Putting a Stop to Slave Labor

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Somehow many of these laborers manage to save a share of their pitiful wages to send home. Justich reports that in 2003, Mexican workers in the United States sent home $13 billion in remittances. That's to Mexico alone, and that's triple the amount recorded in 1995. Talk about family values.

The nation's farm shacks, decrepit trailer parks, and urban tenements are packed with people who work long hours every day in illegal working conditions. In agriculture they toil in extreme weather handling toxic chemicals and dangerous heavy equipment.

In Fast Food Nation (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), author Eric Schlosser calls meatpacking 'the most dangerous job in the United States' with an injury rate three times higher than average factory jobs. No one officially complains because the workers desperately want to steer clear of the authorities. As a result, we have no trustworthy information about the undocumented labor force's health, living conditions, education, or beliefs. Even if someone managed to come up with a reliable way of collecting such data, the study's subjects would still be afraid of participating.

This sort of moral myopia is not a new phenomenon in U.S. culture. Yesterday, Native Americans and African slaves fell outside our narrow definition of humanity. Today, the undocumented worker does.

Politicians talk about building fences and sending soldiers to the border, yet they refuse to take the simplest steps to prevent the workers from being hired illegally. They also willfully disregard why immigrants are attracted to the United States in the first place (for the jobs) and why Americans don't want to admit it.

If we required good documents starting tomorrow, the nation would plunge into an instantaneous economic crisis. Millions of workers would suddenly be missing.
The only practical and ethical solution is to provide legal status to honest, hardworking immigrants. Then we would have to acknowledge how we treat them. We would have to admit that jobs that offer a fair wage and humane working conditions cost money -- and that cost would be passed on to consumers, who, for starters, might see an additional 10 percent added to their rent or mortgage payment and pay 15 percent more for groceries.

That's not a change the average consumer would welcome, of course. And it's not going to happen until American citizens are forced to confront the human cost of the system we have built. Then maybe we'll have the guts to change it.

I met Max Gonzales in the mountains of northern New Mexico more than 20 years ago. He lived up there in the Cruces Basin Wilderness seven months a year in a canvas tent. Most of the time, he had only his two horses, a border collie, and 1,500 sheep for company. Every two weeks or so, his supplies were carried in on horseback. When there were fresh batteries, he could listen to a Juarez radio station.

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