Thread: Fear, economy slow rise in undocumented immigrants

Fear, economy slow rise in undocumented immigrants
By Marisa Taylor
McClatchy Newspapers
Posted: Sunday, May. 02, 2010


HARRISONBURG, Va. For 10 years, Ezequiel Gonzalez and his wife, Lupe, feared their lives as illegal immigrants in America would be discovered.

One spring evening two years ago, it happened. Immigration agents detected Ezequiel working illegally at a glass company in Harrisonburg and ordered him deported to Mexico. Left on her own, Lupe packed up their few belongings and prepared their four children, ages 8 through 15, for the journey to a country they barely knew.

Back in their colonial town in central Mexico, the couple now struggle to support themselves.

"We would like to go back to the United States," said Lupe, 36, by telephone. "But I'm not sure it will ever be possible."

In many places across the U.S., a demographic shift is under way. Illegal immigrants not only are returning to their homelands in response to more intense government scrutiny, they're staying there once they've returned. As word spreads that jobs are harder to come by in the U.S., others are deciding not to come in the first place, slowing an unprecedented flood of immigrants that has lasted more than a decade.

U.S. employers, meanwhile, are hiring fewer undocumented immigrants because they have a bigger pool of unemployed legal workers to choose from and because they fear tighter immigration laws, immigrants and experts say.

"When you start taking away the work force by cracking down on illegal immigration, it scares the bejesus out of employers," said Mark Reed, a former immigration official who once oversaw such measures.

Big increases stall

The estimated 12 million immigrants believed to be living in the country illegally have by no means disappeared from the U.S. work force. In the past decade, the population skyrocketed 40 percent. They now fill about 5 percent of American jobs.

However, the dramatic year-after-year increases in the population have stalled. The Pew Hispanic Center, which regularly estimates the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., concluded in its most recent report in April 2009 that the growth in their population began slowing in 2006, a full year before the recession hit.

Roughly 300,000 fewer immigrants came to the country each year between 2005 and 2008, an almost 40 percent drop annually, the center said.

As the recession deepened in 2009 and into this year, the numbers likely continued to decline, said Jeff Passel, a senior demographer with the center, which is preparing an update of the report.

Some immigrants say their decision to leave or stay away is much more subtle than fear of detection or the lack of jobs. They feel a broader disillusionment with a country that was once more welcoming - or at least grudgingly tolerant - in good times, but has abandoned them as the economy soured.

"We're sold this idea of the 'American Dream,'" said Gustavo, a 46-year-old undocumented construction worker who says he has watched fellow illegal workers return home, discouraged by the lack of jobs. "But when we arrive, we realize it doesn't exist."

Polarizing factors

The shift comes at a time when the Obama administration is trying to demonstrate it's tough on illegal immigration while reassuring the president's political base that he'll eventually pursue a comprehensive immigration overhaul.

State and local lawmakers who once left immigration enforcement to the federal government have stepped in. In 2009, states enacted 222 immigration laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In the latest anti-immigration effort, Arizona Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed a law April 23 that requires police to demand documentation of anyone they suspect might be an illegal immigrant - a measure that critics say encourages racial profiling. President Barack Obama, meanwhile, has criticized the law and ordered the Justice Department to review it.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a pro-immigration enforcement policy organization, said the immigration slowdown proves that the crackdowns work.

"Right now, it's a system where the worker pretends to have real immigration documents and the employer pretends to believe them," he said.

However, Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, an employer-lobbying group, said one trend contributing to illegal immigration hasn't changed. Americans are much more educated than they were 50 years ago and are much less willing to do unskilled physical work.

Economic prosperity, she asserts, is fueled by the flow of laborers willing to fill those jobs.

"When the economy booms again, and when people start to go out to eat, and travel, and build houses, we're going to need an immigrant work force," Jacoby said.

For now, illegal immigrants across the country say they are competing for far fewer jobs against many more applicants as a growing number of jobless citizens are accepting low-paying jobs they never dreamed of taking during boom times.

N.C. mirrors national trend

In 2005, 4.5 percent of undocumented men were unemployed, compared with almost 6 percent of U.S.-born workers, the Pew Hispanic Center estimated. That trend has reversed, with 6.5 percent of undocumented workers unemployed in 2008, compared with 5.6 percent of U.S.-born workers - a situation that has worsened with the downturn. More than half of the undocumented work force worked in service or construction, two sectors hit hard by the recession.

In North Carolina, where building permits for new homes have fallen almost 40 percent in counties such as Mecklenburg, the increase in the immigrant population has stopped - and may have started to reverse. The Pew Hispanic Center estimated that the number of illegal immigrants living in North Carolina dropped to about 350,000 in 2008 from 390,000 in 2006.

After watching the tremendous growth over the past 10 years, Maria Saavedra and her husband, Henry Jimenez, couldn't help but dream that their first Mexican/Honduran restaurant in south Charlotte would be the first of many to open around the city.

Carpenters and painters filled the booths of El Casa Grande when it opened in the fall of 2008, Saavedra said. The jukebox boomed with Mexican ballads.

Nearly two years later, Saavedra, 28, now says they're struggling to keep the restaurant open.

"We have no clients," Saavedra said. "We survive day to day, but it's very, very difficult."

Enforcement affects hiring

It's not just the economy. Immigration enforcement has had a chilling effect on hiring.

Under federal law, employers are only required to ask for proof of immigration status, not verify that the IDs are real. However, they can still be fined or even prosecuted if the federal government can prove they "knowingly" hired undocumented workers.

For years, the federal government did little to go after the employers who did.

Then, at the end of the Bush administration, the Department of Homeland Security stepped up work site raids after President George W. Bush failed to get immigration overhaul legislation through Congress and angered his conservative base. Agents zeroed in on industries such as meatpacking that had come to depend on the undocumented work force.

Though the Obama administration has scaled back those raids, it has stepped up scrutiny of companies' immigration paperwork. Last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement audited 1,444 companies, more than double the number the year before.

North Carolina has been a leading state for testing federal and local partnerships to tackle immigration.

In 2006, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement created a Charlotte-based team to find fugitive illegal immigrants. Then-Mecklenburg Sheriff Jim Pendergraph joined a federal program, known as 287(g), that has netted more than 8,000 illegal immigrants.

In October, current Mecklenburg County Sheriff Chipp Bailey also joined another federal program, known as Secure Communities. Nearly 30 counties in the state joined this new fingerprint-based immigration screening program that gives local law enforcement access to FBI and immigration databases simultaneously.

The number of employers fined for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants has risen dramatically as well.

In 2006, no employer was fined. In 2008, the ICE fined 18, amounting to about $675,000. In the first five months of this fiscal year, the ICE fined 63 employers or issued almost $1.9 million in fines.

James Spero, deputy assistant director for the ICE, said agents are focusing on employers rather than illegal workers.

"It's a pivot," he said. "The goal is to build a case against the employer."




http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/0 ... ented.html

He said, "We're sold this idea of the 'American Dream,'"

OK Who in your home country SOLD you this idea and encouraged you to come to this country Illegally? Thats what I would like to know.
What group or groups in Mexico is pushing massive numbers of people into the United States like this?

These people, along with the unscrupulous and greedy employers of illegals here, are a detriment to our nation, its security, its prosperity, and its overall democracy in general.

Its a good thing to have a slow and steady stream of migrants into the U S but there are forces who are pushing to flood this nation with people which will overload our already strained systems and tear this country apart. We need reasonable numbers of immigrants that are sustainable and a complete STOP on illegal aliens...A restrictive cap on the number of people from mexico as well...

Now if more of those here would self deport we would be better off. If they turn themselves in to police or ICE is useless as ICE has to notify their embassy and wait for a reply from them and that allows them to saty here illegally even longer.