Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (7 page)

TWO

The Universe of the Illegal Alien

HOW DOES THE WORLD of illegal immigration look to the alien himself? Let us start by being candid. Nearly all the fruits and vegetables picked in the Southwest, supplying most of America with its fresh produce, are picked by Mexicans, most of them aliens, many of whom arrived in this country illegally, by stealth or by fraud. The nicest residential lawns in the Southwest are mowed by Mexicans, again mostly illegal aliens, but also green-card holders and naturalized citizens. In most restaurants in the southwestern United States the dishes are bussed and washed by Mexicans. In short, almost any physical labor that requires little skill or education but a great deal of physical strength and stamina and some courage, and that pays only a little over the minimum wage is now done by people born in Mexico - some with proper credentials, others without documentation and with dozens of false IDs.

Young men and women from Mexico now take on tasks that whites, Asians, African-Americans and second-generation Mexican-Americans apparently will not. This fact is denied repeatedly by almost all native-born Americans, who believe - even if they do not say so - that aliens are taking our good jobs. But rarely are unemployed whites, Asians, blacks, or second- or third-generation Mexican-Americans ever referred by the welfare department to pick in our nectarine orchard. Once a confused carload of poor whites showed up to pick grapes and left after a brief rendezvous with heat and dirt - baffled that anyone would be crazy enough to do such work. The last time I worked with white farm laborers -
 
other than my brothers - in the vineyards was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and they all had names like Delmas, Otis, Rhoda, Everette and Velma, the last vestiges of the
Oklahoma
migration of some three decades earlier. My wife's family all came to
California
from the Dust Bowl; none of her siblings or cousins has done any of the type of menial jobs that her grandparents and parents were routinely grateful to get.

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 one who has worked in orchards and vineyards side by side with farm workers for much of his life. One thing this alien knows in his heart: There is
a simple reason
why Americans do not do farm work, one that transcends even the absence of real money and any status. It is physically hard to pick peaches all day. The twelve-foot ladder is heavy and unstable, especially when you must clamber up among the top branches sixty or seventy times a day and then descend with fifty pounds of peaches strapped to your belly. Our knees, backs and shoulders are not designed for such work. Still, you tend to run rather than walk at work because at piece-rate labor, you can make $90 to $120 in a nine-hour shift - if the trees are of moderate size, the fruit to be stripped rather than color-picked, and the orchard relatively clean of noxious weeds.
That you are one ladder-fall away from the poverty that ensues from a slipped disk or inches from a moving tractor tire and a snapped leg are dangers to be ignored if you are to work well and profitably.
The dilemma of farm work was never that it was necessarily low-paid, but rather that it offered good wages on the condition that one was young, healthy and able to move on to something better before old age and infirmity set in.

It can easily reach 110 degrees in a peach orchard in the Central Valley of California. The effects of summer temperature are made worse by the tall grass, the lack of any breeze, and the humidity of the stifling grove. There are other occupational hazards - besides the minor irritants of peach fuzz, dehydration, a rare black widow spider, and foxtails and puncture vines in your socks and shoes. Sometimes the labor contractor can withhold your check without cause, or deduct 30 percent of it for Cokes, rides to work, and everything between.

The trabajador lives and works in a world of young men. They survive for the most part as small teams, under conditions of illegality, apart from their families, and are prone to settle disagreements with knives and worse. Cash - for drinks, a ride, lunch and laundry - is needed daily, even hourly. Most agricultural laborers carry their wages in fat wads in their front pocket. We should never forget that as a rule, illegal aliens come as single young males (50/05) - and in the history of civilization it is single, transient young men who build bridges and roads, but also bring societies their crime and violence.

For a day or two each month, aliens carry perhaps as much as $500 to $1,000 until they send half of it back to Mexico. An entire species of predatory criminals exists in
California
that simply cruises cheap apartment buildings, corner liquor stores and rural markets, always on the prowl for industrious Mexican laborers. Such marauders are playing a criminal lottery, hoping that the young Mixotec they jump or shoot on any particular evening might be carrying his entire month's pay - and not a revolver. A quick stickup can net over $1,000, will probably not be reported to the police, and usually does not draw an armed response. We hear on occasion of the demented white boy who goes into the desert to shoot his .22 at illegal aliens; but the real killers and predators are Mexican gangsters who steal, maim and rape with impunity their own more ambitious brethren from Mexico.

The Latmo death rate - both citizens and aliens - from homicide is three times higher than for non-Hispanic whites. It is daily fare in our local papers to read of bodies dumped in peach orchards, the putrid remains of corpses fished out of irrigation canals, or the body parts and bones of the long-dead uncovered by the cultivator. These are the remains of hundreds of young men from central Mexico who simply disappeared - shot or stabbed and then dumped by thieves and murderers. When I read of another corpse being found nearby, I wonder, "Who was he? What are his mothers and sisters in Mexico right now thinking of him? What does his village back home or his tenement in Tijuana conclude of this strange el Norte where so many fortune hunters such as this young man end up badly?" If my grandfather (born in 1890) used to tell me of his own father's stories of shootouts in precivilized Selma, I think I now could match every such savage incident with a contemporary account of far worse bloodletting, as our town returns to its frontier heritage after a mere century of law and tranquility.

If the body is in somewhat presentable condition, the inevitable appeal for donations is aired on local television and radio to send him back to his pueblo in Mexico. Children wave rags outside of shopping malls and gas stations to lure cars in for a $5 wash, in usually vain efforts to collect $3,000 to ship what is left of a young Mexican male back home. At the local quick-mart the cigar box has $1 and $5 bills piled inside, with handwritten notes appealing for cash. I note that there is rarely more than $30 at any one time.

Besides the stabbings, the drunk-driving arrests and the risk of driving at high speed on the interstate without more than a few days of automobile experience, there is, of course, the plague of alcohol. Latinos die from cirrhosis of the liver at a rate higher than any other ethnic group, and twice the rate of whites. The rates of gonorrhea, herpes, chlamydia and venereal warts are epidemic in the immigrant population of young adult males - and rarely discussed. HIV infection is also generally recorded at twice the percentage found in the native white population. Our social health industry - which daily publishes a myriad of details about farm workers' mental health problems, the pathologies of a newly acquired diet of fatty processed food, and the lack of good dental care - ignores the fact that hundreds of thousands of young Mexicans suffer from an array of venereal diseases. I have seen workers plagued for days by painful urination from recurring venereal infection, resistant to one-time and often improperly administered prescriptions of antibiotics.

Others only haphazardly take medication for tuberculosis, a disease that is thirteen times more likely to be found in Hispanics than in whites. Not long ago, Hernando, who used to come by to borrow money, peddle illegal fireworks and look for scrap iron, said his "little" cough was now "three years old," and swore the medicine was worse than the disease - and thus to be avoided at all costs. I apologized for not wanting to talk closely with him and holding my breath as he went on and on. Nineteenth-century ailments that are rare among citizens of rural
California
- adult whooping cough, hepatitis, even tetanus - are not so rare among illegal immigrants, who enter without the health checks normally demanded of immigrants a century ago. Thousands of young men id women are leaving some of the most treacherous and disease-ridden terrain on the planet to go north. A man's immune system does not shed viruses when he crosses the border. It takes some time - and a lot of tax dollars - for a worker plagued with intestinal parasites, occasional malaria and drug-resistant TB to reach a level of Americanized health where his greatest worry will be acne and allergies.