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What's the impact of illegal immigration?


Sunday, April 23, 2006

By J.B. Smith and Dan Genz

Tribune-Herald staff writers

At the end of an avenue of $300,000 mini-mansions off U.S. Highway 84 West, a new one is taking shape, crowned with gables and dormer windows.

Cross the planks over the black mud and step into the forest of two-by-fours, and you’ll find a group of men who officially don’t exist.

The men, sitting cross-legged on the concrete with glass Pepsi bottles and fast-food sacks, are here to frame the house. Like most of the workers on this house, they are Mexican by birth. Only one of the five framers, the subcontractor, is here legally.

The rest are among the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in America, a population many would like to forget and some would like to deport.

But the men say they are here to work and here to stay.

“We’re not here in this country to take money,” said Luis, 30, an unauthorized immigrant from the Mexican state of Zacatecas who has lived here 10 years with his wife and family. “We’re here to work for money. We need the United States, and the United States needs us.”

As Congress wrestles over whether and how to crack down on the illegal population, it’s not just unauthorized immigrants who are worried.

Many employers and economists fear that a mass deportation or drastic reduction in immigration would slow the growth of the economy, drive up the cost of goods and services and lead to worker shortages in sectors such as construction.

“We are extremely dependent on immigrants in Texas and around the country,” said Ray Perryman, a Waco-based economist.

Perryman said some concerns about illegal immigration are legitimate, such as the vulnerability of the borders to terrorists and the medical and educational costs of the immigrant population. He said bringing unauthorized population into the open by offering them some kind of legal status would make the economy more efficient.

But he said those who simply want to deport all unauthorized immigrants might be surprised at the economic result.

“I don’t think they’d be very happy,” he said. “It would cause a lot of dislocation, in terms of trying to maintain industries such as agriculture, construction and hospitality.”

Curbing the use of immigrant labor would cause the Central Texas building boom to “fall flat on its back,” said K. Paul Holt, chapter executive of the Associated General Contractors of Waco.

Some 300 construction firms in the Waco area are scrambling to fill mounting orders for roads, bridges, schools, churches and homes, Holt said.

“There’s just not enough raw bodies in the construction trade,” Holt said. “I don’t think that Congress recognizes the full impact of a closed border system.”

Immigrants increasing

There are no reliable estimates for the unauthorized population in this area. The 2000 Census counted 9,659 foreign born, Spanish-speaking residents in McLennan County, but unauthorized immigrants often don’t fill out census forms.

The Pew Hispanic Center estimates 1.1 million Texans are unauthorized, or about one in 25.

Nationwide, unauthorized immigrants account for about half of all immigrants and nearly 5 percent of the labor force, according to Pew estimates.

Experts say those numbers are continuing to increase, though at a slower pace than the 1990s. Many who favor curbs on immigration say this growth threatens American jobs and wages.

Lou Ann Anderson, who is helping to organize a rally May 6 in Crawford for tougher immigration laws, said American-born construction workers are being undercut by foreign workers who will do the job for about half the price.

“They’re not the jobs that Americans won’t do, it’s doing the jobs at the prices that are being offered,” Anderson said.

Charles North, a Baylor University labor economist, agreed that immigration, whether legal and illegal, has an effect on wages. But that’s also a benefit to consumers and employers, he said.

“It most certainly keeps the lower end of the wage scale down to have an influx of low-skilled immigrants,” North said. “But it also keeps the prices of things we purchase down. The presence of low-skilled immigrants will lower the prices of yard services, restaurant food, construction and housekeeping. It would not surprise me if a meal at a restaurant would be a dollar or two more expensive if we did not have immigrants working.”

Phil Adkins, owner of six local Shipley Do-nuts shops and president of the Waco Restaurant Association, agreed that a drastic reduction in the immigrant workforce would affect the restaurant industry.

Service levels would go down, and some restaurants would resort to frozen pre-made meals, he said.

“If we can’t hire the prep cook, then we don’t have anyone to chop the tomatoes, so we can’t use local produce and can’t have the freshness our customers expect,” he said.

Restaurateurs predict they will create 2 million more jobs over the next 10 years, or a 15 percent hike. But they see the national labor pool growing only 12 percent, Adkins said. And the 16- to 24-year-old age demographic that restaurants depend on for labor is stagnant, he said.

Steve Murdock, the Texas state demographer, said that’s a problem throughout the economy.

“There’s an absolute numerical decline of Anglos in the labor force nationwide and in Texas,” he said. “Without people from other cultures and origins coming here, we’d actually see a decline in the labor force.”

Murdock said Mexican immigration has kept America young, and that means a more vibrant workforce. He said the median age for Anglos in 2000 was about 37, while the Hispanic median age was 25, “a huge difference,” he said. In McLennan County, the gap was even greater.

Murdock acknowledged that high immigration rates put a strain on local governments in the areas of education and health care, but on a nationwide level it benefits the economy and the solvency of Social Security and Medicare.

Minimal effects

Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said the argument that immigrants are keeping the workforce younger is “bunk” and cited statistics suggesting that the effect is minimal.

Krikorian, whose Washington, D.C., think tank advocates reducing the immigrant population, said there are plenty of citizens in other parts of the U.S. who could take the jobs in high-growth areas like Texas. But immigrants are taking those jobs and driving the wages down, he said.

“It’s hurting low-skilled people,” he said. “Clearly, the movement of Americans to places where there are lots of immigrants is being short-circuited.”

Even in industries that depend heavily on immigrants, the presence of unauthorized workers in the local workforce is a ticklish subject.

No prudent employer would publicly admit to hiring such workers: That’s illegal under federal law. Adkins and Holt said employers in their industries take pains to ferret out unauthorized immigrants, but it’s not easy.

“A construction company is not supposed to be an investigative body that can track down the validity of the forms for everybody, and that seems to be the criticism that is blamed on the construction industry,” Holt said.

Unauthorized immigrants can get fake identification, including a Social Security number for about $100, and few employers have the resources to verify them. A federal pilot program allows employers to check an applicant’s identification information against a national database, but only a tiny fraction of businesses have signed up.

One is the Sanderson Farms poultry company, which is about to hire 1,300 people for its new Waco plant.

Company spokesman Bob Billingsley said the system appears to be effective, and few unauthorized immigrants apply for jobs at Sanderson Farms plants.

“It’s very, very rare, because people out there understand what kind of system we’re on and understand that we’re verifying employment,” he said. “Our company always goes to whatever lengths necessary to do things the right way, and it also allows you not to have the headaches other people have.”

Critics say the government has never gotten serious about workplace enforcement of immigration laws, supposedly the cornerstone of immigration reforms in 1986 and 1996.

Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies said workplace enforcement has dwindled to almost nothing, with only three companies nationwide fined for employment violations in 2004, the most recent reporting year.

“This administration has abandoned routine enforcement on the ban against hiring illegal aliens,” he said.

A General Accounting Office report last summer found that such enforcement was a low priority for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, which took the duties of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Fear of deportation

Paul Rusnok, spokesman for ICE, acknowledged that the agency has shifted its focus away from routine employer enforcement. Today the priority is preventing workers with fake identification from working at nuclear power plants and other potential terrorist targets, as well as deporting criminal aliens. Still, about half of the 167,000 unauthorized immigrants deported last year were not criminals, he said.

Rusnok, who is based in Texas, knew of no recent workplace actions in the Waco area.

But he said employers don’t get off the hook for immigration violations and noted a major enforcement operation in multiple states recently that netted 1,187 suspected unauthorized workers at a pallet company called IFCO.

The guys framing the house in the subdivision off Highway 84 say they do worry about immigration raids at their workplace and elsewhere. Luis said he was deported a few years ago after the highway patrol pulled him over and found he had no driver’s license, but he came right back.

Armando, 22, has been in this country since he was 15 and now has a wife and child. He also drives without a license and lives in constant fear that he will be deported, tearing him away from his family.

Luis said he appreciates the need to patrol the U.S.-Mexican border to keep terrorists out.

“But we’re just workers,” he said in Spanish. “That’s what’s bad. We’re not murderers or criminals. We do important work.”

Valentin, 50, the subcontractor, said immigrants are irreplaceable in the construction industry.

“We work harder than they do,” he said, comparing Mexican immigrants to American natives. “We work faster, for less money, and we do good work.”

“And they don’t like it,” Luis added, with a flash of indignation and pride. “They’re jealous. Not all, but some of them are.”


jbsmith@wacotrib.com

757-5752

dgenz@wacotrib.com

757-5743