To the mostly immigrant workers and American employers who cross paths at El Centro Humanitario – a former carwash converted to a day-labor agency on the fringes of downtown Denver – the nation’s heated debate over illegal immigration is no abstract concept. It’s economic reality.
“If people are willing to pay another $20,000 for their $200,000 house, then fine,” said Chuck Saxton, a contractor who regularly hires immigrant workers for a fraction of what full-time U.S. workers would cost, to help him build additions and finish basements for Denver-area homeowners. “But if not, we need to talk about the consequences of throwing out 12 million people.”
Those consequences – for U.S. businesses and consumers and the illegal workers who provide a consistent source of cheap, dependable labor – are impossible to deny.
That point has been largely overlooked as congressional lawmakers clash over proposals to step up enforcement and legalize foreign workers. But, regardless of the measures they devise, the economic forces underpinning illegal immigration will be difficult to alter, experts say.
“If we enact a law that makes clear we’re going to dramatically increase enforcement without allowing greater legal flows, employers and illegal immigrants will find ways around it,” said Gordon Hanson, an economist at the University of California, San Diego.
While it is difficult to predict precisely what would happen as a result of changes in the law, Hanson’s assertion is backed up by past experience.
The last time Congress overhauled immigration laws in 1986, the rhetoric was at least as heated and sentiments were largely the same. Illegal immigration was alleged to pose a threat to national security. Critics said unauthorized workers were taking good-paying American jobs. Foreign workers were accused of taking advantage of the nation’s generosity by soaking up public benefits.
In the end, lawmakers passed a bill that granted amnesty to workers already here while promising to clamp down on the flow of new arrivals. Congress ordered employers to require documents from their workers and said there would be consequences if they didn’t.
Illegal workers, though, kept coming.
In the two decades since, the number of illegal immigrants in the United States has grown from about 4 million to between 11.5 million and 12 million, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. About 40 percent of those people – about 4.4 million – have arrived within the past five years.
They account for about one in every four farmworkers, hold 17 percent of all jobs in cleaning and building maintenance, 14 percent of all construction jobs and 12 percent of food preparation jobs, the center says.
More than half the undocumented workers in the United States are from Mexico, where the past decade’s currency devaluation and debt crisis have created tremendous economic volatility. At the same time, the Mexican labor market has been fed by a baby boom that is a generation behind the one in the United States.
The combination has created tremendous economic pressure, pushing a surplus of workers to seek out opportunities better than those at home.
Saxton, the Denver-area contractor, said he began hiring immigrant workers about four years ago, after some of the American day laborers he’d previously hired arrived for work drunk. He needed 15 men for three days to dig out a basement and found he could hire immigrants for $8 an hour.
He now pays $10 to $12 an hour. But he points out that is much cheaper then the $35 an hour he’d have to pay for full-time U.S.-born employees, including the cost of worker’s compensation insurance.
“These guys work hard, they’re honest, they’re nice. I trust them with my tools, money, anything,” Saxton said.
While illegal immigrants play a crucial role in the economy, their importance is sometimes overstated. Foreign workers account for less than 5 percent of the nation’s labor force.
