[Mb-civic] Undocumented workers contribute plenty - Derrick Z. Jackson - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Undocumented workers contribute plenty

By Derrick Z. Jackson  |  April 12, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

AT THE New York rally for legalization of immigrants, Chung-Wha Hong, 
the executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, said, ''We 
are inseparable, indivisible, and impossible to take out of America."

In Phoenix, Victor Colex, a 37-year-old fence builder who makes between 
$7 and $8 an hour, told the Washington Post, ''We are not asking for 
favors. We only want to work, for our families and parents and children."

In Boston, 26-year-old Robin Martini, a legal immigrant from Guatemala, 
told the Globe, ''We give a grain a day of ourselves to this country. We 
want to be part of it. We respect the laws. We pay our taxes. We want a 
piece of the American dream.

Americans seem to get this, in a conflicted way. A new Washington 
Post-ABC News poll says that 63 percent of Americans now support 
legalization of immigrants who have lived here for a certain number of 
years. A new CBS News Poll found that 74 percent of Americans favor 
letting illegal immigrants who have been in the country at least five 
years stay and work in the United States providing they pay a fine, pay 
any back taxes they owe, speak English, and have no criminal record.

The conflicted nature of the acceptance comes in other poll findings 
that show that Americans still believe that immigrants are a major drain 
on national resources. A Time magazine poll found that 84 percent of 
Americans were ''very" concerned (61 percent) or ''somewhat" concerned 
(23 percent) that it costs taxpayers too much to provide healthcare and 
education to immigrants. A Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll last week 
found that 87 percent of Americans say they are concerned that 
immigrants ''overburden government services and programs."

But the evidence is becoming clear that it is justified that immigrants 
give us more than a grain a day. They give their dollars. They are an 
inseparable and indivisible part of the economy.

In articles published in The Tax Lawyer, a publication of the American 
Bar Association, and in the upcoming issue of the Harvard Latino Law 
Review, Francine Lipman, a professor at Chapman University's law school 
in Orange, Calif., writes that the widespread belief that undocumented 
immigrants cost us more than they give us is ''demonstrably false."

In her review article, Lipman wrote that there are 7 million 
undocumented workers, which is 1 out of every 20 in the United States. 
Such undocumented workers live in households where the average annual 
income is $27,400, compared with nearly $48,000 for legal immigrant 
families.

They cannot access or easily access many public services, yet in 2003 
alone the labor of undocumented workers poured $7 billion in taxes into 
Social Security even though they cannot legally claim those benefits. 
Lipman calls this ''an abyss in federal relief for hard-working, poor 
families. Undocumented working poor families have higher effective 
income tax rates than their neighbors who enjoy higher income levels."

They perform jobs that are inseparable from our standard of living. 
Undocumented workers are about 5 percent of our overall labor force but 
-- according to the Pew Hispanic Center's analysis of Census data -- are 
between 22 and 36 percent of America's insulation workers, miscellaneous 
agricultural workers, meat-processing workers, construction workers, 
dishwashers, and maids. The American Farm Bureau, the lobbying group for 
agricultural interests, says that without guest workers, the United 
States would lose $5 billion to $9 billion a year in fruit, vegetable, 
and flower production and up to 20 percent of production would go overseas.

Often ignored by anti-immigration forces is that undocumented workers 
pay sales taxes and real estate taxes -- directly if they are 
homeowners, indirectly if they are renters. Analysts at Standard & 
Poor's wrote last week that there is no clear correlation between 
undocumented families and local costs, as the states with the highest 
numbers of such families also have relatively low unemployment rates, 
high property values, and strong income growth, ''all of which 
contribute to stable financial performance."

Except, of course, for the undocumented families themselves. Standard & 
Poor's wrote that the least we could consider in this debate is to 
redistribute the $7 billion contributed by undocumented workers into 
Social Security. It said, for instance, that the money could go toward 
the estimated $11.2 billion it takes to educate the nation's 1.8 million 
undocumented children. Better still is to take the people who give us a 
grain a day in the shadows and let them flower in the sunlight of 
legalization.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/04/12/undocumented_workers_contribute_plenty/
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