The pickings will always be better in the US!



Bear market for immigrants
By Mariel Garza, Editorial Page Writer
Article Last Updated: 04/12/2008 08:18:38 PM PDT


`WE are in the throes of a recession," former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan said on a CNBC business-news show Tuesday. The next day, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said it is "overwhelmingly likely" that the U.S. economy is in recession, according to news reports.

This was significant, because depending on which economist is talking, we're either in, or near, or far from a recession.

I'm going with Greenspan, because labels aside, working people know the U.S. economy is tanking - and taking a good chunk of their personal wealth with it. House prices are dropping (an estimated 10percent of Americans owe more on their mortgage than their houses are worth). But the price of goods is not. Companies across the country are laying off workers, tens of thousands every month. But Visa still wants its pound of flesh every month. Who can afford Hawaiian vacations anymore, let alone a family car trip to Yosemite with gas at about $4 a gallon?

Yet, as the clich goes, even this dark cloud has a silver lining. All this financial doom might finally deflate some of the ugly anti-immigrant rhetoric that has stymied immigration reform.

How? Migrant workers go where the jobs are. Fewer jobs equals fewer migrants. Fewer migrants equals fewer black-market businesses that serve migrants. All that means fewer things for anti-immigrant forces to grouse about.

Legal American residents may be losing their jobs - not to mention their 401(k) profits, houses and cars - but illegal immigrants won't be any better off. Worse actually.
Historically, tough economic times have been harder for immigrants, both legal and not. Remember the forced repatriation of a half-million, the majority of whom were legal Mexican immigrants or born in the U.S., during the Great Depression of the 1930s? But more to the point of today's reality, less disposable income means less money to pay for non-necessities. In Los Angeles, that means personal staffers - legions of under-the-table workers who may or may not be legal and the bacon-wrapped-hot-dog vendors who serve them.

When times are tough, I cut my nonmandatory expenses, and one of the first to go is the man who tends my messy yard once a week. (He's a legal immigrant from El Salvador, by the way.) If it's a choice between gas to get to work and an unsightly yard, it's no question.

There's evidence to support that this is already occurring to some degree. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that "apprehensions" by the Border Patrol have dropped sharply - an indication that fewer people are slipping across the border. It also found that money transfers from the U.S. to Mexico and Central America are growing at much lower rates than in recent years.

And, closer to home, the Daily News' sister paper, the San Bernardino Sun, reports that immigrants in that county are having a hard time finding work, particularly those employed in housing construction. Hispanic illegal immigrants were already having a harder time finding employment as attention on immigration reform increased, according to the Pew Hispanic Center in a 2007 study.

Why risk your life, and spend thousands of dollars to cross a border, for nonexistent jobs? It's easier to be poor and jobless in a country that doesn't hate you.

Besides, it might even be easier to find a job in Mexico in the future. While the U.S. is moving inexorably into a recession, Mexico isn't hurting quite so much. In fact, earlier this month the head of Mexico's central bank said that despite inflation, the economy seems to be OK so far. (Hmm. I wonder what Mexican newspapers pay ...)

Ironically, by the time the controversial border fence is finally finished, having demolished dozens of laws and blazed through $1.2billion in tax dollars, the U.S. might not need it so much. At least not to keep them out. Though someday Mexico might put it to good use - keeping Americans from sneaking across to find jobs in all the factories that relocated to Mexico for cheaper labor.

So things may be crappy at home. But at least there won't be many immigrants competing for that one counter job at Loco Taco Burger Hut. That's something to be happy about.

Mariel Garza is a columnist and editorial writer for the Los Angeles Daily News. She blogs at www.insidesocal.com/friendlyfire.

Write to her by e-mail at mariel.garza@dailynews.com.






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