Undocumented

If the US agricultural system has relied on Mexican labor as it developed over many decades, meat processing and construction are two industries that shifted to heavy use of Mexican and Central American—and, in particular, undocumented—immigrants at the end of the twentieth century. This shift coincided with the trend of outsourcing, when manufacturing plants began to shift their labor-intensive production abroad. Manufacturing employment declined from a high of 20 million in 1979 to 11 million in 2012.¹ Meatpacking and construction couldn’t exactly be moved abroad. But meatpacking could be moved out of heavily unionized urban centers like Chicago into the rural Midwest. Construction boomed in new regions, with employment doubling between 1970 and 2006 to a high of 7.7 million.² Both industries increasingly employed immigrant, and undocumented, workers.

While the manufacturing sector was shrinking in the last decades of the twentieth century, construction was expanding. But this industry was also changing profoundly. Unionization plummeted, from 40 percent in the 1970s to only 14 percent in 2011. Unions lost ground especially in the high-growth area of residential construction, which was being buoyed by low interest rates and subprime loans through the first decade of the new century. But as employment rose, working conditions and wages deteriorated. Immigrants and especially undocumented workers increased their presence in the workforce.³ The low wages of undocumented workers helped contribute to the housing bubble by making building costs artificially cheap.⁴

In Las Vegas, the population doubled to almost 2 million between 1990 and 2007, and the share of immigrants in the city’s population also doubled during the same time span from 9 percent to 19 percent. Many of the newcomers worked in hotel construction and tourism-related services in the booming city: half of the state’s construction workers were Latino immigrants. By 2008, Nevada had the largest percentage of undocumented workers of any state, 12 percent.⁵

Houston’s 1970s oil boom likewise spurred a jump in construction. “The record-breaking construction of office buildings, shopping centers, storage facilities, apartment projects, and suburban homes in the 1970s and early 1980s created an insatiable demand for Mexican immigrant labor. Undocumented workers from rural and urban Mexico became a preferred labor force, especially among construction employers who paid low wages and offered poor working conditions.”⁶ The Greater Houston Partnership estimated that 14 percent of Houston’s construction workforce was undocumented in 2008, more than any other job category.⁷

In Texas as a whole, one in thirteen workers—about a million total—labored in the construction industry as of 2013. Half of them are undocumented. A study by the Workers Defense Project in Austin showed that 41 percent of Texas construction workers are subject to payroll fraud, including being illegally classified as independent contractors instead of employees. Employers use this method to evade their legal responsibilities for payroll taxes, minimum wages, working conditions, and benefits. Working conditions are so dangerous that one in five construction workers in the state will require hospitalization for job-related injuries. “More construction workers die in Texas than in any other state,” the study discovered.⁸

In New Orleans, only days after Hurricane Katrina hit, the federal government waived employer sanctions provisions, allowing employers to hire workers without documents. Soon after, it waived prevailing federal wage standard requirements for contractors working on federally funded reconstruction projects. These exemptions set the stage for an influx of low-paid, undocumented workers.⁹ US census figures showed that some one hundred thousand Hispanics moved into the Gulf Coast after Katrina. Hispanics made up half of the labor force working in reconstruction, and half were undocumented. Undocumented workers formed “the backbone of post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction,” reported USA Today.¹⁰ Curiously, while the workers remained undocumented, it was ostensibly not illegal for them to work, at least during the first month and a half, because of the employer sanctions waiver.

Overall, undocumented workers made up a quarter of the workforce in New Orleans in the months following the hurricane.¹¹ Almost 90 percent were already in the United States and moved to New Orleans from other areas, primarily Texas (41 percent) and, to a lesser extent, Florida (10 percent).¹² Unsurprisingly, undocumented workers faced lower wages and poorer working and living conditions than those with documents.

When Hurricane Ike hit southeastern Texas in 2008, undocumented immigrants performed a significant portion of the cleanup work. “All across southeast Texas, roofs need repair, debris must be discarded and towns hope to rebuild. Hurricane Ike’s destruction is sparking one of the largest rebuilding efforts the state has seen in decades, but at the same time is highlighting a thorny facet of the region’s labor force: A lot of the recovery work will be done by illegal immigrants,” reported the Houston Chronicle.¹³

When the housing boom went bust after 2008, strangely, statistics showed that construction wages began to rise. What was actually happening was that the lower-paid newcomers were the first to lose their jobs, so that the rise in wages was more apparent than real. Individual workers weren’t receiving better wages; there were just fewer construction workers employed overall.¹⁴

Like construction, meatpacking is an industry that is very difficult to outsource. In some ways, the work process in meatpacking more resembles that of other large manufacturing plants than it does construction, in which most workers are employed by small companies and contractors. But while industries like textiles or electronics can transport the raw materials and the finished products over long distances to save on the costs of production, this strategy is not practical for dealing with a perishable, bulky, and sometimes cantankerous product. So like construction, meatpacking has relied on bringing immigrant workers to the point of production, rather than sending production to countries where it is cheaper.

Lance Compa summarizes how in-sourcing happened in Nebraska, in a process repeated throughout the Midwest:

From its founding as a territory in 1854 until the late twentieth century, Nebraska was mostly populated by white Americans of European origin, joined by a minority of African-Americans. Omaha was always an important meatpacking center because of its proximity to livestock and feedlots. Immigrant workers from southern and eastern Europe made up most of the meatpacking labor force in the early twentieth century. In the 1940s and ’50s, the children of these immigrants, along with African-American coworkers in key roles, formed strong local unions of the United Packinghouse Workers. As happened in the industry generally, in the 1980s and 1990s, many meatpacking businesses closed plants that provided good wages and benefits. Following closures, company owners often relocated plants to rural areas. In Omaha, some companies later reopened closed factories employing low wage, new immigrant workforces without trade union representation.¹⁵

Wages in meatpacking fell 45 percent between 1980 and 2007. The downgrading of meatpacking jobs proved “devastating to the standard of living for workers in an industry that once sustained a blue-collar middle class.”¹⁶ As both wages and working conditions deteriorated, immigrant workers became the mainstay of the labor force. By the late 1990s, fully a quarter of meatpacking workers were estimated to be undocumented. ¹⁷

In the climate of heightened calls for immigration enforcement, the meatpacking industry attracted attention. In 1999, the INS launched Operation Vanguard in Nebraska, subpoenaing the employment records of every meatpacker in the state. After reviewing all 24,000 employee records received, the agency identified 4,700 cases in which the employee’s legal status was in doubt. It presented employers with the list and required all of the “suspects” to appear for interviews with the agency. It seemed clear to the meatpackers that “INS’s intention was not to apprehend potentially unauthorized employees, but to ‘chase off’ those workers who were present in illegal status.”¹⁸

In chasing them off, the operation succeeded. Only one thousand of the workers dared to appear for their interviews. The others simply left their jobs. Overnight, the state’s meatpacking industry lost 13 percent of its workforce. Meanwhile, of the one thousand interviewed, thirty-four were determined to be unauthorized to work and were arrested and deported. “Meatpacking company officials . . . believe that a substantial number of these employees [who disappeared] were authorized to work but chose not to appear because of the intimidation inherent in any such interview (for example, from questions such as ‘are you or any members of your family not authorized to be present in the United States?’).” The Nebraska Cattlemen’s Association estimated that its members lost $5 million and the state economy as a whole lost $20 million as the result of the operation.¹⁹

Operation Vanguard ended in 2000, but in 2006 a new enforcement effort began, focused on workplace raids. On December 12, 2006, ICE agents descended on six Swift meatpacking plants in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, Colorado, and Utah, arresting thirteen hundred of the company’s seven thousand day-shift workers. Swift was also part of the industry pattern of shifting from urban to rural, and employing large numbers of new Latin American immigrants, many of them undocumented. In several Swift plants, researchers drew a direct connection to the Bracero Program. Two small communities in the Mexican states of Michoacán, Villachuato and La Huacana, which had begun to send recruits northward as braceros, had now become major sources of migrants to Swift plants. These workers were later joined by Central Americans. In Swift’s Cactus, Texas, plant, most of the workers were Maya Quiche Guatemalans, many of them undocumented.²⁰

In an eerie replay of previous roundups and deportations of Mexicans like Operation Wetback, ICE agents relied on appearance to determine who to detain. One American citizen of Mexican origin at Swift’s Nebraska plant recounted that “when they said all the US citizens come over to this place, I went up there and I stood right by my boss. My boss showed his driver’s license and then he was free to go. I showed my driver’s license and my voting registration card and that was not enough. He [the ICE agent] said, no, you need either your passport or citizenship certificate.”²¹ Most of those arrested in the raids were charged not with the civil violation of unauthorized presence in the country, but with criminal charges of fraudulent use of Social Security numbers and/or identity theft.

The raids affected more than just those arrested, as family members and others were afraid to show up to work in the aftermath. The Center for Immigration Studies looked at what happened in the devastated plants over the following months. All managed to replace the hundreds of workers who were arrested, but none improved working conditions or wages, and none shifted back to employing US citizens. The companies scoured the United States for workers willing to accept the jobs, and most of the lost workers were eventually replaced by immigrants from Burma and different parts of Africa who held refugee status and thus had legal authorization to work.²²

Another devastating raid took place at the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa, in May 2008. Agriprocessors represented a cross between in-sourcing and a new industry. Although meatpacking in general was an old industry that was moving into new rural areas, kosher processing had been a local, small-scale industry before the late twentieth century. “In the 1980s, before the Postville plant had opened, almost all fresh kosher meat had been sold through local butchers. It came in raw quarters from slaughterhouses that were rented out by rabbis, and it rarely made it beyond major cities on the coasts.” ²³

The Rubashkin family changed all that. Locating their new plant in the small town of Postville, Iowa, they proposed to turn kosher meat into a nationally available, mass-produced product. “The Rubashkins created a world in which it was possible to buy fresh kosher beef and poultry in ordinary supermarkets across the country, even in places that had few Jews. . . . The changes brought about by the Rubashkins did something more than expand the reach of kosher meat. They brought an entirely new customer base to kosher food: the secular Jews and even non-Jews who never would have stopped at a butcher shop. The expansion also allowed Orthodox communities in places that had never had them.”²⁴

Agriprocessors also differed from other meatpackers in choosing the tiny town of Postville as its location. Most meatpackers moved to medium-sized towns of thirty thousand to sixty thousand when they left the urban centers. Postville, with a population of fourteen hundred, was “a town with no stoplights, no fast-food restaurants and a weekly newspaper that for years featured the ‘Yard of the Week.’”²⁵ Most of the workers were recruited from two small villages in Guatemala. Over 75 percent of the workers were undocumented, and some were minors.²⁶ Working conditions at the plant were abysmal.

“One of those workers—a woman who agreed to be identified by the pseudonym Juana—came to this rural corner of Iowa a year ago from Guatemala,” said one newspaper account. Since then, she has worked 10-to-12-hour night shifts, six nights a week. Her cutting hand is swollen and deformed, but she has no health insurance to have it checked. She works for wages, starting at $6.25 an hour and stopping at $7, that several industry experts described as the lowest of any slaughterhouse in the nation.”²⁷

In May 2008, ICE agents descended on the plant and arrested 389 of its 900 workers, most of them Guatemalan. As their lengthy saga of incarceration and deportation began, the rest of the town’s immigrant population panicked. “Within weeks, roughly 1,000 Mexican and Guatemalan residents—about a third of the town—vanished. It was as if a natural disaster had swept through, leaving no physical evidence of destruction, just silence behind it.”²⁸

The Agriprocessors raid in May 2008 was “the largest single-site operation of its kind in American history.”²⁹ Because one of the court interpreters, Erik Camayd-Freixas, wrote a detailed protest about the irregularity of the procedures, which circulated widely on the Internet and was later submitted to Congress, the public obtained access to an unusually complete picture of the process. According to Camayd-Freixas’s account, “The arrest, prosecution, and conviction of 297 undocumented workers from Postville was a process marred by irregularities at every step of the way.” The government charged the workers en masse, and without any evidence whatsoever, of the criminal charge of “aggravated identity theft.” Prosecutors then coerced them into a plea bargain for a lesser but still criminal charge of misuse of a Social Security number.³⁰

The Guatemalan workers knew that they were in the country without legal permission. But that’s a civil violation, not a crime. The only punishment should have been removal. Through their own networks, most of the undocumented immigrants know that they have few rights in the immigration court system. Most of them had no idea what the criminal charges meant, and when pressured to accept a plea bargain, most of them did so. Many acquiesced out of desperation, since as the sole support for their families, they could not afford to remain in detention awaiting trial. They believed they would quickly be deported. Instead, they had signed up for a five-month prison sentence.

Camayd-Freixas described the heart-wrenching scenes as court-appointed lawyers tried to explain the criminal charges and advise those arrested. One conversation illustrates the utter disconnect between the world of the workers and the legal system they were caught in.

The client, a Guatemalan peasant afraid for his family, spent most of that time weeping at our table, in a corner of the crowded jailhouse visiting room. How did he come here from Guatemala? “I walked.” What? “I walked for a month and ten days until I crossed the river. . . . I just wanted to work a year or two, save, and then go back to my family, but it was not to be. . . . The Good Lord knows I was just working and not doing anyone any harm.” This man, like many others, was in fact not guilty. “Knowingly” and “intent” are necessary elements of the [criminal] charges, but most of the clients we interviewed did not even know what a Social Security number was or what purpose it served. This worker simply had the papers filled out for him at the plant, since he could not read or write Spanish, let alone English. But the lawyer still had to advise him that pleading guilty was in his best interest. He was unable to make a decision. “You all do and undo,” he said. “So you can do whatever you want with me.” To him we were part of the system keeping him from being deported back to his country, where his children, wife, mother, and sister depended on him. He was their sole support and did not know how they were going to make it with him in jail for 5 months. None of the “options” really mattered to him. Caught between despair and hopelessness, he just wept. He had failed his family, and was devastated. I went for some napkins, but he refused them. I offered him a cup of soda, which he superstitiously declined, saying it could be “poisoned.” His Native American spirit was broken and he could no longer think. He stared for a while at the signature page pretending to read it, although I knew he was actually praying for guidance and protection. Before he signed with a scribble, he said: “God knows you are just doing your job to support your families, and that job is to keep me from supporting mine.”³¹

Like Swift, Agriprocessors looked to other sources of marginalized, immigrant workers in the wake of the raid. “In one of its most desperate moves, Agri recruited 170 people from the Micronesian island of Palau—whose status as a former US protectorate means its citizens can work legally in the United States. In September 2008, the Palauans traveled 72 hours and 8,000 miles on planes and buses before arriving in Postville with little more than flip-flops and brightly colored shorts and tops.”³²

Six months later, the plant closed. It was later sold and reopened, and like other plants in the industry, implemented the E-Verify system. However, as a journalist found in 2011,

few Iowan-born locals work there. Ridding this small community of its illegal workforce, far from freeing up jobs for American-born citizens, has resulted in closed businesses and fewer opportunities. Even nearly four years later, many homes still remain empty, and taxable retail sales are about 40 percent lower than they were in 2008.

In order to staff its still low-paying jobs with legal immigrants, the new owner of the plant has recruited a hodgepodge of refugees and other immigrants, who often leave the town as soon as they find better opportunities, creating a constant churn among the population. The switch to a legal workforce has made the community feel less stable, some locals say, and it’s unclear if Postville will again become a place where immigrants will put down roots, raise children, and live in relative harmony with their very different neighbors.³³

Years later, a researcher in Guatemala met with families that had been deported, including sixteen US-born, US citizen children. The children, Aryah Somers reported, were “growing up in extreme poverty, with little schooling and scant medical care. . . . The kids are undernourished and barely literate in either Spanish or English.” Their parents planned to send them back to the United States once they are ten or twelve years old and able to travel alone.³⁴

While the Obama administration scaled down the Bush-era policy of workplace raids, the E-Verify system expanded rapidly. E-Verify was created in 1997 under the auspices of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and requires participating employers to check each new hire against a set of federal databases to ensure that the individual is either a citizen or an immigrant specifically authorized to work in the United States. The system was initially voluntary, but in 2007, the Office of Management and Budget required all federal government agencies to screen all new hires through the system and, in 2009, required certain federal contractors and subcontractors to use it for existing employees as well as new hires. Several states, beginning with Arizona in 2007, have mandated that all employers in the state utilize E-Verify.³⁵ Other states have tried to restrict its use.³⁶ S. 744, the comprehensive immigration reform bill supported by President Obama and passed by the Senate in June 2013, would make the system mandatory for all employers nationwide. (As this book goes to press, the bill seems to have little chance of passing in the House or becoming law.)

But the experience of the meatpacking industry shows that eliminating undocumented workers, either through workplace raids or through the use of E-Verify, has not increased employment opportunities for citizens. Instead, it has destabilized businesses and communities, created temporary flows of refugees, and brought harm to innumerable immigrants, citizens, and businesses with benefit to none. Many argue against the use of E-Verify because the GAO found it to be plagued with errors and false alarms, as amply illustrated by several GAO investigations between 2005 and 2011.³⁷ While it’s quite true that the program has mistakenly ensnared large numbers of work-authorized immigrants and naturalized citizens, that is not the only or even the main reason to oppose it. Even if the program worked perfectly, its impact on individuals, businesses, communities, and the economy would only be to cause harm.³⁸

Other sectors that employ significant numbers of undocumented workers are the mostly unregulated, small-scale niches in the service sector like landscaping, nanny services, and newspaper delivery. The first two are sectors where employment has grown in recent decades, while in the latter it has shrunk. But all three have been refuges for undocumented workers, in part because they involve low pay; insecurity and lack of benefits; difficult hours; and isolated, heavy, and sometimes dangerous working conditions. These poor working conditions parallel the working conditions in industries that have been outsourced (manufacturing) and in-sourced (meatpacking, construction). The cheap products provided by outsourcing and in-sourcing, along with the cheap services provided by these new service industries, have contributed to rising consumption and illusions of affluence in the United States.

The landscaping industry has grown steadily since the 1970s, hand in hand with the construction industry. Newly built homes, businesses, and public buildings created a fresh demand for landscaping services. Landscaping companies responded to the increased demand by creating new products and services, which soon came to be considered essential.³⁹

Two additional, interrelated changes in the past decades have contributed to the increase in demand for landscaping services. First, the ranks of the super-rich who hire landscaping companies to maintain their palatial grounds have increased. Second, middle- and upper-middle-class suburban families that once might have maintained their own yards are now too busy and are contracting out services that they or their children used to provide. As the industry grew, the new jobs were filled by immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants.

One of many companies to expand and transform in the new era belonged to Nikita Floyd. The Washington Post described its trajectory:

In the early 1990s, Floyd had fewer than a dozen employees, all of them black. Today, 73 percent of the Washington area’s landscaping workers are immigrants, along with 51 percent of office cleaners and 43 percent of construction workers. . . . Floyd’s 20 wintertime workers are all men from El Salvador, except for two black women who manage the office. In the summer, he employs twice as many men, all immigrants. Floyd’s experience illustrates immigrants’ impact. Once just a guy with a lawnmower, he runs a business with annual sales of more than $2.5 million. He credits immigrant employees for his business’s growth and pays about $10 an hour, with no work and no pay in inclement weather. It’s grueling labor in the winter; a man can spend the day stabbing a spade into frozen dirt or be asked to shimmy up a tree with a chainsaw in one hand and no netting below.⁴⁰

Like the farm and meatpacking associations discussed earlier, the California Landscape Contractors Association is strongly opposed to the criminalization of immigrant work and implicitly acknowledges its industry’s reliance on the undocumented. Calling for legalization, the association notes that “[t]he status quo is untenable, as it puts employers in a strange ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ situation where they can never be sure of their workforce.” The industry operates under a continuous labor shortage, the association explains:

The landscaping industry relies heavily on an immigrant labor force. Landscaping is physically demanding work. It is performed in hot, cold, and sometimes rainy weather. Some landscaping jobs are seasonal. American-born workers increasingly are not attracted to such jobs. Because landscaping work involves outdoor manual labor, it is to some extent young person’s work. Yet America has an aging workforce. At the same time, the landscape industry is growing and therefore has a need for more workers, partly because this same aging population tends to enlarge the market for landscaping services. Immigrants, who tend to be young, address this unmet need for younger workers in the landscape industry.⁴¹

Landscaping is not the only personal-service job that has proliferated with the use of undocumented immigrants in recent decades. A number of high-profile public figures have been embarrassed when reporters uncovered their use of undocumented domestic workers. Lawyer Zoe Baird, who had worked for the Carter administration and the Department of Justice, was withdrawn as President Bill Clinton’s nominee for attorney general when it was revealed that she had employed undocumented workers as chauffeur and nanny. Then Clinton’s second choice, Kimba Wood, was withdrawn for the same reason.⁴² When Mitt Romney was running in the Republican primary in 2007, in large part on an anti-immigrant platform, the Boston Globe published an investigation showing that undocumented workers maintained the 2.5-acre lot around his home in Belmont, Massachusetts.⁴³ California Republican gubernatorial candidate and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman fired her nanny of nine years during the campaign when she allegedly first learned that she was undocumented.⁴⁴ And Bernard Kerik stepped down from his nomination as chief of the Department of Homeland Security in 2004 when it was learned that he too had hired a nanny who lacked documents.⁴⁵

But not only the super-rich hire nannies, landscapers, and house cleaners. In 2001, sociologist Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo described the proliferation of services in the previous twenty years that had transformed middle-class life in heavily immigrant Los Angeles. At the time she was writing, Los Angeles was still in the vanguard; a decade later, what she described had become commonplace throughout the United States.

When you arrive at many a Southern California hotel or restaurant, you are likely to be first greeted by a Latino car valet. The janitors, cooks, busboys, painters, carpet cleaners, and landscape workers who keep the office buildings, restaurants, and malls running are also likely to be Mexican or Central American immigrants, as are many of those who work behind the scenes in dry cleaners, convalescent homes, hospitals, resorts, and apartment complexes. . . . Only twenty years ago, these relatively inexpensive consumer services and products were not nearly as widely available as they are today. The Los Angeles economy, landscape, and lifestyle have been transformed in ways that rely on low-wage, Latino immigrant labor.⁴⁶

The number of gardeners and domestic workers in Los Angeles doubled between 1980 and 1990.⁴⁷

The inexpensive nature of these services—in part because of the often undocumented immigrant labor that provided them—helped to sustain an illusion of upward mobility for people in the working and middle classes.⁴⁸ This illusion overlays other changes in the US economy over the past fifty years, as the rapid expansion of the middle class that began in the post–World War II era slowed and then reversed in the 1970s, to be replaced by growing economic inequality. Paradoxically, Hondagneu-Sotelo found that increasing social inequality led to greater numbers of people employing domestic help. The middle class works harder to maintain its standard of living and must increasingly rely on low-cost services provided by the more impoverished.⁴⁹ Formerly, domestic workers were found mostly in the employ of upper-middle-class suburbanites. By the 1980s, employers came to include “apartment dwellers with modest incomes, single mothers, college students, and elderly people living on fixed incomes. They live in tiny bungalows and condominiums, not just sprawling houses.” Even Latina domestic workers found themselves employing other immigrant women to clean, cook, and care for their children, while they provided those same services to their wealthier clients.⁵⁰

Tellingly, Los Angeles was the vanguard. In the 1990s, “when Angelenos, accustomed to employing a full-time nanny/housekeeper for about $150 or $200 a week, move[d] to Seattle or Durham, they [were] startled to discover how ‘the cost of living that way’ quickly escalate[d]. Only then [did] they realize the extent to which their affluent lifestyle and smoothly running household depended on one Latina immigrant woman.”⁵¹ As the Latino immigrant population spread from the Southwest to other parts of the country, access to the services it provided also became more widespread.⁵²

Business Review reported, “[N]annies [are] a growth industry in slow economy.” With more parents working, and child care expensive or unavailable, the nanny industry fills the gap.⁵³ The Arizona Republic reported, “[U]nconventional work schedules, increased awareness and flexible care options have ignited growth in the nanny industry. At the same time, parents have a desire for more personalized care.”⁵⁴

The New York Times commented on the widespread nature of the so-called nanny problem with regard to the Zoe Baird case: “As everyone learned before a conveniently childless candidate ended the search for an Attorney General, the hiring of illegal caregivers is an endemic labor practice, among paralegals and secretaries as well as $250,000-a-year executives, in cities like New York, Los Angeles or Miami—points of entry to the United States as well as centers of immigrant population. Cities with a baby sitter or nanny labor force tend to lack even the fragile, faint day-care networks that exist in other parts of the country.”⁵⁵

Newspaper delivery, of course, has been around for a long time. But today’s newspaper delivery system is something entirely new. No longer does a neighborhood kid walk or bike through the streets tossing papers into his neighbors’ yards. Today, 81 percent of paper deliverers are adults, and a large proportion of them are undocumented immigrants. A look at the structure of the industry will help explain why.⁵⁶

In many areas of the country, newspapers are delivered through a system of independent contractors—the same system construction companies use to evade their legal responsibilities as employers. The newspaper publisher works with a contracting company, which in turn hires workers who must sign a contract confirming that they are not employees but independent contractors. In Connecticut, all fourteen respondents to a survey of newspaper publishers in the state confirmed that they used this system. ⁵⁷ Likewise in the Boston area, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Boston Globe are all distributed by a single company, which hires contractors to deliver all three in a given area.

As independent contractors, workers may not receive the minimum wages and may not be eligible for workers’ compensation or unemployment benefits. (States and courts have varied as to how they treat these cases, but newspaper publishers overwhelmingly insist that their deliverers are contractors, not employees.) In a case where independent contractors sued and appealed for class status in a class action suit, the US District Court–Southern District of California described the job in the following terms:

Plaintiffs deliver the North County Times to the homes of subscribers. Each morning, the newspaper carriers arrive at one of several distribution centers in San Diego County. The carriers arrive at different times. Although they generally arrive between 1:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m., some arrive earlier or later. The arrival time varies depending on the day of the week.

The carriers are contractually obligated to deliver the assembled newspapers by 6:00 a.m. each weekday and 7:00 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

Upon arrival, the carriers are responsible for assembling the newspapers. Some assemble the papers at the distribution center—those that use the distribution center pay a rental fee—and others assemble the papers elsewhere. Assembling the newspapers may involve folding or inserting the following: newspaper inserts, sections, pre-prints, samples, supplements and other products at NCT’s direction. The carriers pay for their own rubber bands and plastic bags used to assemble the papers. Some carriers buy the rubber bands and bags from Defendant, and others purchase them elsewhere. The carriers also pay for their own gas and automobile expenses they incur delivering the newspapers.⁵⁸

Contractors sign up to deliver papers 365 days a year, starting no later than 4 a.m. every day. They cannot miss a day unless they can arrange for their own replacement, must own a car, and have a valid driver’s license. They have to maintain and buy gas for the car, driving hundreds of miles a week. All for less than minimum wage. During winter weather emergencies, when public transportation is shut down and the governor of Massachusetts calls a state of emergency, closing public offices and begging residents to stay at home and businesses to remain closed until the plows can clear the streets, independent contractors receive a curt message with their newspapers. “SNOW IS EXPECTED . . . WE WILL BE WORKING. IC’S ARE EXPECTED TO DELIVER THEIR ROUTES. PLAN ACCORDINGLY: BE EARLY; DO NOT ALLOW YOUR CAR TO BE BLOCKED IN; EXPECT TO HAVE TO SHOVEL OUT.”⁵⁹

Overall, the rise in undocumented workers over the past several decades has gone along with a rise in the invisible, exploited labor that they perform. The generally unacknowledged work that they do is a crucial underpinning to the standard of living and consumption enjoyed by virtually everyone in the United States. But, clearly, an economic system that keeps a lot of people unemployed and another group trapped in a legal status that restricts them to the worst kinds of jobs does not really benefit everyone.

Some have argued that the influx of undocumented workers depresses the labor market, lowers wages for less educated workers, and creates more competition for jobs at the lower end of the pay scale. Labor economist George Borjas has made this argument most persuasively, and many commentators who argue that we should restrict immigration base their arguments on his work.⁶⁰

Other economists, however, have found that the low-wage labor of undocumented immigrants actually increases the wages and employment of even low-paid citizen workers. By increasing productivity, low-paid undocumented workers can increase capital available for investment, hiring, and wages. Because undocumented workers add to the population, their consumption stimulates the economy.⁶¹ One recent study tried to document the expected economic impact of deportation versus legalization of the undocumented population of Arizona. The study found that legalization would be far more beneficial and deportation far more costly for American citizens.

Undocumented immigrants don’t simply “fill” jobs; they create jobs. Through the work they perform, the money they spend, and the taxes they pay, undocumented immigrants sustain the jobs of many other workers in the US economy, immigrants and native-born alike. Were undocumented immigrants to suddenly vanish, the jobs of many Americans would vanish as well. In contrast, were undocumented immigrants to acquire legal status, their wages and productivity would increase, they would spend more in our economy and pay more in taxes, and new jobs would be created.⁶²

Two recent films, one a feature film and one a documentary, demonstrate this effect. A Day without a Mexican imagines that California awakens one morning to a strange fog, which has caused everyone of Mexican origin to vanish. Non-Mexicans stumble through their lives trying to fill in the gaps and realizing along the way how utterly dependent their economy and daily lives are on Mexican immigrants. In a moving scene at the end, after the fog lifts and the Mexicans reappear, the Border Patrol comes across a group in the wilderness at night. Flashing their lights, a patrolman asks, “Are you guys Mexican?” When the migrants confirm, the patrollers break into welcoming applause.

The film 9500 Liberty looks at a case in which the fantasy of A Day without a Mexican became a reality. In Prince William County, Virginia, a local ordinance in 2007 required police to stop and question anyone they suspected of being undocumented. Although the ordinance was eventually repealed, the acrimonious anti-immigrant mobilization surrounding it as well as fear of its implementation caused many immigrants to leave. As businesses closed, schools and neighborhoods emptied, and the housing market collapsed, the white citizen majority in the county became more dubious about the supposed benefits of expelling the undocumented.

Although the current system benefits many people in the United States, we must also recognize its fundamental injustice and think seriously about how it works and what steps could make it more just. If immigrants are being exploited by the current system, and if undocumentedness is one of the concepts that sustains inequality and unjust treatment, then we need to question undocumentedness itself.

The system benefits most Americans materially, given that Americans—even poor Americans—consume an extraordinary proportion of the planet’s resources. Only 4 percent of the world’s children are American, but they consume 40 percent of the world’s toys.⁶³ Despite the fact that many Americans are unemployed, in debt, and struggle to pay for health care and put food on their plates, they still consume more than their share. They do so because of the economic chain that links them to workers who are legally marginalized, either because they work in other countries or because they work illegally inside the United States.

Undocumentedness has everything to do with work and the economy. It is a key component of the late-twentieth-century global system. Every so-called industrialized country—or more accurately, deindustrializing country—relies on the labor of workers who are legally excluded to maintain its high levels of consumption. Like the United States, these countries rely on the legal conveniences of borders, countries, and citizenship to impose different rules for different people and maintain a legally excluded working class.

This system also creates fantastic profits for the few. But a fairer economic system would distribute the planet’s resources more equally. If we can understand undocumentedness as a mechanism for creating and perpetuating economic inequality, it will be easier for us to reject it outright.

Working (Part 2)