A NEW ORDER
Imagining Life Without Illegal Immigrants
By DEAN E. MURPHY New York Times Week in Review
SAN FRANCISCO — Imagine America without illegal immigrants, the people who flip the burgers, clean the toilets, watch the kids and send their children to public schools.
Would the grass be greener?
The question got an answer of sorts last month in California, where about a third of the country's estimated 8 million to 10 million illegal immigrants live. Thousands of Latinos stayed home from school and work one Friday, protesting the repeal of a contentious new law that would have allowed illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses.
The boycott was not nearly the success its organizers had hoped for. Nonetheless, there were reports of fast-food counters closing and lawns going uncut. A few shops in cities with big immigrant populations, like Fresno, did not bother opening, and in Los Angeles, the second-largest school district in the country, the absentee rate nearly tripled from the Friday before.
President Bush reopened the national debate about immigration last week with his proposal to grant temporary visas to undocumented workers. As with those who supported the repeal of the driver's license law in California, the Bush initiative left many Americans wondering why elected officials would change the rules for people who live in this country only by breaking them.
"I think it is hard to imagine a worse immigration reform proposal right now," said George J. Borjas, a professor of economics and social policy at Harvard who has written extensively about the drawbacks of illegal immigration. "The one good thing you could say about it is, it takes seriously the fact that the United States is not going to deport 10 million people. We have to do something about these people."
Most everyone would agree that mass deportation is unlikely. But imagining such a chain of events is one way of understanding the economic backdrop to Mr. Bush's initiative.
The Pew Hispanic Center estimated in 2001 that the unauthorized labor force in the United States totaled 5.3 million workers, including 700,000 restaurant workers, 250,000 household employees and 620,000 construction workers. In addition, about 1.2 million of the 2.5 million wage-earning farm workers live here illegally, according to a study by Philip L. Martin, a professor at the University of California at Davis who studies immigration and farm labor.
That is a whole lot of cheap labor.
Without it, fruit and vegetables would rot in fields. Toddlers in Manhattan would be without nannies. Towels at hotels in states like Florida, Texas and California would go unlaundered. Commuters at airports from Miami to Newark would be stranded as taxi cabs sat driverless. Home improvement projects across the Sun Belt would grind to a halt. And bedpans and lunch trays at nursing homes in Chicago, New York, Houston and Los Angeles would go uncollected.
"There would be a ripple effect across the economy," said Harry P. Pachon, president of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern California, a Latino research group.
But while the disruption would be real, Professor Borjas argues, it would not be long lasting. As proof, he says, look no further than places like Iowa, where foreign-born residents are relatively rare, but there are people working in hotels, fast-food restaurants and all the rest.
Most illegal immigrants, in fact, are concentrated in a handful of states - California, Texas, New York, Illinois and Florida - leaving many parts of the United States relatively untouched by the influx.
Estimates by the Immigration and Naturalization Service based on the 2000 census show that 15 states accounted for all but 13 percent of illegal immigrants.
If there were no undocumented workers to tend to the gardening, Californians who wanted a nice lawn would pay more for it, eventually drawing low-skilled workers from other parts of the country, Professor Borjas said, adding that American workers would be the better for it.
"The workers would be slightly wealthier and the employers would be slightly poorer, but everything would get done," said Professor Borjas, who used to live in California. "I moved to Boston and the lawn is still green."
Laura Hill, a research fellow at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, said there would be a spike in prices for lettuce, spinach and strawberries, which are typically picked by undocumented workers. But farmers and agricultural companies would eventually find cheaper ways to harvest the crops. "Who knows, but maybe it would turn into new technology being developed," Ms. Hill said.
If not, Americans would look elsewhere, including other countries, for cheaper substitutes.
"The nice thing about importing a good is that once you don't like it, you can dispose of it," Professor Borjas said. "Immigration isn't like that."
Some immigration experts also suggest that American taxpayers would be better off financially if the country's unauthorized residents returned home.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington group that favors greater restrictions on immigration, argues that if Americans "eased our addiction to this illegal labor," there would be less stress on the country's social welfare system, ranging from fewer children in crowded urban schools to fewer welfare checks for the American-born families of illegal immigrants.
"Immigrants over all use at least one major welfare program at a rate 50 percent higher than natives," Mr. Krikorian said, referring to an analysis of 2001 data by his center that found Medicaid use particularly high among immigrants. "That is not because they are morally defective. It is because they are poor and don't have any education and they end up inevitably stumbling and having needs for the system."
But immigrant advocacy groups dispute the notion that illegal immigration is a drag on America. Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights organization, said the economic impact of immigration plays out differently at the local and national levels.
While hospitals and clinics in Los Angeles County, for example, bear huge health care costs associated with uninsured illegal immigrants - one study put the total at $340 million in 2002 - the federal government enjoys a "bonanza" from many of the same immigrants who pay federal taxes but receive no benefits in return, Mr. Yzaguirre said.
Mr. Yzaguirre suggested that Social Security would go broke without the payments of undocumented workers, many of whom, contrary to popular perception, do have regular payroll taxes deducted from their paychecks by employers. (In some instances, undocumented workers use false Social Security numbers, while others have valid numbers from when they had worked legally.)
Mr. Yzaguirre also rejected suggestions that Americans would maintain their standard of living without the low-wage contributions of those workers. He agreed with Professor Borjas that some Americans would enjoy fatter paychecks, but he said all Americans would be punished by having to pay more for everything from a McDonald's hamburger to a new house.
In a 2002 study conducted with the cooperation of immigrant rights organizations, researchers at the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago concluded that the 300,000 or so illegal immigrants in Chicago did not use government benefits at a substantial rate. The study also estimated that 70 percent of the undocumented workers paid payroll taxes, like Social Security and unemployment insurance. The researchers calculated other economic benefits, finding that consumer spending by illegal migrants generated more than 31,000 jobs and contributed $5.34 billion annually to the gross regional product in Chicago.
Which side to believe? The problem with gathering data about illegal immigrants, and the idea of an America without them, is that they tend to blend into the vast tapestry of legal immigrants.
Someone living and working in the United States with a valid visa one year can become illegal the next by overstaying the visa. A single household can have legal and illegal residents, sometimes brothers and sisters. In that sense, the Bush proposal to blur the distinction further between illegal and legal workers includes "some degree of honesty," said Patricia Nelson Limerick, chairwoman of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado.
"The hope is that it would lead to some recognition that you don't solve problems of illegal immigration by shutting down the border," she said, "but reckoning with the problems in the home country."
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