Let’s get this straight: immigrants are not “taking jobs away” from Americans. Let us consider this language for a moment. What would this mean? Do these immigrants confront the job-holding Americans and wrest their tools from them? No. Do they drive them out of their jobsites? No. How then do they get these jobs? Employers hire them. Why? Because employers can get away with paying them less, or as studies have shown recently, with not paying them at all. See e.g. “On The Corner: Day Labor in the United States,” by Abel Valenzuela, Jr., Nik Theodore, Edwin Meléndez, and Ana Luz Gonzalez. January 23, 2006. Often these workers have no other choice than to work for less than legal workers earn. Is this “taking jobs away from” anyone?
It’s time to address the roles driving this issue, employers and consumers. It is employers seeking lower-cost labor that are outsourcing jobs at an enormous rate. It is employers trying to drive down their costs that are decreasing benefits, reducing health care coverage, abolishing pension plans. And it is employers that take advantage of immigrants to shave pennies off every bushel of tomatoes. Let us remember to place the blame where it belongs in this case.
Look at the incredible market heft wielded by Wal-Mart, which commands the economies of whole towns, and even counties. It is these employers who are undermining our common livelihood. And yet we rarely hold them responsible for their incursions into our hard-won labor protections. We treat employers as though they were at the mercy of the fickle weather of labor costs, without any choice over who to hire and how much to pay. We blame these powerless job-seekers and absolve the employers, who make or break the lives of all workers.
Employers will of course retort that the pressures of competition “force” them to lower their costs by whatever means they can. Causes are indeed complex in this situation. Americans as workers say they want pensions and health care and a fair wage. If these are eroding, it is not because of undocumented workers who have little choice but to work incredibly difficult jobs over long hours for barely sustaining pay. It is because of the intense demand for lower costs. But Americans as consumers want the lowest prices they can get, and rarely stop to think of what labor brings them their lettuce at such a bargain.
Employers should be providing living wages and decent benefits. Consumers have a responsibility to be more aware of the lives they are shaping with their dollars. Our labor laws brought us the weekend, the 40-hour work week, and the pensions and health coverage that are now being eroded. Efforts to protect labor and return our focus to real problems will get us past this destructive pattern of pitting some job-seekers against others, feeding American xenophobia and fearful finger-pointing. We are almost all immigrants here, after all. Let us not blame these people, working hard to escape poverty, who were drawn here by America’s brightest image of hope and opportunity.
Nancy Urban
nurban@berkeley.edu
© 2006
Nancy Urban is a cognitive linguist, focusing on the analysis of social and political affairs. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999, with a dissertation on the influence of business models on higher education in the United States. She studied with Dr. George Lakoff, and has worked as a Senior Researcher at the Rockridge Institute. She currently resides in Berkeley, California.
