Over the Horizon Line | Commentary by Hal Rothman
Western Response to Immigration Demands Attention
By Hal Rothman, 3-01-06
Any old Texican would recognize the axiom "to populate is to govern." This was the principle of the Texas Revolution in the 1830s, that by creating facts on the ground in Spanish-speaking Catholic north Mexico, they would in fact establish an Anglo-American, Protestant republic of their own.I thought of this as I watched a Mexican guy, clearly an immigrant, cut sushi in a toney restaurant. He was wearing a Rising Sun bandanna, the emblem of Japan, and his knives flew. When I asked him where he was from, he told me "Zacatecas." 28 years old and a father of three, he had come to the United States like so many others to make his way in the world and do better for his family.
This is an old American story, one that dates to even before there was a United States. The Mayflower was filled with similar people, Englishmen who had gone to Holland to find religious freedom, only to be perplexed when their children came home speaking Dutch. It wasn't so much religious freedom they wanted; it was religious freedom in English.
It is this point on which the newest immigration to the United States hinges. As vigilantes patrol the border, they are trying to close the door long after everyone has gone. Recently, the national media trumpeted that North Carolina had the largest percentage increase in Latinos in the nation. Amid all the sturm und drang, few noticed that cities like Aurora, Illinois, had long been Latino strongholds. Wisconsin, that frozen white state-excuse the double entendre- has a significant and growing Latino population. Everywhere you look in America, everywhere work is done, you'll find Latinos.
One explanation for this change is simple: poverty, turmoil, and fear in Mexico and Latin America and the perception that the US offers economic opportunity pushes people north. If Western movies were made in Spanish, they might very well be called “Norteños.? They would certainly be about moving north.
Another is behavioral change. Since the two fastest ways to impoverish yourself in post-modern America are to accept all the credit card offers that appear in your mailbox and to have a lot of children, most Americans, more than two generations from the farm, cap their reproduction. There are exceptions, of course, but the birth rate of second and third generation Americans is nowhere near that of their immigrant ancestors. Nor does it match that of current immigrants.
Then there is the stickiest question, the cost of labor. American immigration policy is stringent on paper and lax in enforcement. We all benefit from under-priced labor, from workers in construction to the guy who cut my sushi that night. Immigrant labor not only fills jobs at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum that many Americans will not take, it also provides labor that allows prices to remain low. When La Migra, what Spanish-speaking workers call U.S. Customs, rounded up a bunch of Latino workers in Jackson, Wyoming, on Labor Day 1993, one hotel owner marched down to the police station and asked if the police chief intended to make the beds in his hotel.
NAFTA and CAFTA enshrine this arrangement on a wing and a prayer that such workers will stay home, but no one really believes they will. Agribusiness does not want these workers to stay home, and neither do you or I. Economically, we all benefit from their presence. It is fair to say that I could not afford my house if all the workers who built it had been paid the prevailing wage in my community.
So ultimately, it is the social issues attached to immigrant labor that vex us as a society. The spread of Latino labor brings with it a public dimension to Latino life that alienates some segments of white America. Latino labor puts children in schools, makes some demands on social services and law enforcement, and otherwise acts as any other community, immigrant or otherwise. The difference turns out to be who is asking for service or causing a ruckus.
The result is a kind of the immigration that is surprisingly similar and at the same time different from the Eastern European immigrants, who came to this country between 1880 and 1920. On one hand, a group of people who seem foreign to the Americans of their day have landed in our midst. On the other, Latino culture is continuously replenished by its proximity to its lands of origination. People travel back and forth in a way not possible a century ago. Even more, they carry culture both ways, creating hybrids rather than the assimilation of the early 20th century.
So not only in cities like Los Angeles and Miami, Houston and El Paso, can you live a life in Spanish and not be inconvenienced. It's true in Las Vegas, where the 85,000 Spanish-surnamed people in 1990 became 375,000 in 2004. It is equally true in large and small towns across the country. The Latinoization of the United States continues in earnest, often beyond the glare of all but the crime report on the five o'clock news.
As the influence of this community grows, the lack of attention from the rest of us may very well ill create an enormous divide that will someday come back to haunt us. In the recent chaos in France and Australia, we have seen how societies that fail to integrate minority populations pay for that shortcoming. The US remains the best example of a polyglot nation; simply put, we bring all kinds of people under the tent better than anybody on earth. We're not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but we still do a better job than anyone else.
Cobden, Illinois, a small town about 13 miles south of Carbondale, and 100 miles from St. Louis, holds a particular place in the history of Illinois high school basketball lore. In 1964, the Cobden Appleknockers, became Illinois’ version of the Hoosiers story and there is a team picture, full of white players, just like in the movie.
The little town of 900 sent its team to the state basketball tournament against schools that had more students than Cobden had people. They won all the way until the title game, where they faced the mighty Pekin Chinks. I kid you not; they are now called the Dragons. Cobden lost, 50 to 45.
When it came time for the 40th reunion of this vaunted team, those who had not been to their hometown in a while were in for a shock. Three flags flew over Cobden, the American flag, that of Illinois, and by its side, the flag of Mexico.
It is a lesson to all of us, a reminder that change, especially demographic change, happens. The response of the West to this change will tell us a great deal about how the future will play out. [End of article]
Hal Rothman says
"We all benefit from under-priced labor.."
Not so. Those who use cheap foreign labor, illegal aliens, seldom pass their savings along to the consumer. Business economics (Price Theory) says you sell your product at the market price. That price has nothing to do with how much it costs. What your product costs you determines your profit and, in the long run, if you can stay in that business. Go price a new house. Does the price reflect the fact that the builder used a lot of illegal alien labor? Not likely.
The ultimate in under priced labor in the U.S. was the use of slaves in the South before the Civil War. In 1957 Hinton Rowan Helper wrote the book "The Impending Crisis of the South" in which he condemned slavery not on humanitarian or moral grounds, but because it was an economic threat to the poor whites of the South. Helper used the 1850 census to show that in the decade from 1840 to 1850 the North had leapfrogged over the South in almost every way including what should have been the South's strength agriculture. When Southerners wanted Bibles, brooms, buckets and books, toys, primers, school books, fashionable apparel, machinery, medicines, tombstones, and a thousand other things, and they went to the North.
The basic problem of course is that in response to expensive labor the North had invested in automation where the South, with access to cheap labor, never bothered to put capital at risk to do so. If we continue to accommodate business desire for cheap labor we will return to the dependency of the pre Civil War South.
Let business pay up for the labor they need, invest in automation, or do without. The rest of us should not have to pay the high cost of cheap labor.
Hal,
I just finished reading your column about Latinos, which I enjoyed. I also just completed the Iowa chapter in my forthcoming book about the 2004 summer bicycle tour. Here is an excerpt that I think you might enjoy.
"In Marshalltown, Shane, Laura and I get off our bikes and join Ardath in front of the Times Republican for an interview with local newspaper reporter, Jenny Welp. As the interview concludes, a senior citizen rides by on his fat-tired bike and shouts from the street, “Welcome to our Mexican town!" Of course, he is referring to the growth of the Latino population in his part of Iowa. Normally I’m slow on the uptake, but for some reason I don’t let the moment slide by and blurt out a response. “They’re Americans!” I shout. The biker harrumphs as he continues down Main Street and around the corner, not caring to engage in further discussion of his stated opinion. Frankly, I do not know if all, or any, of the Latinos along the Lincoln Highway, are American citizens.
From the very start of our trip, all along our route, it is mainly Hispanics, Asians and Blacks working in the service industry who have been waiting on Ardath and me: greeting us from behind desks, stocking continental breakfast food bars, wiping tables, emptying trash, pushing vacuum cleaners, cleaning bathrooms, making the beds in our rooms, serving us at restaurants and waiting on us at grocery or chain stores. Alicia Perez, who stocks the food bar at one of our Iowa motel stops, tells us that Hispanics also work at the local packinghouse. She explains that although she was born in Iowa, people ask her if she has her green card. Alicia seems not be resentful of the misconception but wonders why people should be so antagonistic toward people who work for a living. It also makes we wonder if that passerby who shouted at us on Main Street might have skipped his high school civics course or if he actually paid much attention to the Iowa state motto, 'Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.'"
It’s hard to make a machine that will take a steak from the cooler, prepare it, then take it to the stove and cook it. The real reason we need immigrant labor is that we are not willing to give up the lifestyle that it supports. Americans either don’t need or don’t want to do most of these jobs, and only a small portion of them can be mechanized.
But still, it does lower prices.
“Business economics (Price Theory) says you sell your product at the market price.” This is true. But in a competitive market where profit margins are small or moderate, reinvestment and growth are practically mandatory, and success is translated into stock value, labor costs have a direct affect on prices. This is especially true in service economies.
If the company that built Hal’s house had to pay higher wages to its workers their profit margins would decrease and they would be unable to maintain their business model as is. They would either have to raise prices to make up for the shortfall or reduce their reinvestments—either way they face a hit to their stock. If they chose the ladder (assuming other companies made the same decision), the new-home supply would decrease and prices would rise even more.
I think the bigger question here has to do more with the proximity question. What has gotten us through similar times in the past is our ability to absorb waves of immigrants and “assimilate” them. The impermanence of the current situation and the ability to maintain nonnative culture makes that much more difficult. I just would like to see some order to the whole affair. It doesn’t seem like any policy will work until there is control of the border and a system that directs immigrants toward the path of citizenship or a temporary worker program. I don’t see why that’s such a big deal.
In an ideal world people would be able to freely flow across national borders with little effect. Unfortunately, we ain’t there yet.
A recent op-ed piece in the Denver Post rhetorically asked question of whether or not ski bumming had become another job Americans would not do. Pointing out the increasing numbers of Latino laborers are working jobs traditionally filled by young white season workers. This is of course changing the face of resort towns throughout the intermountain West. As Hal, Mark, and Garron all point out this is the norm in today’s United States. There is a disconnect between this reality and the political, and often racist, rhetoric surrounding the debate by group such as the Minutemen and Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, though it does need to be mentioned that the Minutemen issue is as much about property rights as it is about race. I agree with Garron about the absurdity of the current situation, but we should be leery of solutions which will attempt to seal our borders. Rather, any solution will need to be more comprehensive in its approach by realizing the linkages between national economies and understanding that economic, cultural, and environmental realities cannot be defined by political borders.
Comment By ATR, 3-11-06"We all benefit from under priced labor"
What a strange idea. Even assuming, arguendo, that the marxist price theory advanced by Rothman holds, i.e. prices are determined by the cost of production- not supply and demand, we could ascribe the same benefit to the lax enforcement of any law that raises the cost of doing business. Under this theory we would all benefit from ignoring labor, environmental, and tax laws as well.
Even if construction of a house would be rendered uneconomic by hiring legal labor, one cannot be heard to complain any more than the smelter owner who is forced to shut down because of the clean air act, or the textile manufacturer put out of business because of child labor laws.