The argument that alien unskilled labor is a new phenomenon in America is not entirely accurate. This country has always welcomed in cheap foreign workers when the economy was sound and menial labor short. It goes without saying that if we closed the borders, cut back state welfare subsidies and raised the minimum wage, then American citizens of the lower classes or at least our youth might become grass cutters, bed makers and grape pickers. But none of that is necessary when millions of industrious and impoverished workers are just hours away south of the border. Yet the moral quandary we face is clear when we acknowledge that denying residence to impoverished illegal aliens - a move that would end their hopes of freedom and economic betterment - would benefit enormously the Mexicans who are already here legally.
There are thousands of idle American teenagers at the mall every summer; others are lounging on the couch, while some are hard at work in computer camp. But so far I have not seen a single one employed in a vineyard or an orchard, whose owners instead use - and probably prefer - labor from Mexico to prevent their soft fruit, and so their livelihoods, from rotting. The U.S. Department of Labor reports that in July 2002, at a time of recession, less than half of America's teenagers were looking for summer employment - the lowest percentage since it began compiling statistics on youth job rates. In other words, millions of Americans are not working seasonal jobs that millions of Mexicans desperately want. There is something deeply ingrained now in the American character saying that Josh should not spend June and July in a chicken-packing plant. Nor must Nicole be sewing casual wear between spring and fall semesters as a temporary seamstress in a garment sweat shop.
In the late 1990s, after reading dozens of stories in our local paper about a severe shortage of grape pickers - and then witnessing firsthand that the raisin harvest was a week or two behind because too many farmers were seeking too few workers - I once drove to the three largest shopping centers in Fresno. The labor pool there was astounding! There were easily two or three thousand healthy men and women under twenty - shopping, loitering, idling, chatting on cell phones and flirting at 2 P.M. on a summer weekday. Some had cultivated physiques with bulging muscles and were well tanned, appearing to my mind more than ready for the rough outdoors of the vineyard.
There were enough Americans within a ten-mile vicinity who had the strength and health to pick all the grapes on seven or eight hundred acres of vineyard in a single day. But as Napoleon said of war, the will is to the materiel as three is to one. Not one of those young men and women works in the fields. Their parents may complain about how expensive their school clothes and electronic appurtenances are, but still unleash them to the malls, while the farmers gripe that nobody wants their wages to do hard, honest work, even as the Mexicans are happy to do what others will not, and thereby earn the money to buy what others purchase through parental subsidy.
Ban our yearly contingent of tough, lean Mexican immigrants completely from California tomorrow, and I think within a year or two the state would be almost paralyzed - much of its food decaying, its hotels dirty, its dishes unwashed, its lawns and shrubs weedy and unkempt. Remove the young Mexicans and our professional classes would learn rather quickly that fruit does not fall edible from trees, that the grass does indeed continue to grow, and that trenches do not open of their own accord like the Red Sea.
Dozens of agricultural magnates I know have never themselves - much less their children - picked any peaches from their thousands of trees, never sprayed organophosphates on their vast orchards, and never even mowed their own lawns. In the great debate now going on about immigration, it seems to me vital that critics of Mexican illegal aliens at least experiment - if only for forty-eight hours or so - with working at such helotage. They might serve as maids for a day at the Motel 6, or pick strawberries to understand the issues of stoop labor, its compensation, and why people who wish to work find in America work that Americans will not do. We must keep in mind that unlike the 1950s, when only the elite in our country had someone else tend their lawns and baby-sit their kids, now millions of the middle and upper-middle classes pay aliens for such services - a radical change in the American lifestyle made possible by the arrival of millions from Mexico in the last decades.
So at a personal level, whether the present massive immigration is good or bad sometimes depends on whether your lawn is being mowed cheaply, or you are mowing someone else's; whether you show up at the emergency room for thousands of dollars in free maternity care, or pay the highest state taxes in the country to provide care for someone who either cannot or will not acquire health insurance; whether you believe that we are all going to be fine because an illegal alien becomes valedictorian of his high-school class, or that none of us will have a future when almost four out of every ten Hispanic students - natives, resident aliens and illegal immigrants alike - are believed never to finish the twelfth grade.
As we contemplate this growing complexity, it is worth considering the world as it appears to the illegal alien - a cosmos that I know something about as
