Immigration

There is very little work on whether border enforcement affects labor-market outcomes in the United States or Mexico.4 This gap in the literature is unfortunate, given the importance of border enforcement in U.S. efforts to control illegal immigration.

Our work also relates to a broader literature on whether immigration lowers the wages of
U.S. workers.5 This subject has attracted attention due to the coincidence of two events -- rising immigration of low-skilled individuals (Borjas 1994) and a relative decline in the earnings of lowskilled U.S. workers (Levy and Murnane 1992; Katz and Murphy 1992). ---

In California, the arrival of immigrants from Mexico and other low-wage countries has been followed by rapid growth in apparel, textiles, food products, and other labor-intensive industries (Hanson and Slaughter 2000).

This paper helps assess the severity of the shortcomings in previous literature.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/15/immigration.town.ap/index.html (link no longer available)

Immigration raids make a ghost town in Georgia

STILLMORE, Georgia (AP) -- Trailer parks lie abandoned. The poultry plant is scrambling to replace more than half its workforce. Business has dried up at stores where Mexican laborers once lined up to buy food, beer and cigarettes just weeks ago.

This Georgia community of about 1,000 people has become little more than a ghost town since September 1, when federal agents began rounding up illegal immigrants.

The sweep has had the unintended effect of underscoring just how vital the illegal immigrants were to the local economy.

More than 120 illegal immigrants have been loaded onto buses bound for immigration courts in Atlanta, 189 miles away. Hundreds more fled Emanuel County. Residents say many scattered into the woods, camping out for days. They worry some are still hiding without food.

At least one child, born a U.S. citizen, was left behind by his Mexican parents: 2-year-old Victor Perez-Lopez. The toddler's mother, Rosa Lopez, left her son with Julie Rodas when the raids began and fled the state. The boy's father was deported to Mexico.

"When his momma brought this baby here and left him, tears rolled down her face and mine too," Rodas said. "She said, `Julie, will you please take care of my son because I have no money, no way of paying rent?"'

For five years, Rodas has made a living watching the children of workers at the Crider Inc. poultry plant, where the vast majority of employees were Mexican immigrants. She learned Spanish, and considered many immigrants among her closest friends. She threw parties for their children's birthdays and baptisms.

The only child in Rodas' care now, besides her own son, is Victor. Her customers have disappeared.

Federal agents also swarmed into a trailer park operated by David Robinson. Illegal immigrants were handcuffed and taken away. Almost none have returned. Robinson bought an American flag and posted it by the pond out front -- upside down, in protest.

"These people might not have American rights, but they've damn sure got human rights," Robinson said. "There ain't no reason to treat them like animals."

The raids came during a fall election season in which immigration is a top issue.

Illegal immigrant population doubles
Last month, the federal government reported that Georgia had the fastest-growing illegal immigrant population in the country. The number more than doubled from an estimated 220,000 in 2000 to 470,000 last year. This year, state lawmakers passed some of the nation's toughest measures targeting illegal immigrants, and Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue last week vowed a statewide crackdown on document fraud.

Other than the Crider plant, there isn't much in Stillmore. Four small stores, a coin laundry and a Baptist church share downtown with City Hall, the fire department and a post office. "We're poor but proud," Mayor Marilyn Slater said, as if that is the town motto.

The 2000 Census put Stillmore's population at 730, but Slater said uncounted immigrants probably made it more than 1,000. Not anymore, with so many homes abandoned and the streets practically empty.

"This reminds me of what I read about Nazi Germany, the Gestapo coming in and yanking people up," Slater said.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Marc Raimondi would not discuss details of the raids. "We can't lose sight of the fact that these people were here illegally," Raimondi said.

Businesses may have to close
At Sucursal Salina No. 2, a store stocked with Mexican fruit sodas and snacks, cashier Alberto Gonzalez said Wednesday that the owner may shutter the place. By midday, Gonzalez has had only six customers. Normally, he would see 100.

The B&S convenience store, owned by Keith and Regan Slater, the mayor's son and grandson, has lost about 80 percent of its business.

"These people come over here to make a better way of life, not to blow us up," complained Keith Slater, who keeps a portrait of Ronald Reagan on the wall. "I'm a die-hard Republican, but I think we missed the boat with this one."

Since the mid-1990s, Stillmore has grown dependent on the paychecks of Mexican workers who originally came for seasonal farm labor, picking the area's famous Vidalia onions. Many then took year-round jobs at the Crider plant, with a workforce of about 900.

Crider President David Purtle said the agents began inspecting the company's employment records in May. They found 700 suspected illegal immigrants, and supervisors handed out letters over the summer ordering them to prove they came to the U.S. legally or be fired. Only about 100 kept their jobs.

The arrests started at the plant September 1. During the Labor Day weekend, agents with guns and bulletproof vests converged on workers' homes after getting the addresses from Crider's files.

No people, no work
Antonio Lopez, who came here two years ago from Chiapas, Mexico, and worked at the Crider plant, said agents kicked in his front door. Lopez, 32, and his 15-year-old son were handcuffed and taken by bus to Atlanta with 30 others. Because of the boy, Lopez said, both were allowed to return. In his back pocket, he carries an order to return to Atlanta for a court hearing February 2.

But now, "there's no people here and I don't have any work," he said.

The poultry plant has limped along with half its normal workforce. Crider increased its starting wages by $1 an hour to help recruit new workers.

Stacie Bell, 23, started work canning chicken at Crider a week ago. She said the pay, $7.75 an hour, led her to leave her $5.60-an-hour job as a Wal-Mart cashier in nearby Statesboro. Still, Bell said she felt bad about the raids.

"If they knew eventually that they were going to have to do that, they should have never let them come over here," she said.

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GRAND ISLAND, Neb. -- On Dec. 12, just after 7:30 a.m., Superintendent Steve Joel got a call from the police chief saying "something big" was about to happen at the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant.

Mr. Joel realized what that meant: Dozens of Swift workers were about to be rounded up in an immigration raid. What would happen to their children, students in his district? Would some seniors ever be able to graduate? "It was like a tornado," says the head of the Grand Island School District.
[S J]

The twister that struck this Midwestern town was part of a far-reaching operation targeting Swift plants in six states and detaining 1,200 workers. As Congress debates how to deal with millions of illegal immigrants, the Department of Homeland Security has been stepping up workplace enforcement. As a result, the number of illegal immigrants arrested by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit, or ICE, during work-site operations has soared. In the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2002, 485 were arrested. In fiscal year 2006, 3,667 workers were arrested.

The raids at many companies are creating an unexpected new problem for public schools. More accustomed to gun scares, suspicious intruders and tornado warnings, school administrators find themselves having to orchestrate a response to a new kind of crisis.

"Our response was going to be a defining moment for Grand Island," says Mr. Joel, a New Yorker who built his 22-year career in Nebraska schools.

Numerous school districts near the raided Swift plants made plans on the fly. In Marshalltown, Iowa, teachers put children on buses home and hoped there was someone to receive them. In Worthington, Minn., where 239 Swift workers were arrested, schools were flooded with calls from frantic relatives. Many administrators found themselves calling Swift in an attempt to ascertain the fate of some students' parents.

In the aftermath of the highly publicized raids, some schools are making new contingency plans. Mr. Joel has been on the road to share his experience with other school administrators. "This is one more crisis you must be mentally and organizationally prepared for," he says.

Chain of Command

Superintendent Robin Stevens of Schuyler, a town 90 miles northeast of Grand Island that is home to a large Cargill Inc. packing plant, says his staff has devised a strategy, which includes a chain of command to ensure effective communication among staff as well as a united message for students' families and the community.

Established by German immigrants who toiled on the land or on the railroads, Grand Island's population of 42,000 now includes large numbers of Latin American immigrants who work in the meatpacking industry. Many of these immigrants are undocumented. Last year, Swift was the city's largest employer, with minorities representing 70% of its 2,600 workers. Currently, 42% of the 8,200 students in Grand Island schools are minority, mainly Hispanic.

In the years preceding the raid, Mr. Joel and his staff worked hard to win the support and trust of the Hispanic population, which sometimes viewed schools with the same suspicion felt for other U.S. institutions. Mr. Joel hired bilingual staff for the schools and co-founded a multicultural coalition that includes hospitals, churches and businesses.

On the morning of Dec. 12, less than 20 minutes after learning of the raid, Mr. Joel issued an "urgent" email informing administrators at the district's 18 schools about a major immigration operation at the Swift plant that would have "significant impact on many students." Children might go home to find one or both parents gone, or might not be picked up from school at all, it noted.

By then, the raid was well under way. Outside the Swift plant, dozens of workers, many weeping and shackled, were boarded onto white, unmarked buses headed for processing centers in other states.

Schools tried to notify their pupils without generating a panic. Every principal enlisted teachers, social workers and guidance counselors who could work through the night. Some schools were designated as shelters. Elementary schools received specific directives to ensure that every student be released only to relatives or a person that a child could identify.

Starr Elementary's administrators attempted to identify the children of Swift workers but soon realized that most of the worker names, likely derived from fake Social Security cards, didn't match the names given to the school. Walnut Middle School held a meeting where teachers tried to calm 140 students whose relatives worked at Swift.

Meanwhile, Mr. Joel worried that his "hard-gained trust was about to go down the tubes." While immigration agents usually leave schools alone, there is no rule barring them from picking up parents during morning drop-off. Mr. Joel says he got assurances from authorities that his schools wouldn't be touched.

With details trickling in from the plant and fear gripping Hispanic neighborhoods, Mr. Joel called a 10 a.m. news conference. "The schools will be a safe haven and we will guarantee that," he said. His remarks helped generate charitable donations from local service groups and private citizens wanting to help.

Some were distrustful. "How can you tell us that children will be safe when their parents are no longer here," shouted an angry Latina community leader. Undeterred, Mr. Joel reiterated his message on Spanish-language radio and TV, in fliers sent home with children and in a simultaneous phone message transmitted to Spanish-speaking homes.

Ghost Town

As ICE agents pursued fugitives around town, some families took refuge in churches while others barricaded their doors and windows at home. By sundown, the Latino business district was a ghost town. ICE agents had apprehended 278 immigrants and routed most of them to a processing center in Iowa.

By about 8 p.m., Mr. Joel's team had accounted for every student affected by the raid. About 165 children were identified as having a relative detained in the Swift raid, including 25 who had two parents missing. The district confirmed that every one of these children had adult supervision.

The immediate crisis was over. Detained workers would be held anywhere from a few days to a few months, after which they would be released to their families while awaiting a court date for a deportation hearing.

But that didn't mean Mr. Joel's worries had ended. He feared families would be too scared to bring their children to school. Not only would that hurt attendance, it would jeopardize graduation for some high-school seniors. Indeed, on Dec. 13, attendance was mixed. Only a handful more students than usual were absent at the high school. But about 370 students were absent in the lower grades, 60% more than usual.

Mr. Joel, who wears ties adorned with drawings of multicultural children, instructed school principals to fully investigate each absence -- even if it took going door-to-door.

Principal Kris Burling took to the streets in a heavily Hispanic area near Howard Elementary. At every house, she could hear music, TVs and shuffling inside. But when she knocked, no one would come to the door -- even after she explained why she was there. "I took it pretty personally," Mrs. Burling recalls. "I had worked with these families for five years."

By the third day, attendance levels systemwide were close to normal. Karla, a fifth-grader whose father had been seized in the raid, was back in school. "I was afraid that if I left home, they would come and take my mom," says the 10-year old, whose family granted permission for the interview on the condition their last name not be used. "But mom reminded me that my dad had always wanted me to be educated." She adds: "I know I'm safe at school."

Over the winter holiday break, school officials were dispatched to homes where at least one parent was still missing, delivering brown bags stuffed with tortilla chips, beans, rice and other staples. Inside the bag, a note in Spanish and English cited a hotline to call "if you have any questions or need help after the Swift raid." According to Kerri Nazarenus, who coordinated the response for the superintendent, "it was a way to get in the door and make sure the kids were safe."
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Labor-force participation among foreign-born men exceeds that of the native born: the figure for illegal immigrant men is the highest of any group -- 94 percent. And immigrants are less likely than natives to be unemployed.

Of course that is what Mexico is exporting - poverty and unemployment

The resulting shortfall of unskilled labor -- estimated to run to hundreds of thousands of workers a year -- is showing up in sector after sector. The construction industry creates some 185,000 jobs annually, and although construction workers now earn between $30,000 and $50,000 a year, employers in trades such as masonry and dry-walling report that they cannot find enough young Americans to do the work. The prospects for the restaurant business are even bleaker. With 12.5 million workers nationwide, restaurants are the nation's largest private-sector employer, and their demand for labor is expected to grow by 15 percent between 2005 and 2015. But the native-born work force will grow by only ten percent in that period, and the number of 16- to 24-year-old job seekers -- the key demographic for the restaurant trade -- will not expand at all.

Of all the economic consequences of immigration, the easiest to calculate is the fiscal effect -- whether immigrants consume more in government benefits than they contribute in taxes. Although this is one of the most disputed and emotional aspects of the immigration debate, in fact the net effect in most states is close to a wash.

Immigrants' overall contribution to U.S. economic growth is harder to measure, although there is no doubt among economists that newcomers enlarge the economic pie. Foreign workers emerging at the end of the day from the meatpacking plant or the carpet factory buy groceries and shoes for their children; on Saturday, they buy washing machines and then hire plumbers to install them. The companies where they work are more likely to stay in the United States, rather than move operations to another country where labor is cheaper. Readily available immigrant workers allow these businesses to expand, which keeps other Americans on the job and other U.S. businesses, both up- and downstream, afloat. Economists call this shifting the demand curve outward, and no one disputes that it results in a bigger, more productive economy.

Some of the best efforts to measure the elusive immigrant growth dividend look at states or regions rather than the nation as a whole. A recent report on immigrants in North Carolina -- which has one of the fastest-growing foreign-born populations in the country -- estimated their contribution to economic expansion and compared it with the more easily measured fiscal consequences. The bottom line: newcomers filled one-third of North Carolina's new jobs in the past decade, and they were responsible for $9.2 billion in consumer spending and $1.9 billion in saved wages -- a total growth dividend of $11 billion, which dwarfed the $61 million (or $102 per native-born taxpayer) that the newcomers cost the state when taxes and services were netted out.

They often work harder and for longer hours, and in some cases they take jobs many Americans no longer want to do. But rather than undercut the native born, immigrants who are genuinely different make Americans better off. More low-skilled construction workers mean more jobs and higher wages for plumbers, electricians, and architects. More service workers allow skilled Americans to spend more of their time doing more productive work: instead of staying home to cut the grass, the brain surgeon has time for more brain surgeries. And over time, the higher return for higher-level work creates incentives for more Americans to become plumbers, electricians, and architects, thus making the entire economy more productive.

Even in sectors such as construction and hospitality, in which the work must be done in the United States, it hardly makes sense to lure an American to a less productive job than he or she is capable of by paying more for less-skilled work. Meanwhile, because they complement rather than compete with most native-born workers (and this in turn attracts additional capital), immigrants raise rather than lower most Americans' wages.

Immigrants do compete with one category of American workers: native-born high school dropouts. But not even the most pessimistic economists think that the resulting downward pressure on wages affects more than ten percent of the U.S. labor force or that the drop in those American workers' earnings has been more than five percent over the last 20 years. Moreover, these unskilled native workers benefit in other ways from immigrant complementarity, because they pay less for goods such as food and housing.

Finally, rather than taking jobs from Americans, immigrants often create jobs where none existed before

Comprehensive reformers start with these assumptions about the economic benefits of immigration and build out from there to design policy. Their basic idea is that the U.S. immigration system should be market-based. For the past decade or so, market forces have brought some 1.5 million immigrants, skilled and unskilled, to work in the United States each year. But annual quotas admit only about a million, or two-thirds of the total. Enforcement of these limits is poor in part because the nation is ambivalent about how much it wants to control immigration and also because it is all but impossible to make unrealistic laws stick. And as a result, some half a million foreign workers, most of them unskilled and from Latin America, breach the border every year or overstay their visas to remain on a job. It is as if American cars were made with imported steel but the government maintained such restrictive steel quotas that a third of what was needed had to be smuggled in. The only plausible remedy is more generous quotas combined with more effective enforcement.

The best way to regain control is not to crack down but to liberalize --

Not only is such reform the only way to restore the rule of law; it is also one of the best ways to improve border security. As one veteran Border Patrol agent in Arizona put it, "What if another 9/11 happens, and it happens on my watch? What if the bastards come across here in Arizona and I don't catch them because I'm so busy chasing your next busboy or my next gardener that I don't have time to do my real job -- catching terrorists?" The government needs to take the busboys and the gardeners out of the equation by giving them a legal way to enter the country, so that the Border Patrol can focus on the smugglers and the terrorists who pose a genuine threat.

[of course is prob one of the reasons am single again - books seem to scare most females...:-( ]

If we send back illegal immigrants, 90% of the restaurants, here in America, are forced to close and go out of business. I have been in the restaurant business for over 32 years, and I must say that I have never fund American workers willing to work long hours and as hard as the Latinos do.

Illegal  immigrants are an asset for big corporations like McDonald, Ruby Tuesday etch…, and for  restaurant owners in general, because they love to work.Work, that's all they want! who cares where they send their money! It's their money!

And beside, these illegal immigrants , even though being  here illegally,  they pay taxes like all the other legal residents. Every year millions of dollars are not returned to illegal workers who are hired and work  under false documentation.

All this talking and BS about illegal immigration sounds more  like “The sanction of the victims”

Ciro









(Edited by Ciro D'Agostino on 3/22, 12:19pm)