Labor centers for immigrant workers

If one takes into account well staffed entities as well as simple hiring halls, there are probably up to 200 centers dedicated to supporting immigrant workers in obtaining work, learning about American labor practices, and securing their labor rights. I have been to two such centers: The Brazilian Immigrant Center in Boston, and the Watsonville Law Center in Watsonville, CA. I have also visited a makeshift center – more of a hiring hall – in Brooklyn.
Janice Fine of Rutgers University has published a book on this topic: “Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream”. Cornell U Press summarizes the book: “[She] identifies 137 worker centers in more than eighty cities, suburbs, and rural areas in thirty-one states. These centers, which attract workers in industries that are difficult to organize, have emerged as especially useful components of any program intended to assist immigrants and low-wage workers of color. Worker centers serve not only as organizing laboratories but also as places where immigrants and other low-wage workers can participate in civil society, tell their stories to the larger community, resist racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, and work to improve their political and economic standing.”
Fine defines labor centers as “community-based mediating institutions that provide support to low-wage immigrants. Part settlement house, part local civil rights organization, and part union, the centers pursue this mission through a combination of approaches.”
Pablo Alvarado of the National Day Labor Organizing Network proposed seven characteristics of a well runs center:

Continue reading Labor centers for immigrant workers

Wages and economics of immigrant restaurant workers: a case study

The Washington Post profiled the Oval Room Restaurant, on Connecticut Avenue. The writers follow the economic trail of Walter Velasquez, a 40 year old Salvadorean waiter. He came to America illegally; now his eldest child, 17, aspires to become an immigration lawyer. The Post article touches on his household finances, the public’s cost of uninsured healthcare and educating children, and the economics of the restaurant industry.
“The sous-chef, a Panamanian immigrant, directed two cooks from El Salvador, one from Guatemala and one from Honduras. A Salvadoran immigrant ran the food to the tables. All the activity was monitored by the general manager, an Austrian by birth, who needs to satisfy the owner, originally from India. “We would not exist without immigrant labor,” said Ashok Bajaj, owner of the restaurant. “If the laws change, the entire economics of the restaurant industry would change, too.”

Bajaj, a New Delhi native who moved here from London in 1988, was willing to invest a million dollars here because of the availability of labor at attractive prices. His dishwashers make about $10 an hour, line cooks about $14 an hour, and sous-chefs $20 or so. About 70 percent of the restaurant’s employees were born outside the United States; overall in the Washington region, about 45 percent of food-service workers are immigrants, according to an analysis of federal data by the Pew Hispanic Center.

[The] household finances of [Walter Velasquez], a Salvadorean waiter at the Oval and his restaurant-working girlfriend] show how immigrants support the U.S. economy — but also incur costs for public services. He makes about $30,000 a year. Avila, who works fewer hours, earns about $18,000. They pay $1,300 a month in rent and pay Comcast $140 a month for cable television and high-speed Internet service. Comcast has added more than 30 foreign-language channels in the past eight years. The couple spends $150 a week on groceries, much of it at the Giant Food store on Columbia Pike, which has a large selection of ingredients that are common in Central America.

Velasquez’s [the waiter’s] family also exacts costs on the economy. He sends about $100 a month home to family in El Salvador, which does not create new economic activity here. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, in 2000, such remittances amount to $10.2 billion for Mexico and four Central American nations. If the uninsured Velasquez were to have a serious medical problem, the cost would probably be borne by the hospital that treated him. (“We just can’t be sick,” he said.) Inova Fairfax Hospital, near Velasquez’s home, provided $75 million in health care last year to people who were too poor to pay and had no insurance, many of them immigrants, said Ron Ewald, the hospital’s chief financial officer. “It can be very volatile and extremely costly,” he said.

There are local costs too. The Arlington County school system is spending $16,464 per pupil this year, or more than $32,000 for his school-age children. School spending is supported partly by state and federal governments but most significantly by property taxes, which Velasquez pays indirectly with his rent. But what the school system spends on his children’s education can also be viewed as an investment in the next generation of U.S. workers. On Thursday, as Velasquez gathered his things to head back to work, his 17-year-old daughter, Alma, described her plans. After high school, she plans to go to a community college for two years, to save money, then transfer to a four-year university. Ultimately, she wants to be an immigration lawyer. “It came to me because my parents went through so much to get here,” she said.

Pandering and posturing in Arizona about illegal immigrants.

On August 12 2005 a new Arizona law went into effect making it, according to one report, ‘a felony punishable for up to two years in prison to smuggle humans across the border. “ The primary, perhaps only, real effect of the law so far has been to provide the sheriff of Maricopa Country, Joe Arpaio, another publicity stunt. Some time ago, he instructed his deputies to ask citizens to voluntarily submit fingerprints in order to combat the supposed epidemic of identity theft. And he has ordered prisoners, male and female, to wear pink underwear. In 2004 he told jailed illegal immigrants that they had to register for the draft. This time, Arpaio interpreted the law to mean he can round up any and all illegal immigrants and charge them with trespass, conspiracy to smuggle themselves into the United States.
The legislature passed another law making in a felony to be an illegal immigrant in Arizona. The governor vetoed it, perhaps mindful of the reality that major parts of the state’s economy could grind to a halt.
According to a May 5th AP article, a posse of 100 volunteers and sheriff’s deputies will patrol the Phoenix area and arrest any illegal immigrants, the county sheriff said. The group likely will be deployed across parts of Maricopa County by the weekend, Sheriff Joe Arpaio said Wednesday. Volunteers will be drawn from the department’s 3,000-member posse, whose members are trained and are often former deputies.

“It’s important to send the message out to stay in Mexico and don’t come roaming around here hoping you’re going to get amnesty,” said Arpaio. [His] deputies have already arrested about 120 illegal immigrants using a new state smuggling law. “We’re going to arrest any illegal who violates this new law,” he said. “I’m not going to turn these people over to federal authorities so they can have a free ride back to Mexico. I’ll give them a free ride into the county jail.”

Under the law, as interpreted by the Maricopa County attorney, illegal immigrants can be arrested and prosecuted for conspiracy to smuggle themselves into the country. The law’s authors have said they intended it to be used to prosecute smugglers, not the immigrants being smuggled.

Lawyers for nearly 50 undocumented immigrants charged with conspiracy to commit human smuggling have filed motions to have the charges dismissed. A Los Angeles attorney brought into the case last week by the Mexican Consul General’s Office in Phoenix plans to file another motion claiming Maricopa County Attorney officials are violating state and federal law because it’s the federal government’s job to control illegal immigration.

NPR report on social impact back home of Mexican work migration to U.S.

On May 9, NPR ran a first part of a series on the social impact in Mexico of the migration of large numbers of adults to the United States for work. This first part threads a story of a troubled 14 year old whose father, then mother, left for the United States. “When Mexicans migrate to the United States, many leave their children in the care of extended families. That’s causing problems back in their home communities, with children doing poorly in school, dropping out or turning to crime,” reports NPR.

[School headmistress] Antonia Figaroa Ibanez says that more and more parents are leaving their children behind to be cared for by relatives. “It’s affecting us hugely,” she says. “Out of 73 children in one class, 10 have neither of their parents here. That’s a big number.”

Teacher Carmen Sanchez says that when a child’s parents leave, there is a clear consequence. “When they don’t have their father or mother, they lack confidence … in the academic sphere,” she says. “It means that they will be more likely to miss school and to drop out. They are also less respectful of their grandmothers or uncles or their teachers.”

Because crossing the border illegally has become more difficult and costly, migrants don’t want to risk returning to see their families.

More Mexican children and mothers have been coming to the United States, it appears, because only that way can they be with their fathers/husbands.

Illegal Immigrants, Immigration Reform and the Catholic Church

Donald Kerwin, executive director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, a key advocacy group, wrote on 5/1 about the church’s positive, perhaps even militant stand, in regarding undocumented workers rights. He write about recent events and gives a short history of the experience of Catholic immigrants in the early decades of the 20th Century, when they often suffered from discrimination. “Cardinal Roger Mahony electrified the US immigration reform debate by announcing on March 1, 2006 (Ash Wednesday), that he would instruct archdiocesan priests and lay Catholics to ignore provisions in a House-passed “enforcement only” bill (H.R. 4437) — were they to pass — that would make it a crime to assist unauthorized immigrants.”

In February 2003….bishops in the United States and Mexico released Strangers No Longer: Together on a Journey of Hope, a pastoral statement that called for a comprehensive approach to immigration reform. Strangers No Longer built on themes established in other pastoral statements by US bishops (One Family Under God in 1995 and Unity in Diversity in 2000), annual statements by the Holy Father on migration, and a long history of Catholic teaching documents. The US bishops have conducted extensive rollout of these documents through public gatherings, within the relevant church structures, and to lay Catholics, in response to what it sees as increasingly harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric and legislation.

Kerwin provides an historical perspective: “….The church sees parallels between the last great wave of immigrants to the United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the current wave.”

Continue reading Illegal Immigrants, Immigration Reform and the Catholic Church

Strangers No Longer: Catholic Church’s statement on Hispanic illegal immigration

This February 2003, pastoral letter signed by Mexican and American bishops in the Catholic Church forms a foundation for the church’s strong support of immigration reform that gives undocumented immigrants legal protections. The letter addresses the broad social issues of all Hispanic immigration.
Selected numbered paragraphs:
102. We recognize the phenomenon of migration as an authentic sign of the times. We see it in both our countries through the suffering of those who have been forced to become migrants for many reasons. To such a sign we must respond in common and creative ways so that we may strengthen the faith, hope, and charity of migrants and all the People of God. Such a sign is a call to transform national and international social, economic, and political structures so that they may provide the conditions required for the development for all, without exclusion and discrimination against any person in any circumstance.
103. In effect, the Church is increasingly called to be “sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race” (Lumen Gentium, no. 1). The Catholic bishops of the United States and Mexico, in communion with the Holy Father in his 1995 World Migration Day message, affirm that
In the Church no one is a stranger, and the Church is not foreign to anyone, anywhere. As a sacrament of unity and thus a sign and a binding force for the whole human race, the Church is the place where illegal immigrants are also recognized and accepted as brothers and sisters. It is the task of the various Dioceses actively to ensure that these people, who are obliged to live outside the safety net of civil society, may find a sense of brotherhood in the Christian community. Solidarity means taking responsibility for those in trouble.
The Church must, therefore, welcome all persons regardless of race, culture, language, and nation with joy, charity, and hope. It must do so with special care for those who find themselves–regardless of motive–in situations of poverty, marginalization, and exclusion.

Continue reading Strangers No Longer: Catholic Church’s statement on Hispanic illegal immigration

May Day Immigrant rallies and aftermath

The media appears to be bemused by the May Day rallies. What is their impact? My guess is that the rallies may have hardened the get-though sentiment among Republicans in the House of Representatives, while they also may have moved forward political organization among Hispanics. It may result in higher voter registrations among Hispanics.
An article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer starts with: “A day after more than 1 million immigrants and supporters skipped work to march in rallies across the nation, some advocates say the mixed messages surrounding the “Day Without Immigrants” show a need for a unified front and the movement’s own Cesar Chavez. An estimated 400,000 people marched in both Chicago and Los Angeles, but fewer than 10,000 turned out in cities including Dallas, Atlanta and Phoenix, which all have large Hispanic populations.

With so many organizers pushing their own plans for the May 1 rallies, and no single group at the forefront, there wasn’t a unifying plan. And there were conflicting signals from various leaders questioning whether a boycott that disrupted the economy would do more harm than good. Even individual immigration-reform leaders are torn over how best to keep the momentum going. The grass-roots flavor of the recent demonstrations has generated excitement and publicity, but empowering an umbrella organization or dynamic figurehead could galvanize the effort the way Chavez did for farm workers and Martin Luther King Jr. did for the civil rights movement.

“It’s always good to have a figure that melds it together,” said Eliseo Medina, executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, a major organizer and supporter of rallies Monday. “But right now, we are seeing hundreds of leaders coming together. Many of them are people nobody had ever heard of,” Medina said. “This organic organization will outlive any one charismatic figure.” Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, director of immigration studies at New York University, said he believes any consolidation of local groups won’t happen until leaders see what comes out of Congress. “Clearly the ball now is in the court of the political class,” Suarez-Orozco said. “But in the long run, the elephant in the room is how (the marches) will be translated into political muscle.”

Organizers in many cities see that effort already under way. Reform activists in Oklahoma, California, Alaska and Illinois said they have started voter registration or citizenship drives in recent weeks – making good on the promise emblazoned on thousands of marchers’ signs that read: “Today we march, tomorrow we vote.” Medina said SEIU planned to sponsor citizenship forums in major cities and work with churches and activist groups to do voter registration drives.

Using fear of raids to estimate the numbers of illegal immigrants

it’s been clear for several years that if you want to find out how many workers are working illegally, spread a rumor and see how many don’t show up the next day. The NY Times ran an AP story on this phenomenon arising out of the big IFCO raid of last week, which I have blogged.
The article says: “Len Mills, executive vice president of Associated General Contractors of South Florida, estimated at least 50 percent of workers on construction jobs in the region had not shown up for work. ‘This is costing millions of dollars a day, and I don’t know who is going to pay for it,’ he said.”

Rumors of random sweeps were rampant from coast to coast Friday, prompting many immigrants to stay home from work, take their children out of school and avoid church. Their absences added to immigrants’ fears, as some thought their friends and co-workers had been arrested. Mills said he believed even some legal workers were afraid. Katie A. Edwards, executive director of Florida’s Dade County Farm Bureau, said nearly a third of farmworkers did not come to the fields this week.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Dean Boyd said the agency has received hundreds of calls about immigration raids in recent days. ”However, we don’t conduct random sweeps,” he said. ”All our arrests are the result of investigations, evidence and intelligence.” ICE officials acknowledged they have stepped up arrests under their ”Operation Phoenix,” an existing program to find and deport fugitive illegal immigrants with criminal backgrounds.

On Friday, ICE announced the arrests of 106 illegal immigrant fugitives and 19 immigration status violators throughout the Midwest over the last 10 days. Of those, 46 had criminal records, according to the department. Earlier this week, ICE announced the arrest of 183 fugitives in Florida alone.

Immigrant labor and agriculture today: fully integrated

The Washington Post ran an article highlighting the tight relationship between immigrant workers and food production, especially corporate meat processing, in America. I have discussed this before. Steve Striffler’s book, Chicken, is an excellent description of the evolution of the poultry industry hand in hand with Hispanic labor. See my posting on meat processing as a de facto guest worker program.
The article said that “The meat production unit of privately held Cargill Inc on Tuesday said it decided to close down operations at five U.S. beef plants and two hog plants next Monday while employees participate in mass immigration rallies. Similar rallies on April 10 cut U.S. meat production at top meat producer Tyson Foods Inc. Tyson spokesman Gary Mickelson said on Tuesday Tyson was not encouraging workers to participate in planned rallies if it meant missing shifts. “

Continue reading Immigrant labor and agriculture today: fully integrated

RICO suit against Mohawk Industries heard by U.S. Supreme Court

I have previously blogged about how a Chicago based law firm is waging a legal fight against employers who hire lots of illegal workers, calling the practice a violation of the nation’s anti-racketeering law, RICO. Well, the Mohawk Industries case was heard this week by the Supreme Court. Mohawk along with other carpet manufacturers hires large numbers of Hispanics at its Datlon, GA, operations. I’ve been there: huge, faded but well staffed buildings on one side of town; a slice of flag waving America on the other.

The Washington Times
ran an article about the oral presentation before the Court.
The article says that “Winning parties in RICO cases can be awarded triple damages — notably higher awards than winners in non-racketeering criminal cases. Congress expanded RICO in 1996 to include violations of immigration law.”
The article goes on:

Continue reading RICO suit against Mohawk Industries heard by U.S. Supreme Court