The Economist is a weekly magazine.  It is headquartered in Great Britain, and is published worldwide.  The magazine is over 100 years old.  It covers the world and is very informative.  And it provides a refreshing objective view of our America that will not be found in our domestic press or media.  Often times it scoops even the electronic media, to say nothing of our print media.

 

This article is based on Immigration and “The Jungle: Of meat, Mexicans and social mobility” in the June 17th 2006 issue.  I would like to share the whole article with you, but the next best thing is to extract some of the key parts and build this article around them.  Those parts are enclosed in quotation marks, are bolded and italicized.   Here then is the main thrust of the article as this poor amateur scribe is able to see it.

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“Can immigrants still work their way up from the bottom? Can they become American?

“Many fear that, for the latest wave of mostly-unskilled immigrants from Latin America, the answer is no. Some fret that the newcomers are too ill-educated and culturally alien to prosper or assimilate. Others are convinced that immigrant workers are horribly exploited or trapped forever in low-wage jobs. Both worries are largely unfounded.”

Alberto Queiroz, after a stuffy ride out of Mexico 12 years ago in the trunk of a car, found his first job in a Chinese-owned clothes factory in Los Angeles. Legal immigrants were paid the minimum wage, but he had to make do with $2.50 an hour. While unlawfully stingy, it was much better than anything he could earn where he came from in Mexico.

Two years later he moved to North Carolina where “he picked blueberries for $5 a box, earning nearly $100, tax free, for a 12-hour day” until the harvest ended. He then searched for more stable employment, eventually landing a job at America's largest hog slaughterhouse.

 “But is a slaughterhouse a nice place to work? Smithfield does not let journalists in, for reasons of “biosecurity”. Human Rights Watch, a watchdog from New York, issued a report in 2004 entitled “Blood, Sweat and Fear”, which accused American meat and poultry firms of ‘systematic human-rights violations’. Slaughterhouses are harsh and dangerous places to work, said the report, and illegal immigrants, who form a large chunk of the workforce, find it hard to defy abusive employers.

“Mr Queiroz takes a more benign view. Yes, the work is hard. The line goes fast and you have to keep cutting till your hands are exhausted. And yes, it is sometimes dangerous. He says he once saw a co-worker lose a leg when he ducked under the disassembly line instead of walking round it. But many occupations are risky. Taxi-drivers are 34 times more likely to die on the job than meatpackers.

While the work is hard and sometimes dangerous, Mr Queiroz does not judge Smithfield to be a bad employer. He earned more than $10 an hour, and was able to buy a house back in Mexico.  Five years ago he decided he had had enough of cutting up pigs, so he quit and set up a taco stand with his brother. He now owns a Mexican restaurant and is enthusiastic about America.   “America, he says, is ‘the land of opportunity’”.

“News about jobs spreads quickly through the Hispanic grapevine. … New migrants head not only for California, New York, Texas and Florida, but also for Georgia, Arizona, Arkansas and Oregon. Perhaps the most rapid change has taken place in North Carolina, where a technology and construction boom has sucked in hundreds of thousands of migrant workers, swelling the Hispanic population by more than 1,000% since 1990.

“In some areas, the newcomers strain local services. Cindy Evans, director of a county clinic for children in Raleigh, says the percentage of her patients who are Hispanic has leapt from perhaps 2% a decade and a half ago to about 65%. The clinic is full of bilingual signs. Next to one, someone has scrawled: “Speak English!

“Many native-born North Carolinians are uneasy about the pace at which their state has Latinised. Few of the newcomers arrived legally. Some join gangs. As in the rest of America, antipathy towards illegal immigrants, though widespread, is mostly mild and seldom violent. It should not be dismissed, however, since it is politically influential …”

This is an important dimension to this problem.  While people like Mr Queiroz are a valuable addition to America, not all such illegal immigrants are such success stories.  The proportion that assimilates successfully is an unknown quantity in the equation, if for no other reason than that the United States government has no real idea as to how many illegal aliens are among us.

One concern that many Americans have is where the tipping point is.  How fast can our culture assimilate the hordes coming across our border with Mexico?  This is a real term in the equation, and like so many other terms it is an unknown.  And that volume is a new experience in America’s history of immigration.

Yet another concern for many Americans is the economic impact on America.  That is an emotion laden issue.  It is difficult to get accurate figures on each element of that issue. 

“Accurately measuring the economic consequences of immigration is hard. Looking only at North Carolina, John Kasarda and James Johnson recently found that Latinos paid $756m in taxes annually and cost the state government $817m. That works out as a net burden of $102 per head. Anti-immigrant agitators will seize on this figure, worries Mr Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School. But it is dwarfed by the positive impact of Latino spending in North Carolina, which he estimates at $9.19 billion in 2004. That translates into nearly 90,000 new jobs, he says.”

The forgoing figures are interesting in their specificity and coverage.  But one might question the source of the new job creation, for starters.  If there are enough success stories such as Mr Queiroz’s, such a figure becomes more credible.  The question is, are there that many success stories in North Carolina, or the United States?

Assimilation is problematical for an illegal population that can be back home by stepping across our border.  This population might be divided into at least two groups: those that assimilate, and even become American citizens; and those that do not intend to, or cannot, assimilate.  Mr Queiroz is a representative example of the former group.  We see representatives of the latter group in larger and larger numbers hanging around street corners across the United States.

But for those that are determined to make a go of it here, their children are a bright spot, their light at the end of the tunnel.

“Immigrants' children are typically American citizens, having been born on American soil. More than 90% speak English fluently; by the third generation, 72% speak nothing else. Many help their less-fluent parents with form-filling, as other children help their elders navigate the internet. The parents, in turn, try to infuse their offspring with their work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit. (Latinos open new firms at a rate three times the national norm.)”

For these committed illegal immigrants, this process is identical to that which took place for waves of German and Scandinavian immigrants on the north coast of America in earlier generations.  This is an encouraging process for those of us that believe our American culture is worth preserving.  And it is encouraging for those of us that believe that immigrants are the transfusion of new blood that helps maintain the vitality of that culture and America.