🚀 go-pugleaf

Rush Limbaugh has been expecting liberals to start "whining" about the
$5000 fine undocumented immigrants will have to pay to gain
citizenship under the new immigration bill, but most liberals have
been too busy chortling about the immigration-induced split in the GOP
to make their own case against the bill. So let a mighty whine rise
over the land: Undocumented workers shouldn't be fined; they should
get a hefty bonus!

All right, they committed a "crime"--the international equivalent of
breaking and entry. But breaking and entry is usually a prelude to a
much worse crime, like robbery or rape. What have the immigrants been
doing once they get into the US? Taking up time on the elliptical
trainers in our health clubs? Getting ahead of us on the wait-lists
for elite private nursery schools?

In case you don't know what immigrants do in this country, the Latinos
have a word for it--trabajo. They've been mowing the lawns, cleaning
the offices, hammering the nails and picking the tomatoes, not to
mention all that dish-washing, diaper-changing, meat-packing and
poultry-plucking.

CONTINUED BELOW
The punitive rage directed at illegal immigrants grows out of a larger
blindness to the manual labor that makes our lives possible: The
touching belief, in the class occupied by Rush Limbaugh among many
others, that offices clean themselves at night and salad greens spring
straight from the soil onto one's plate.

Native-born workers share in this invisibility, but it's far worse in
the case of immigrant workers, who are often, for all practical
purposes, nameless. In the recent book There's No Jos� Here: Following
the Lives of Mexican Immigrants, Gabriel Thompson cites a construction
company manager who says things like, "I've got to get myself a couple
of Jos�s for this job if we're going to have that roof patched up by
Saturday." Forget the Juans, Diegos, and Eduardos - they're all
interchangeable "Jos�s."

Hence no doubt the ease with which some prominent immigrant-bashers
forget their own personal reliance on immigrant labor, like Nevada's
Governor Jim Gibbons, who, it turns out, once employed an undocumented
nanny. And as the Boston Globe revealed late last year, Mitt Romney's
lawn in suburban Boston was maintained by illegal immigrants from
Guatemala.

The only question is how much we owe our undocumented immigrant
workers. First, those who do not remain to enjoy the benefits of old
age in America will have to be reimbursed for their contributions to
Medicare and Social Security, and here I quote the website of the San
Diego ACLU:

Undocumented immigrants annually pay an estimated $7 billion more than
they take out into Social Security, and $1.5 billion more into
Medicare.... A study by the National Academy of Sciences also found
that tax payments generated by immigrants outweighed any costs
associated with services used by immigrants.

Second, someone is going to have to calculate what is owed to
"illegals" for wages withheld by unscrupulous employers: The homeowner
who tells his or her domestic worker that the wage is actually several
hundred dollars a month less than she had been promised, and that the
homeowner will be "holding" it for her. Or the landscaping service
that stiffs its undocumented workers for their labor. Who's the
"illegal" here?

Third, there's the massive compensation owed to undocumented
immigrants for preventable injuries on the job. In her book Suburban
Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights, Jennifer Gordon reports
such gruesome cases as a Honduran who died from inhaling paint while
sanding yachts in Long Island and a Guatemalan worker whose boss
intentionally burned him with hot pans of oil for not washing dishes
fast enough. "Death rates for Latino workers," Gordon reports, "have
risen over the past decade even as workplace fatality rates for
non-Latinos have fallen."

When our debt to America's undocumented workers is eventually tallied,
I'm confident that it will be well in excess of the $5000 fine the
immigration bill proposes. There is still the issue of the original
"crime." If someone breaks into my property for the purpose of
trashing and looting, I would be hell-bent on restitution. But if they
break in for the purpose of cleaning it--scrubbing the bathroom,
mowing the lawn--then, in my way of thinking anyway, the debt goes in
the other direction. 

Barbara Ehrenreich


On Thu, 14 Jun 2007 21:27:23 -0700, Anthony Martinez
<anthony77123@hotmail.com > wrote:

>
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5bEhN7_abc&mode=related&search
>