According to the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights, “the expression ‘illegal migrant’ should not be used. It contradicts the spirit and violates directly the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which clearly states in Article 6 that ‘Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.’ The preferred term is ‘undocumented migrant.’ ”1 Some immigration scholars prefer “unauthorized migrant,” since many of the people who fall into this category do in fact have documents, but not valid documents—they may be false, or expired, or otherwise fail to authorize their presence.2
The difference between “legal” and unauthorized, undocumented, or “illegal” immigrants is nowhere near as clear-cut as most people imagine. Some people who enter the country legally will become illegal if they overstay their visa; some people who enter illegally or become illegal are actually in the process of legalizing their status, especially if they have a close relative who can sponsor them.
Many families and households include people of differing immigration status: citizens by birth, naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents, people on immigrant visas, and undocumented immigrants.
A 2004 study by the Pew Hispanic Center, based on the 2000 census and the 2004 Current Population Survey, found 35.7 million foreign-born residents in the United States; in 2005 this was up to 37 million. Of these, 11.3 million (11.5 million in 2005) were naturalized citizens; 10.4 million (10.5 million in 2005) were legal permanent residents; 10.3 million (11.1 million in 2005) were unauthorized migrants; 2.5 million (2.6 million in 2005) were refugees; and 1.2 million (1.3 million in 2005) were temporary legal residents (holding a nonimmigrant visa like a tourist or a student visa).3 As of early 2006, estimates had risen to between 11 and 12 million unauthorized migrants.4
Of the unauthorized migrants, over half—5.9 million (6.2 million in 2005)—were from Mexico, and another 2.5 million from elsewhere in Latin America. The rest came from Asia (1 million in 2004; 1.5 million in 2005), Europe and Canada (600,000 in both 2004 and 2005), and Africa (400,000 in both years).5
Hard information on these unauthorized migrants is hard to come by. But the Pew report argues that most of those who came from Mexico entered “without inspection”—that is, they crossed the border without valid entry documents—while most of those from outside the Americas entered with valid visas but overstayed them. For the rest of Latin America, migrants are assumed to be divided between the two categories—some crossing the border without documents, and some overstaying valid visas.6 The California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation estimates that half of all unauthorized migrants are EWIs—people who “entered without inspection,” that is, crossed the border without passing through a border control post. The other half are visa overstayers—people who entered with a valid visa but did not depart when the visa expired.7
In addition, something like 1 to 1.5 million of the unauthorized migrants have “quasi-legal” status in the United States. They may have requested asylum, or begun the process of acquiring legal permanent resident status, or become eligible for a new category of authorized presence, like the temporary protected status offered to Salvadorans and Nicaraguans.8
The stereotype most Americans hold of the “illegal immigrant” is a single, adult male, here to work temporarily. Indeed some of the unauthorized migrant population falls into this category. Of the approximately 11.1 million unauthorized migrants in the country as of March 2005, only about 25 percent (2.4 million) were single men, fewer than 10 percent (730,000) were single women, and 16 percent (1.8 million) of unauthorized migrants were children under eighteen. The remaining 3.9 million women and 5.4 million men lived in families, whose members varied in terms of immigration status. In particular, they included three million children who were U.S. citizens.9
Overall, unauthorized migrants tend to have lower levels of education and work at lower-paying jobs than do authorized migrants or citizens. They are especially overrepresented in agriculture and construction work—some of the most unregulated sectors of the labor market.10 Only 4.3 percent of all workers in the United States are unauthorized migrants, but they constitute 19 percent of workers in agriculture, 17 percent in cleaning and building maintenance, 12 percent in construction, 11 percent in food preparation, and 8 percent in production.11
In industrial work, unauthorized workers are particularly present in food manufacturing and in textiles and apparel manufacturing. These two industries offer good examples of how global economic restructuring has affected the U.S. labor market.
Textiles and garments were two of the first industries to experiment with the mobility of capital. The U.S. textile industry began in New England in the mid-nineteenth century. Before the century ended, textile magnates were looking to invest in places where they could produce more cheaply. South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and other places in the U.S. south offered low taxes, cheap labor, official repression of unions, and subsidies to entice capital.
Factory owners in the north played a double game during the early to mid-twentieth century. They invested in the south, taking advantage of the incentives southern communities offered. Then they told their northern workers that they were being undercut by southern competition and would have to lower wages and speed up the work pace in order to remain competitive. Often they ran their northern factories into the ground before closing them permanently.
In the second half of the century, the game turned global. Manufacturers opened plants in Puerto Rico, in Mexico, and elsewhere in Latin America and in Asia. They imposed cost-cutting measures in their U.S. plants, claiming “foreign” competition. When they had reduced conditions in their U.S. factories to make them competitive with the Third World, they began to import Latin American workers—claiming that no U.S. workers wanted the jobs. New England’s oldest textile towns, like Lowell, Massachusetts, and Central Falls, Rhode Island, turned into new immigrant centers in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, as textile employers recruited workers in Puerto Rico and Colombia.12
Meatpacking followed a somewhat different trajectory. While the textile industry was able to use the threat of plant relocation to successfully undermine union organizing attempts or to keep unions weak, the meatpacking industry became one of the bastions of industrial union organizing in the 1930s, which succeeded in significantly improving the conditions of workers. “From the 1930s to the 1970s,” explains Lance Compa, “meatpacking workers’ pay and conditions improved. Master contracts covering the industry raised wages and safety standards. In the 1960s and 1970s, meatpacking workers’ pay and conditions approximated those of auto, steel, and other industrial laborers who worked hard in their plants and through their unions to attain steady jobs with good wages and benefits. Meatpackers’ wages remained substantially higher than the average manufacturing sector wage.”13
In the 1980s, meatpackers began an assault on the conditions of their unionized workers. Management’s response to the 1985 strike at a Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota, epitomized the industry’s commitment to breaking and eliminating unions in their plants. The strike lasted for over a year and a half, and garnered national attention from labor activists and others who hoped to stem the tide of concessionary bargaining. The cautious national union (UFCW) opposed the militant local, and the strike was crushed. It was the beginning of the dismantling of the unionized meatpacking sector.
Because it is perishable, meat is harder to transport than many of the items whose production was moved abroad in the 1980s. Rather, the meat industry replicated what the agricultural industry had been doing since the nineteenth century: it began to “bring in the Third World.” As Compa explains it, “Instead of exporting production to developing countries for low labor costs, lax health, safety and environmental enforcement, and vulnerable, exploited workers, U.S. meat and poultry companies essentially are reproducing developing country employment conditions here.”14