I was talking with a strawberry farmer today, and he said something I’ve heard from many people who are trying to fill low-skilled jobs.
“It’s not that American-born people are calling me about employment and declining the job because I’m not offering enough money, it’s that they don’t call in the first place. In the last ten years, I don’t remember ever getting a call from anybody who spoke English as a first language. Ever. Blacks and whites don’t even consider these jobs, only Hispanics.”
It started me thinking about some phrases in American political rhetoric that are so common that they’re unquestioned. “Illegal immigrants come here to do work that Americans won’t do,” is right there at the top. Is that really true? If it is, when and why did that become the case, and what does it mean for our future?
First, my perspective on the situation. I’m 51 years old, graduated high school in Southern California in 1974. In the years afterward, I had friends the same age who were aspiring musicians and actors who played music on the Venice Beach boardwalk or Westwood Village, or who mimed on the streets for pocket change in between taking any part they could find in local theater productions. That was in summer, of course, when the crowds were out and tourist dollars were flowing. The rest of the year, they washed dishes, worked construction jobs, went to pick apples in Oregon or Washington, or dug vegetables in the central valley. They knew that their real vocation was seasonal, that the money available from it was unpredictable and unreliable, so they accepted that they had to spend part of the year doing manual labor. I was in the same boat. I had been going from door-to-door washing cars and doing yardwork in order to support my budding career as a photographer, so I understood their decision.
Understand something here – we are not talking about model citizens here. We’re talking a bunch of teenagers and early twentysomethings who were aspiring actors and musicians, not actual responsible human beings. Nevertheless, despite city upbringings, most of them spent part of every year out in the fields, and didn’t expect anything else. The rest made their livings with scrub brushes, shovels, or the other tools of hard, dirty jobs.
Some of those people actually made it in their various artistic endeavors, most didn’t. After a couple of years of making tolerable money as a photographer but getting diminishing artistic satisfaction from the process, my camera equipment was stolen from my car. (The vehicle was parked outside of a wedding chapel while I was inside arguing with the father of the bride, who was trying to negotiate an amount lower than the signed contract.) I referred all my pending jobs to someone else and quit the business. Still, I don’t regret learning those skills at photography, nor the hundreds of cars I washed and lawns I mowed while I gained those skills. I talked to one of my old friends who has a desk job but still makes pin money playing in a bar band, and he doesn’t regret the time he spent picking apples. It brought him in contact with all sorts of people, some other musicians and artists, some drifters and ex-army types who just didn’t fit well in society and liked a rootless existence, and a fair number of people from south of the border.
So it seems to be a major social shift that students and artists aren’t applying for those jobs any more, and it concerns me on a number of levels. First, I learned a lot from those days walking from house to house with a bucket, soap, squeegee, and rags. I learned the basics of salesmanship, I learned about budgeting my time and estimating a job, and when I guessed wrong and it took a lot longer than expected, I had to do it for the price I quoted. I was working for something like five bucks an hour, and when I considered buying something that cost ten bucks, I had to ask myself, “Is it worth working two hours for that?” I often decided it wasn’t. It occurred to me even then that richer kids who got generous allowances didn’t make such calculations, because the amount of money received had no relation to the amount of effort expended. It occurred to me much later that people who have only ever subsisted on a government check are in the exact same circumstances.
Farming is hard work, and unpredictable in some ways – a cold snap or unseasonal rain, and you and a whole bunch of people who have shown up to pick fruit have to go somewhere else and find some other way to support yourself. Nevertheless, even for those who are doing stoop labor, there is decent money to be made. Most of the people who are working on those fields are supporting themselves and a family at home in Mexico – and they put enough money aside to both go home to visit occasionally, and to pay the smugglers known as coyotes hundreds, even thousands of dollars. And while the stereotype of the immigrant farm laborer is of a Central American or Mexican, they’re not the only ones. A few years ago while I was in Texas I met a New Zealander who came to the US to do farm work every year. He was on a three-month visa, and he made enough money in two and a half months to spend the other two weeks vacationing around the country in style, plus paying for the round-trip ticket from Auckland to Houston. When he told me this I was visibly shocked, and he laughed when he saw my face. He told me that it was like the United Nations – along with the Mexicans who came from just across the border, there were Australians, Chinese, and Polish laborers picking vegetables. It didn’t occur to me then to ask if there were any white or black kids from the nearby cities, teenagers in their first jobs, but I have a feeling I know the answer.
It occurs to me as I write this that the people I know who are most rude to waiters, retail store staff, and others in menial jobs are the ones who have never done that kind of work for even a day. To have such a job early in life might give you a lifelong compassion for those who can’t look forward to ever rising higher, whether from lack of skills, lack of ambition, or other factors. Jobs like this might be the only time in a person’s life that they are called upon to work on an equal basis with people from greatly varied backgrounds, to see that people who are unskilled or poorly educated can sometimes perform tasks as well or better than they do.
This has been a long intro to some short questions, but I figure I needed to include it because it might make people think differently about the social consequences of spurning low-wage employment. I’ve heard the far right types with their “Throw out everybody who isn’t legal, issue visas only to people who have high skills or lots of money, and damn the consequences” rhetoric, but I’ve never heard any hint that they want to send their kids to do the hard work that will otherwise be undone. I’ve heard some people from the left who apparently want completely open borders with no verification of identification, which I find completely unfathomable – a place without borders isn’t a country, and the people who have the most to gain from such a situation are criminals and identity thieves who can move through society undetected.
My own position has long been that I’m against illegal immigration, but want to greatly expand and streamline the procedures for legal immigration, so that people who want to contribute to this country can do so without fear, without having to pay coyotes or risk dying in the desert or at sea. On the other hand, I’m wavering a bit, because I wonder if to massively expand legal immigration would create a permanent underclass of newcomers who do the jobs that the last decades’ newcomers don’t want to do any more.
More than that, I’m wondering about how a generation of people who have never worked with their hands, started microbusinesses and sold their skills from door to door, and learned the value of money in the process, will survive when times get tough. I’ve walked the streets looking for work, and found it, and I trust that if things got bad enough, I could do it again. My father worked as a bricklayer, rug cleaner, and boiler installer before moving up to cabdriver, then to a job in aerospace and eventually into owning his own business. My son wants to be a cabinetmaker, and has applied for jobs doing construction – but he doesn’t speak fluent Spanish, so it’s hard to find work, because the rest of the laborers are all Mexican and he can’t communicate with them. Most of his friends haven’t thought about what they want to do for a living, but whatever they envision, it has something to do with a keyboard and monitor.
It seems to me that our society has come to be built on unreasonable expectations, and insofar as they are reasonable, they’re not the foundations of a healthy society. So I ask:
Do you see the same things I’m seeing, a generation of privileged people that has grown up expecting to never work with their hands, or regards such work as demeaning?
The issue of illegal immigration aside, is it healthy for our society that this is the case?
If this is not healthy for our society, what do we do about it, both as individuals and as citizens who can lobby our representatives?
I don’t know the answers, but I think that the questions are worth asking…