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On one hand we have this huge bureacracy dedicated to locating and deporting undocumented people (the INS or whatever it's called now) and on the other hand there are thousands of employers (lots of them flag-waving repukes) who hire undocumented people willingly (and knowingly) to make sure they have a guaranteed (and cheap) labor force available to them.
These employers violate the law (there are severe employer sanctions in place for people who knowingly violate the law regarding the employment of undocumented people) but they will never be caught because they are usually well-connected and there are not enough inspectors available for enforcement of the laws.
Besides the way workers are abused, what I hate most is that undocumented people are used as "union busters". I had high hopes after the IRCA (Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986) that finally farmers and other employers, because there was a limited number of newly legalized workers, would have to pay workers more. However, another part of IRCA was the expansion of the H-2A program, a guestworker program which allows farmers to "import" workers by claiming that there are labor shortages in their areas.
Even though farmers had to comply with the H-2A program regulations and provide "better" wages and working conditions than most domestic farmworkers received, farmers knew that in the end the H-2A regulations would not be enforced in the same way that the existing laws regarding farmworkers were not enforced. And, yes, there may have been labor shortages in rural areas due to people not being willing to work for paltry wages in terrible conditions any longer when they could get a job in construction or a poultry plant. But, this shortage should have caused wages to rise and working conditions to improve and instead the H-2A program served as a safety valve and resulted in decreased wages and increased unemployment for domestic farmworkers (African Americans and newly legalized Latino workers). In addition, one aspect of the H-2A program was that a farmworker who was brought in under the program, worked at the discretion of the farmer, meaning that if they were a rabble-rouser, the farmer could fire them practically at will and exerted tremendous control over these workers. If the farmer fired the worker, then the worker had to go back to Mexico and would be out the money that he or his family had raised to send him to the US. Sometimes workers would leave their contracts and then they would become "undocumented"; thereby increasing illegal immigration, something this program was supposed to stop…
I worked for 11 years with migrant farmworkers in NC and part of my job involved visiting churches to talk about farmworker conditions. Sometimes when I would go to churches, people would ask me, "How many of the workers are illegal?" I would just reply something like, "There are lots of people who are undocumented. But Jesus wouldn't really be concerned with borders. These people are up here working extremely hard, in terrible conditions, to do work that most Americans would not want to do. They also send lots of money back home to their families. This is money that actually goes to the people who need it, unlike our government sending money to their government which probably gets ripped off at the highest levels." That usually stopped that line of questioning.
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