Thread: Jobs lure illegal immigrants to state

http://www.newsobserver.com/1155/story/411982.html
Part 1: Jobs lure illegal immigrants to state


Karin Rives, Staff Writer
Four hundred thousand strong and they keep coming, drawn by the jobs that North Carolina employers eagerly offer illegal immigrants.
Illegal immigrants mow our lawns, paint our homes, watch our children and cook our food for bottom wages. Doing so, they provide consumers with affordable services that people in most other industrialized countries can only dream of.
But as the wave of immigration continues and the benefits grow, the costs of illegal immigration also mount and become more painful. The losers in the United States' immigration-system breakdown are numerous. They include:
* Taxpayers who foot the cost of educating children of illegal immigrants.
* Hospitals that serve thousands of uninsured newcomers. They absorb some of the cost but pass much of it along to their paying customers and taxpayers.
* Legal blue-collar workers, whose wages are depressed by competition from immigrants willing to work for less.
So far, however, the federal government has chosen to look the other way -- and many businesses are glad it has.
Businesses are the biggest beneficiary of illegal immigration and are the reason unauthorized foreigners are here in the first place.
Some employers say they have difficulty verifying immigrants' legal status, others that pressing labor demands force them to flout the law.
Few, however, express remorse.
"Let's say they got the National Guard to start pulling everybody over and sending every illegal person they find back home. Then where is your work force going to come from?" asked Paul, owner of a small landscaping and tree-cutting business in Raleigh.
Paul, who has employed two illegal immigrants from Mexico for more than seven years, agreed to speak provided he and his business were not fully identified.
"If we don't want them here, why doesn't the government send them back?" he said. "The government lets them cross the border, so why should we worry about it?"
In North Carolina, as in much of the South, any account of illegal immigration is essentially a story about Hispanics. Today, it's estimated that more than 600,000 Hispanics are in the state, roughly half of them without papers.
Of the estimated 395,000 illegal immigrants who made their home in North Carolina in 2004, 70 percent were Mexican, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a research group in Washington. Taking into account thousands who arrived from Central America and other Latin American countries, the Hispanic portion of the state's illegal immigrant population is probably at least 80 percent. That would put the number of illegal Hispanic residents in the state about 316,000.
Last month, researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill published a study on the economic impact of North Carolina's Hispanic influx. Among their findings:
* Hispanics, legal and illegal, cost state taxpayers $817 million in 2004, with education and health care being the biggest expenses. Meanwhile, Hispanics generated $756 million in tax revenue. According to the report, that averages out to a cost to the state budget of $102 per Hispanic resident.
* More broadly, Hispanic residents contributed about $9 billion to the state economy through purchases and taxes. Their spending has led to creation of 89,600 jobs.
* Because many Latinos work for below-market wages, they also depress North Carolina private-sector payrolls by $1.9 billion annually, the researchers found. In many cases, those lower costs are passed on to consumers as lower prices.
The study was released by UNC's Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise and was underwritten by the N.C. Bankers Association.
North Carolina businesses are tripping over one another to offer products and services to this growing Hispanic consumer group.
A few years ago, it was rare to see an American-owned company display a "Se habla espanol" sign. Today, many business owners say they can't manage without Spanish-speaking staffers.
Carol Priest, owner of Carolina Motorcars in the Franklin County town of Youngsville, has four.
"We probably sell 50 percent of our vehicles to Hispanics," she said. "It's fantastic."
9/11: An awakening
The 2001 terrorist attacks focused new attention on immigration. They woke the nation up to a long-ignored but astounding fact: In spite of stepped-up border security, the population of illegal immigrants in the United States has swelled by 700,000 each year since 2000, according to estimates by Pew.
Citing national security concerns, lawmakers are introducing measures aimed at slowing the flood of illegal workers and their family members into the United States.
One bill, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick, a Charlotte Republican, calls for $10,000 in fines against employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. Today the maximum fine is $250 per worker.
"Our immigration system is broken," Myrick said. "We need to know who's inside our country. Our main concern here is terrorism; there are a lot of people who don't like us and want to hurt us."
Today, potential terrorists can assume a Hispanic name and slip with ease across the country's southern border, she said.
But even if the federal government decides to crack down, it would need to find the resources to stop the flow.
In North Carolina, not a single business has been fined for hiring illegal immigrants since 1999. That's in spite of Section 274A of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the federal law that prohibits employers from knowingly hiring illegal immigrants.
Tom O'Connell, who runs the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Cary, said enforcement of the law is difficult, given his limited staffing. It's more important, he said, to concentrate on finding and deporting immigrant felons and workers in sensitive workplaces such as nuclear plants or defense facilities.
"I can't arrest every truck full of painters going to some job in Apex," he said. "We don't have the resources."
So they keep coming -- some on tourist visas that expire, others by car or by foot across the country's southern border. Some are professionals, but the vast majority are people who come to the United States hoping to escape poverty and to build a better life.
Two are chosen
Seven years have passed since Paul, the owner of the Raleigh tree-cutting and landscaping business, picked two Mexican brothers from a crowd of 30 immigrant laborers.
They had gathered at a McDonald's on Capital Boulevard after hearing that an employer was coming to recruit. Paul chose "the two cleanest-cut guys" and drove his two new employees, Oscar and Daniel, to a Hispanic store down the street.
There, he paid $60 to have a clerk fill out and mail applications for individual tax identification numbers for his two workers. The Internal Revenue Service provides the number to people who lack Social Security cards to ensure they pay taxes, regardless of their legal status.
The tax ID program was introduced in 1996 as a means of capturing tax revenue, but for illegal immigrants, it has turned into a kind of substitute Social Security number that can open some important doors.
Oscar and Daniel wanted tax ID numbers because the numbers enable lenders to run credit checks, just as they would with a Social Security number. For immigrants, a tax ID number makes it possible to apply for a car loan, an apartment lease, phone service and other essentials of daily life.
Paul, meanwhile, wanted to make sure he paid taxes for his employees.
"If the government gives them a tax ID number to work, then I've got to think that they're OK to work," he recalled thinking.
Oscar and Daniel have been working for the tree-cutting business ever since.
Paul benefits from having experienced, dependable workers, and the low turnover saves him thousands of dollars' worth of training costs.
He has had less luck with his American employees. He recently had to fire both, one for not showing up to work and one for showing up drunk. He has since hired another American whom he's very happy with.
Paul says he can't afford to purchase health insurance for his employees, but he pays their medical bills if needed. He also treats his workers to lunch every day and lends them money if they need it.
"They work hard, and they listen to you, but they also want you to treat them right," he said of his two Mexican employees. "I try to help them out."
Oscar has no plans to leave his job, which pays between $500 and $600 a week.
It has been nearly nine years since he left his wife and two young children in Toluca, a city about 60 miles west of Mexico City.
Since then, he has flown home twice to see his family. Each time, he paid more than $1,000 for a forged visa so he could re-enter the United States.
Oscar's weather-worn face makes him look older than his 35 years, but a hard life may also have something to do with it. His eyes tear up when he talks about his children growing up without him.
"It's terrible to say goodbye to your family and leave your house, but I had to," he said.
The hardship is outweighed by the opportunity he is providing his son, now 17, who is attending a good private school in Mexico and plans to attend an engineering college. Each month, Oscar wires $800 to $1,000 to his wife, about $300 of which goes toward their son's tuition.
"He speaks better English than I do after eight years in the U.S., and he also speaks some French," Oscar said proudly in Spanish. "In one more year, he'll be going to university. This is the reason I'm working here."
Throughout the Triangle and North Carolina, business owners echo the theme: Immigrant workers -- with or without papers -- are meeting a critical need. What American worker, after all, would put up with hard labor for 10 or 11 hours a day without eventually quitting, or at least calling in sick?
Without Hispanic labor, many business owners insist, they just couldn't deliver the goods and services consumers have come to expect.
The true picture is muddier.
David Watts, 20, an unemployed high school graduate from Raleigh, has failed to land a job since his layoff from a call center earlier this winter -- even though he has several years of work experience. He suspects his difficulties are due in part to his expectation of higher wages than the $6 or $7 an hour immigrants will work for.
"Employers want to spend less money on labor so their profits are higher," he said last week. "It's very frustrating."
Nationally, the unemployment rate among workers between 20 and 24 is 8.2 percent, nearly twice the rate for all workers. The jobless rate among African-American men is even higher.
It's not because such workers want to be idle, said Gene Norton, manager of the N.C. Employment Security Commission's Job Link office in Raleigh.
Immigrant workers sometimes get preference because employers know they won't call in sick or "ask for a day off to go to the State Fair," he said. Unlike American workers, he said, they don't "work the system."
Such reliability is gold to employers trying to meet deadlines.
'Hard to find' good help
No wonder then that employers in a state with 215,000 people officially unemployed are openly breaking the law to hire undocumented workers.
About 60 percent of the workers who sign up with Angela Carber Coleman's All-in-One staffing agency in Durham are Hispanic.
"It's hard to find quality people," Coleman said in an interview last year when asked why she doesn't hire more American-born workers.
She does her best to make sure the people she hires are legal. This means she regularly sends people on their way because they can't present the right papers, she said.
Most workers come to her office through word of mouth or from the local Catholic churches where Coleman recruits.
When an Atlanta contractor working on a new department store in Hillsborough called last summer to get help setting up shelving, Coleman had a dozen workers lined up the next day. For two weeks, the group of Spanish-speaking workers toiled in 90-degree heat to get the shelves up on schedule. Nobody quit.
Coleman follows the protocol for checking the legal status of the people she hires out to companies in need of temporary labor. They must produce a visa, passport or other proof of legal residency -- or, if they can't, two other forms of identification that the government requires to prove legality, such as a Social Security card and a driver's license.
Under the law, employers must show good faith, but they're not held liable if they fail to spot a false Social Security card, for example. Employers also walk a fine line: If they decide to verify the legality of one Social Security number, they must check the numbers of all other employees to avoid potential discrimination charges.
So most do what Coleman does.
"We use our best judgment," she said.
In his office at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Cary, Tom O'Connell has a stack of faxed complaints on a desk. They come from people who want him to go after employers of illegal immigrants.
Most go unanswered. O'Connell only has time to investigate critical cases, those that involve felons or national security breaches.
It means Paul, the landscaper, should have little to worry about even as Congress considers stiffer penalties for companies that hire illegal immigrants.
Still, he doesn't want to acknowledge to his clients that he is illegally providing employment to two men with no right to work in the United States.
"I know that illegal aliens also put a burden on taxes," he said. "I don't like that aspect of it."
Until the government solves the problem, however, he plans to look out for himself in the Triangle's competitive landscaping market.
USE OF ANONYMOUS SOURCES: The last names of some people who appear in this series have been withheld. With rare exceptions, it is The News & Observer's policy to fully disclose the names of news sources. For these stories, some illegal immigrants -- and in one case, an employer -- agreed to be interviewed only if they were not fully identified. We included their comments to help explain what's happening with illegal immigration in North Carolina.
Staff writer Karin Rives can be reached at 829-4521 or krives@newsobserver.com.

"Hard to find quality people." ???

Illegals, uneducated and unskilled, are quality people????

Please.....it's just about cheap labor and they know it!