“Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” So wrote Emma Lazarus in her now famous poem New Colossus in 1883 to help with the fundraising the statue of liberty pedestal that was mounted in a bronze plaque at the base in 1903.
It was a great sentiment for the 100 or so years it lasted. But lately the immigrants are not wanted, particularly those that supposedly scourge of our society — the illegal immigrant. They come to this country from all over the world. They are Irish, English, Italians, Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, and they all come here looking for one thing: To build a life.
You’ll note that I don’t say, “to be given a life.” The reason for this is quite simple. The vast majority of the illegal aliens who come to this country do so for the profound amount of opportunity that we still have in our country. The opportunity to start at the bottom, take a low paying, back-breaking job, and to one day have a better paying, less back-breaking job.
It is my opinion that the majority of those people who come to this country illegally are the hardest working members of society. They take the jobs that no one else would ever dream of taking. Why would someone take a job like picking strawberries in the incredibly hot central valley of California for pennies per flat, when they can sell drugs in the inner city and live in a much more comfortable apartment with a new car in the driveway and lots of untaxed cash income?
The economics of our society depend greatly on the illegal alien. We live in a society that balks at paying $2 a gallon for gas. Can you imagine the cries of horror if the farmers in the central valley had to pay minimum wage ($6.75 per hour in California, and double time for any day more than 12 hours) plus worker’s compensation, vacation and sick pay, and health benefits for a field worker to pick our lettuce? They’d have to charge $9 a head for lettuce and who knows what for strawberries.
That would lead to a increase in the base amount that an office worker would have to earn in order to pay for their food bill and their rent. And as the food bill increases, who is most hurt? Not the guys at the top of the corporate ladder, but the ones at the bottom and the middle because they are the ones most likely to have a family. And as a percentage of their income, their food budget will balloon.
As they need more money to survive, the company has to earn more money, which means their costs are going up, which means that they are going to charge more, which means that the public at large will have to pay more. Thus, an inflationary cycle is started and it won’t end until the society as a whole has reached essentially the same standard of living as before the farm workers were paid their now increased wages.
In Los Angeles there are many nannies and maids who are from across the southern border. They do not have the right papers to be here, but without them, our society would look decidedly different. In any given room of more than five people in Santa Monica, it is safe to guess that at least two of them have an illegal immigrant working for them in some capacity. Whether as a gardener, a painter, a maid or a nanny, they are everywhere. I don’t think it makes me particularly racist to acknowledge the fact that most of these people are Hispanic, mostly from Mexico, but some from Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Columbia and Ecuador.
I think if we were to close our borders, which realistically we could do on a greater basis but certainly not completely, we would find that our way of life would have to drastically change. I think that we would find a sudden run up in the cost of maids, nannies and general workers.
If we truly wanted to eliminate the illegal immigrant “problem,” which I dispute even exists, we need to first make the available population who could take those jobs, hungry for them. When healthy people have a choice of welfare or doing a menial, unsavory job, they are more likely to take the welfare. When we as a society decide that we are done supporting those who could support themselves, we will find that they are then willing to take the jobs that are currently being filled by the illegal immigrants. Then, and only then, can we realistically expect to solve the illegal immigrant “problem.”
I’m a business lawyer, and from that perspective, it really is nothing more than basic economics. On the one hand, it is too expensive to pay legal citizens what they would require to do many jobs, and on the other, they have no motivation to want the work anyway.
Until we create incentives to work for those who don’t, we cannot expect to see any lessening of the numbers of people who are willing to risk their lives and their freedom to come here. There are just too many jobs available that the illegals are willing to fill, and the citizens aren’t.
I think we all should show a bit more admiration for the illegal immigrant who is willing to come to our home, and pick our strawberries or clean our toilets, and a little less tolerance for those who are so willing to sit at home and live off the government tap.
I have a great deal more respect for the guy who is working 10 hours a day and sending money home to his family in Guadalajara than the yahoo selling crack in Oakwood and killing his neighbors. (David Pisarra is a partner in the Santa Monica law firm of Pisarra & Grist, he welcomes questions, comment and concerns. He (310) 664- 9969 or e-mailed at ).
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 14, 2003. Read the original PDF.