Good People, Hard Choices, and an Inescapable Question

How many immigrants should we allow into the United States annually, and who gets to come?

The question is easy to state but hard to answer, for thoughtful individuals and for our nation as a whole. It is a complex question, touching on issues of race and class, morals and money, power and political allegiance. It is an important question, since our answer will help determine what kind of country our children and grandchildren inherit. It is a contentious question: answer it wrongly and you may hear some choice personal epithets directed your way, depending on who you are talking to. It is also an endlessly recurring question, since conditions will change, and an immigration policy that made sense in one era may no longer work in another. Any answer we give must be open to revision.

This book explores the immigration question in light of current realities and defends one provisional answer to it. By exploring the question from a variety of angles and making my own political beliefs explicit, I hope that it will help readers come to their own well-informed conclusions. Our answers may differ, but as fellow citizens we need to keep talking to one another and try to come up with immigration policies that further the common good.

Why are immigration debates frequently so angry? People on one side often seem to assume it is just because people on the other are stupid, orimmoral. I disagree. Immigration is contentious because vital interests are at stake and no one set of policies can fully accommodate all of them. Consider two stories from among the hundreds I've heard while researching this book.

* * *

It is lunchtime on a sunny October day and I'm talking to Javier, an electrician's assistant, at a home construction site in Longmont, Colorado, near Denver. He is short and solidly built; his words are soft-spoken but clear. Although he apologizes for his English, it is quite good. At any rate much better than my Spanish.

Javier studied to be an electrician in Mexico, but could not find work there after school. "You have to pay to work," he explains: pay corrupt officials up to two years' wages up front just to start a job. "Too much corruption," he says, a refrain I find repeated often by Mexican immigrants. They feel that a poor man cannot get ahead there, can hardly get started.

So in 1989 Javier came to the United States, undocumented, working various jobs in food preparation and construction. He has lived in Colorado for nine years and now has a wife (also here illegally) and two girls, ages seven and three. "I like USA, you have a better life here," he says. Of course he misses his family back in Mexico. But to his father's entreaties to come home, he explains that he needs to consider his own family now. Javier told me that he's not looking to get rich, he just wants a decent life for himself and his girls. Who could blame him?

Ironically one of the things Javier likes most about the United States is that we have rules that are fairly enforced. Unlike in Mexico, a poor man does not live at the whim of corrupt officials. When I suggest that Mexico might need more people like him to stay and fight "corruption," he just laughs. "No, go to jail," he says, or worse. Like the dozens of other Mexican and Central American immigrants I have interviewed for this book, Javier does not seem to think that such corruption could ever change in the land of his birth.

Do immigrants take jobs away from Americans? I ask. "American people no want to work in the fields," he responds, or as dishwashers in restaurants. Still, he continues, "the problem is cheap labor." Too many immigrants coming into construction lowers wages for everyone—including other immigrants like himself.

"The American people say, all Mexicans the same," Javier says. He does not want to be lumped together with "all Mexicans," or labeled a problem, but judged for who he is as an individual. "I don't like it when my people abandon cars, or steal." If immigrants commit crimes, he thinks they should go to jail, or be deported. But "that no me." While many immigrants work under the table for cash, he is proud of the fact that he pays his taxes. Proud, too, that he gives a good day's work for his daily pay (a fact confirmed by his coworkers).

Javier's boss, Andy, thinks that immigration levels are too high and that too many people flout the law and work illegally. He was disappointed, he says, to find out several years ago that Javier was in the country illegally. Still he likes and respects Javier and worries about his family. He is trying to help him get legal residency.

With the government showing new initiative in immigration enforcement—including a well-publicized raid at a nearby meat-packing plant that caught hundreds of illegal workers—there is a lot of worry among undocumented immigrants. "Everyone scared now," Javier says. He and his wife used to go to restaurants or stores without a second thought; now they are sometimes afraid to go out. "It's hard," he says. But: "I understand. If the people say, 'All the people here, go back to Mexico,' I understand."

Javier's answer to one of my standard questions—"How might changes in immigration policy affect you?"—is obvious. Tighter enforcement could break up his family and destroy the life he has created here in America. An amnesty would give him a chance to regularize his life. "Sometimes," he says, "I dream in my heart, 'If you no want to give me paper for residence, or whatever, just give me permit for work.'"

* * *

It's a few months later and I'm back in Longmont, eating a 6:30 breakfast at a café out by the Interstate with Tom Kenney. Fit and alert, Tom looks to be in his mid-forties. Born and raised in Denver, he has been spraying custom finishes on drywall for twenty-five years and has had his own company since 1989. "At one point we had twelve people running three trucks," he says. Now his business is just him and his wife. "Things have changed," he says.

Although it has cooled off considerably, residential and commercialconstruction was booming when I interviewed Tom. The main "thing that's changed" is the number of immigrants in construction. When Tom got into it twenty-five years ago, construction used almost all native-born workers. Today estimates of the number of immigrant workers in northern Colorado range from 50% to 70% of the total construction workforce. Some trades, like pouring concrete and framing, use immigrant labor almost exclusively. Come in with an "all-white" crew of framers, another small contractor tells me, and people do a double-take.

Tom is an independent contractor, bidding on individual jobs. But, he says, "guys are coming in with bids that are impossible."...