Good Enough to Work: Low Pay and No Rights Peter Watt - NACLA
go to original April 30, 2014

Brooklyn's Corner of Broken Dreams: Every morning, scores of women crowd the corner of Division Avenue and Marcy Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in hopes they'll get hired to clean the homes of the area's Hasidic Jewish families. Work is sometimes scarce and the pay small, but for many of the women, who hail from all over Latin America, there are few other options. (Vocativ)

... The United States has the world's largest immigrant workforce. Immigrants constitute 14 per cent of US labor and 20 per cent of the low wage workforce. Mexican immigrants in the United States, who constitute the largest immigrant group, also comprise the highest number of underpaid workers in the world’s most powerful economy. Up to 52 per cent of the 11.1 million undocumented migrants now in the US are born in Mexico.

By 2003, Mexican-born consumers in the United States contributed an estimated $395 billion to the US economy. Nonetheless, the US government has few legal obligations to provide even minimal state benefits to undocumented migrants. So while they may produce and spend billions in the US, the state does little in return, a situation which rewards both government and employers, but which is disastrous for undocumented labor.

This contribution to the US economy would not be possible without a workforce among whom millions have already risked incarceration, deportation, physical abuse and death. What is widely deemed one of the most dangerous journeys in the world, through Mexico on top of freight trains, has become a perverse rite of passage to a shattered American dream in which toiling in the fields, working as janitors or exploitation in the service industries, often for pay cheques below the minimum wage and treatment as a racial underclass, is seen as preferable to even more constrained opportunities in Central America and Mexico.

Migrants, far from being in search of “handouts”, overwhelmingly enter the United States in order to escape the grinding poverty in Mexico. Why else risk the multiple dangers of the journey northward, tolerate humiliating work conditions and low pay and chance arrest, incarceration and eventual deportation if not out of desperation? On the one hand, US policy encourages the integration of markets globally and the free movement of goods, but criminalizes those who attempt to move as freely as foreign capital. In short, much of the story of Mexican migrants in the US can be seen as a criminalization of poverty.

Read the rest at NACLA

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