Undermining American workers

The perils of illegal immigration rattle around in the attic of public policy like a troubled spirit. We pretend not to hear the dragging chains because we don't know how to silence them, but the ghosts will endure, especially in California. Because the nation can't control its borders, the number of illegal immigrants grows by an estimated half-million each year. They come because we invite them with lax law enforcement and menial jobs. Their presence makes our own poor more destitute, creating a Third World chaos in the California economy that we are only beginning to understand.

Patricia Morena has no time for a philosophical discussion on unauthorized immigration. She lives with it, or tries to. She's a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, and a motel maid in Chula Vista, six miles north of the border. She's short and heavyset, and dresses with care in tasteful thrift shop. She earns $300 before taxes, when she's fortunate enough to have a five-day week. She's a single mom with three children, all stuffed into a ratty little one-bedroom apartment. The eldest, an 18-year-old boy, has taken to stealing; she thinks it's because he's always been poor.

Sitting in the pale yellow kitchen light, she looks resigned rather than angry. She has the fear of anyone who's 39, broke and tired: being replaced. If she didn't have to compete with unauthorized workers in the cheap motels that cluster just north of the border, she thinks, she could lift her wages from $7.50 per hour to maybe $10 and bargain for some health insurance.

But she won't ask for a raise. "If I ask for money, the bosses say, 'I can get a young girl who is faster and cheaper,' " she says. "The bosses have power over illegals. They know they're afraid and not going to ask for overtime, even though I know the law says they should get it." So Morena remains mired, one of 32.9 million people the U.S. Census Bureau says lived in poverty in 2001.

The 1996 welfare reform act was pitched as a means for poor people to elevate themselves through work. President Clinton said at the time that the act was "to give them a chance to share in the prosperity and the promise that most of our people are enjoying today."

Well, seven years later, Morena is still poor. Although she never studied economics, she has learned a fundamental economic truth: The only leverage unskilled workers have is scarcity of labor. Morena can't work her way up the economic ladder because the bottom rungs have been broken off by the weight of millions of new illegal workers. The census bureau says the number of illegal immigrants in the country doubled in the 1990s, from 3.5 million to 7 million, the largest such increase in the nation's history.