Mouada estimates as many as 70 percent of construction workers in the county are undocumented. ``Believe me, I know. Even the ones who are documented and have papers -- it's fake. But it's not just in construction. It's the restoration business, the cleaning companies and in the kitchens of restaurants.''

It's also in the fields. Ben Anderson's house near Gilroy is surrounded by farmland. He can watch the illegal job market while sitting on his front porch. ``See that 50-acre bean field there? Ninety days from now, you'll have maybe 200 workers harvesting it. If they were all gone, you'd see a bunch of bean plants going to seed. The farmer would lose money; his quarter would be shot. Eventually, the bank could foreclose on his house, his truck loan, his equipment. Over time, the impact would trickle down.''

Evelyn Sanchez is with an Oakland group that brings unions and immigration advocates together to work on reform. She said, ``Ninety percent of all hotel workers, housekeeping, catering and maintenance, are all immigrant labor. Many are legal,'' she said, but ``a great many come here illegally, literally crossing the border.'' She met a Guatemalan woman who had come to the Bay Area ``hanging on the bottom of a truck,'' first into Mexico, then into California.

But gauging the precise impact of losing so many residents at once is tough, largely because of the community's own surreptitious nature.

``There are a lot of misconceptions about undocumented workers,'' said local labor leader Jim Homer. ``They will not use government services because that might increase their chances of getting caught. They don't file for unemployment and food stamps. They're the last ones to call in workers' comp. They don't want the exposure.''

Some of the facts

This much we do know:

• There are probably more than 100,000 unauthorized immigrants in Santa Clara County, the majority of them Latinos, with a notable Asian minority, according to a 2004 estimate from Richard Hobbs, director of the Santa Clara County Office of Human Relations. According to the 2000 Census, about 24 percent of the county's nearly 1.7 million residents are Latinos.

• They tend to be young and employed, and are somewhat more likely to be young men. There are also significant numbers of illegal immigrant children as well as U.S.-born children living with parents who don't have legal status.

• They are apt to work in unskilled or service jobs, possibly competing with legal residents for some of those jobs, though one study by the Palo Alto-based Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy concluded that the state has had so much economic growth in recent years that such displacement has been minimal.

• And while debate rages over whether illegal immigrants cost more in government services than they pay in taxes, one study from the same center suggest this is true for low-income families in general, regardless of legal status.

County officials say they have not tried to measure the cost of serving illegal immigrants, but do not consider them a major drain on local budgets. By one estimate, illegal immigrants account for roughly 3 percent of emergency-room admissions at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center.

But, hospital spokeswoman Joy Alexiou adds, ``We don't ask and we don't know who is and who isn't legal, because we don't want a barrier for people seeking care. Especially with communicable diseases, you don't want people wandering around because they're afraid to seek help. Diseases don't care who's legal and who isn't.''

Police and jail officials don't keep track either. Schools, which by law don't require proof of citizenship for enrollment, would face a similar challenge penciling out the impact of losing undocumented students. In a reflection of how emotional an issue immigration is for South Bay parents and educators, Don Iglesias, San Jose Unified's superintendent, said he could hardly fathom such an exodus.

Even if the government ordered public schools to track down and expel students here illegally, ``I would not direct my people to do it,'' he said. His own father was a Guatemalan immigrant, and 51 percent of his district's 30,000 students are of Latino heritage. ``Our mission is education. We would never turn any kid away.''

Still, many Americans deeply resent anyone breaking the law by being here.

Roberta Allen, a San Jose small-business owner coordinating a counterprotest for Friday and Saturday, said, ``It's not the immigrants that are the issue. It's the illegal aliens that are coming in. The ones who are undocumented. We don't know who they are, what diseases they're bringing, what gangs they're affiliated with. Are they terrorists? We don't know any of these things.''

But we do know that without them, things could gear down quickly -- starting with that lunch spot down the street.

Jeff Starbeck, owner of Sonoma Chicken Coop in San Jose and Campbell, has no idea which of his 140 employees -- 80 percent Mexican -- are truly legal or not. Many business owners, in fact, don't ask too many questions as long as their employees can show a Social Security number. So ``immigrants'' becomes at times interchangeable with ``illegal immigrants.''

``We require everyone to bring an ID, and we keep it on file. What's real? I don't know.'' But none of the business owners he knows could ``survive without immigrant labor. They run our business for us. They're very loyal, they don't call in sick, they're the backbone of our whole operation.''

But beyond the coffee shops and vegetable fields, an exodus of undocumented workers would manifest itself in many other ways. Non-profit organizations serving the poor could see their roles change and their workforce reduced. Esperanza Rojas, a nurse coordinator for Alviso Health Center, said, ``We'd see fewer patients, so we'd have to reduce our staff -- for example, we'd need one clerk instead of two; and maybe we'd have to send our patients to another clinic to have lab work done'' because the lower number of clients would no longer justify bringing in a private lab person on site.

The hospitality industry would be throttled, especially in hotels where busboys, maids, cooks and bellhops are overwhelmingly immigrants. Union leader Valerie Lapin said, ``If there were no immigrants working in the hotels, hotels would come to a standstill.''

The illegal immigrants themselves know this well.

J. Garcia, 42, a janitor at a local college campus who preferred not to use his full name, came from Mexico illegally, crossing the border in 1996. He lives in East Palo Alto with his son, while his other son and wife are in Mexico. He plans to skip work Monday to show his support for immigration reform. And what will happen at his workplace without him around?

``The managers will go crazy,'' he said, ``trying to clear out all the trash and clean up the offices. The client companies will complain that the janitors didn't come.''

Even places of worship would feel the blow. Brother Bill Minkel, the Franciscan priest who presides at the Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in East San Jose, sees a congregation each Sunday of 3,500, most of them Latinos and Asian. Minkel said he doesn't ``look at people and wonder who's documented and who's not,'' but he has a good idea of what a church without immigrants would look like:

``It would be one color,'' he said. ``It would be boring. It would be like Wonder Bread.''


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Mercury News Staff Writers K. Oanh Ha, Brandon Bailey, Jessie Mangaliman, Lisa Fernandez and Luis Zaragoza contributed to this report. Contact Pat May at pmay@mercurynews.com or (40 920-5689.

I sure would like the opportunity to try anyway. I believe it could be done, but not for dirt cheap like they get workers now.

That's the fact that these people just gloss over. It not the work, it the money.

The nations unemployeement rate would drop, the money the states could save on social services could be put to other stuff, like better schools and roads.

Well if we hired LEGAL Immigrants, and we hired Americans in the first place,,we would not have to worry about that, would we?