Attrition works
A common argument against enforcement of immigration laws is that it is impossible or at least hopelessly impractical to deport all 12-20 million illegal aliens. The retort is that it isn’t necessary to deport them all, most of them will leave on their own volition if enforcement is stepped up. There are reasons to believe that enforcement is in fact reducing the size of the population of illegal aliens from Brazil in Massachusetts, partly by sharply reducing the inflow and partly by inducing illegals to leave. The effect is the one might have expected: Better prospects for low-end workers. Liz Mineo writes in the MetroWest Daily:
The flier flatly announced job openings for housekeepers at the Sheraton Framingham Hotel requesting “good disposition, some cleaning experience, team work spirit, and attention to details.” In exchange, it offered “competitive salaries, a friendly work environment and a benefits package.”
…
Calls to the Sheraton Framingham were not returned. The flier invites those interested to apply in person or call a number that now appears to be a fax line. The hotel’s Web site said there are no job openings.
I guess that’s how companies decide that the jobs they offer are of the kind Americans won’t do, as the saying goes. Mineo continues:
Though the flier drop may indicate the difficulties businesses in the area face recruiting workers - as reports of Brazilians going back home continue - it could show that fewer and fewer Brazilians are coming in.
I can see at least five reasons for why that would be: The weakening dollar has reduced the attractiveness of a low-wage job in America. Last summer I talked to a Brazilian-American importer at eBay Live in Boston who had to contend with a soaring real. Just as the real’s rise decreased his profits it also takes a bite out of the value of money sent back to Brazil from America. A second economic reason is the commodity boom across the world that has pushed up prices for agricultural products and raw material, two industries that are very important to Brazil’s economy. Brazil easily has the most advanced economy in Latin America and is able to enjoy relatively broad-based benefits of increasing commodity prices (correspondingly, Brazilians can fairly be described as the cream of the crop of illegal aliens in the United States, partly because they are more or less from the cream of the crop of Brazil’s population).
Three important things have happened on the enforcement side: Mexico started demanding Brazilian’s to get visas in order to enter the country. At about the same time America ditched the so-called Other Than Mexican catch-and-release policy, which in short meant that non-Mexicans who were caught trying to sneak across the border were released rather than detained while awaiting deportation. Finally, tougher interior enforcement have made many employers unwilling to hire workers who don’t have proper documentation.
The result appears to be that employers are having a harder time finding low-wage workers in parts of Massachusetts.
Writes Mineo:
A landscaping company based on the South Shore contacted Basilio’s center to look for Brazilian workers, but didn’t have much luck. It offered $8 an hour and required a green card.
“With a green card, people are not willing to work for $8 an hour,” said Erika Abreu, who works at the center that is sponsored by St. Tarcisius Church.
$8 an hour is the minimum wage in Massachusetts. It is in my opinion a good thing that companies that offer minimum wage rates have a hard time finding workers. It would be, in my opinion, a bad thing if such companies were able to simply bring in essentially whatever number of foreign workers they desired, as the McCain-Kennedy bill proposed last year.
A couple of years ago Mineo wrote an outstanding series of articles about illegal migration from Brazil to New England. She has, in my opinion, displaced The Boston Globe’s Yvonne Abraham as the leading immigration reporter in the state (perhaps one should say chronicler since Abraham is no longer a reporter but a columnist).
