Workers in the Shadows of a Corrupt Immigration System
To me, nothing symbolizes the current mess over illegal immigration better than the battle in congress in 2015 when Rep. Lamar Smith proposed the “Legal Workforce Act” that would have made the popular E-Verify program mandatory for any and all businesses in the United States. A system that made it impossible for illegal immigrants to work in the U.S. would remove the primary incentive for people from any foreign country to come here illegally. It also paired the adoption of E-Verify with stricter border security and enforcement.
And yet, it failed to pass for one simple reason. Lobbyists from corporations that depended on illegal workers that would work for less than legal workers.
Here’s a quote from “The Hill” magazine at the time:
{“What about Ag?” As a veteran Capitol Hill staffer recently told me, that’s the question invariably asked of members of Congress whenever they put their support behind a bill promising for better immigration enforcement or stronger border security. The power of the ‘Big Ag’ lobby (‘Ag’ is short for ‘Agriculture’) was put on display recently when it came out in full force against Rep. Lamar Smith’s Legal Workforce Act, a bill that would make mandatory the monumentally sensible and wildly popular E-Verify program — Sen. Grassley introduce its companion bill last month — Although a major player, Big Ag’s certainly not the only lobby with outsized influence over immigration policy; they’re merely in the top ten.}
Because undocumented workers are afraid to speak out or complain, these corporate employers have leverage to keep from paying a fair legal wage along with all the other legal protections our system is supposed to provide workers.
Let’s take Target Stores as one illustration of how it works across multiple industries. (selected quotes taken from an article in The Texas Tribune by Travis Putnam Hill, Dec. 19, 2016)
{Back in 2007 to 2008, the Equal Justice Center represented Chunco and 28 other janitorial workers in a lawsuit against Target and a contractor called Jim’s Maintenance for unpaid wages and overtime. According to publicly available court documents, Target’s lawyers asserted that the retailer was not a joint employer of the workers and thus not responsible for the wages that Jim’s Maintenance had failed to pay. Target instead claimed that the workers were employees solely of Jim’s Maintenance.
To Beardall, the notion that these janitors were not jointly employed by Target was “preposterous.”
Target managers decided when shifts would start and directly told the workers when they should come in, which was usually around 10 or 11 p.m. Shifts were typically scheduled to end at 7 or 8 a.m., but Target managers regularly held the workers past the scheduled quitting time. And to ensure Target’s strict cleaning standards were met, managers would frequently lock the workers in the store for the entirety of their shifts.
Depositions from both sides also showed that the janitors often worked 60 or more hours each week, yet according to testimony, were never paid overtime. While Target kept records of the workers’ hours, Jim’s Maintenance did no such thing and instead tracked only days worked. The wages the workers did receive often came out well below minimum wage — in at least one case to the equivalent of $4.35 an hour.
“We can find no references in the court record that would indicate that Target knew that plaintiffs, nor any other people, were ‘undocumented,’” she wrote. “The issue instead was that their employer, Jim’s Maintenance, was failing to fulfill its obligations to keep proper records, including records of I-9 compliance. This failure to fulfill its contractual obligations ultimately contributed to Target’s decision to terminate its contract with Jim’s Maintenance.”
“If a company doesn’t meet the requirements that Target demands, [Target] breaks ties [with that company] and another one comes in,
So despite the lawsuit and dissolution of Jim’s Maintenance, Chunco is still buffing the same Target floors in the same Target buildings that he has for the last 12 years. And the disadvantages of working in the shadows haven’t quite disappeared: He said his schedule was cut to five hours per shift, but he’s still required to do all the work he used to do in eight or 10.
“When you’ve been here for a while, you learn that they do exploit you,” he said. “But we have to work.”}
https://www.texastribune.org/2016/12/19/big-name-businesses-exploit-immigrant-labor/
The Illegal Immigration Industrial Complex fuels profits for Big Ag, construction, Private Prisons/detention camps, and hundreds of employers like Target and Walmart and all the rest — while creating a race to the bottom for wages of average workers.
Just as we allowed these corporate interests to legally bribe our politicians to ship jobs overseas to lower-paid workers, we’ve also allowed them to defeat bills like the “Legal Workforce Act” and the E-Verify program for their short-term greed until the system has now become so skewed toward corporations and billionaires that working-class people are turning on immigrants in the false belief that they’re the problem. But the truth is these immigrants are co-victims of this corrupt system that has now gone off the rails to the point that even these corporations that helped create it can no longer control it.
In fact, they are now afraid to advocate even for legal worker programs and face a backlash from people who have been fed the lie that immigrants are the problem.
It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when many business interests fought to expand legal immigration to meet the growing demand for labor in our country.
Here’s some selected quotes from a recent article in ProPublica:
{From the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (the largest lobbying organization in the nation, representing business interests) to the “Growers” (agricultural businesses employing migrant farmworkers) to hotel, restaurant and construction industry associations, they spent time and money on Capitol Hill largely to fend off threats to their existing supply of immigrant labor. They also advocated for guest worker programs and a range of types of visas and work permits for new foreign-born workers.
These business groups — alongside immigration and labor advocacy groups on the left — helped achieve multiple overhauls of the U.S. immigration system this way. They were deeply involved in the negotiations that led to President Ronald Reagan’s sweeping legalization of the status of undocumented immigrants in 1986. Then, they successfully fought for the creation of several new and expanded visa categories, as well as the Temporary Protected Status program, in 1990.
“The U.S.-born working population is in relative decline, due to both our postpandemic labor shortage and the aging and retirement of tens of millions of baby boomers. Around 8 million jobs nationally are sitting unfilled right now — untapped capacity that companies could unleash more of with more workers from abroad, who are younger on average.”}
https://www.propublica.org/article/business-lobby-immigration-reform-trump
So, now that Trump has won and is embarking on his program of mass deportations of twelve million undocumented workers, what do you think will happen to our economy if he succeeds?
My novels can be found lurking on Amazon as well as audiobooks on Audible.
Nihala — God’s Dark Algorithm
https://www.amazon.com/Nihala-1-Scott-Burdick/dp/0996555412
https://www.audible.com/pd/Nihala-Audiobook/B01AIM6D00
The Immortality Contract
https://www.amazon.com/Immortality-Contract-Scott-Burdick/dp/0996555420
https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Immortality-Contract-Audiobook/B075KLGV6B
My Artwork can be found at:
https://www.ScottBurdick.com
Instagram: @scott_burdick_fine_art
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scott.burdick.37
