To understand landscape contractor Barbara Alvarez's position on illegal immigration, it helps to know she has an employee with his own chauffeur.
A key, longtime worker confessed a few months ago that his driver's license renewal had been rejected. In other words, he was in this country illegally.
Alvarez's solution: hire an $11-an-hour driver to take the worker to his lawns throughout the day. What else could she do? "My clients love him," the San Dimas, Calif., entrepreneur said.
Like much of the business community, Alvarez is solidly behind the immigration proposal that emerged from the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. It would offer the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants here a path toward citizenship while bringing in 400,000 guest workers annually.
These changes -- which are also endorsed by organized labor, most Democrats and some Republicans -- are described by supporters as benefiting just about everyone. The undocumented will no longer have to live in fear. Companies will get a more stable workforce. Society as a whole will be helped when the underground economy emerges into daylight. Tax revenue will rise.
Yet this prediction of good times all around rests on the most slender of assumptions, economists say.
It presumes that the flow of illegal immigrants will shrink from a torrent to a trickle, they say. It takes for granted that the government will have the resources to find the illegal workers who get through as well as the money and political will to enforce the laws that forbid their hiring.
Unless these things come to pass, economists say, the proposed legislation will increase the pool of legal workers while hardly denting the underground economy. Some employers will still choose to hire illegal workers at wages lower than those for new legal immigrants.
The result: an entrenched, two-tier labor system in which workers on the bottom rungs compete to drive wages down.
Los Angeles is believed to have the nation's largest underground economy, the result of its proximity to Mexico. Researchers at the Economic Roundtable used government data to calculate that the city has about 300,000 "informal" workers, two-thirds of whom are undocumented. That would make illegal immigrants 11% of L.A.'s workforce.
"A lot of restaurants only take cash now," reflecting the widespread employment of illegal immigrants who must be paid in cash, said Roundtable President Daniel Flaming. The same for auto-repair shops and beauty salons. Remodeling your house? There's one price for checks and one for cash.
