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Organizers of the Boston janitors’ strike last fall thought they had a great slogan (“Justice for Janitors”) and compelling arguments, but they wondered whether a work force composed largely of immigrants would be willing to walk picket lines. And if the foreign-born workers did take a stand, would the INS come after those with dubious legal standing?
“We estimate that about half are undocumented,” says Jill Hurst, staff director of Local 254 of the Service Employees International Union. In the end, more than 2,000 cleaners walked off their jobs, winning higher wages and better benefits. And the INS left them alone.
But the janitors, backed by their union and legions of activist supporters, may be the exception. In recent months, Massachusetts has experienced what some consider a crackdown on the state’s immigrant population. One example: a series of high-profile raids this fall in which the INS rounded up dozens of Brazilians in Hyannis and East Boston for deportation.
The federal agency makes no apologies for enforcing immigration restrictions. “Basically, if someone is here illegally or is working here illegally, there are going to be consequences,” says Paula Grenier, spokeswoman for the Boston District Office of the INS.
status “takes forever.”
But putting the squeeze on undocumented workers could have serious consequences for the Massachusetts economy. In the 1990s, the Commonwealth experienced a surge of new immigrants (some 337,000, according to the US Census). Without them, the state would have lost population and some employers would have been unable to expand.
These immigrants came from all over the globe, and their official standing varies. Some are legally permitted to work in the US, while others are in the process of gaining proper credentials. “A lot of people working here have applied to be legal citizens, but the process takes forever,” says Fausto da Rocha, executive director of the Brazilian Immigrant Center in Allston. “In the meantime, they’re still considered undocumented.” Still others are here without a legal leg to stand on, but have gained employment using fake identification papers, even phony Social Security cards.
Legal or not, foreign-born workers are filling low-wage cleaning, health care, and tourism jobs, not to mention construction and manufacturing positions. That makes the prospect of an anti-immigrant sweep alarming to workers and employers alike.
John O’Brien, legislative liaison for the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce, worries that Cape restaurants and hotels will have a hard time filling jobs once coveted by college students but now worked by immigrants from Brazil, Ireland, and Eastern Europe if the INS tightens the screws on temporary-work visas. “More immigration restrictions, from a work force standpoint, would not be a good thing for us,” says O’Brien.
While Cape employers continue to import a sizable portion of their work force–in 2002, they petitioned the government for 4,700 job positions, up from 4,500 in 2001–new INS restrictions make the process of securing visas for their employees increasingly onerous and expensive. In the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, the INS began performing in-depth criminal record checks on potential employees. As Cape employers discovered this past summer, an approval process that once took one month was now taking three or four months, delaying the arrival of the region’s vital seasonal work force. The INS has also begun charging a “premium processing” fee of $1,000 per employee. Employers who don’t pay the fee can face even longer delays. O’Brien says that visa hang-ups have given rise to a new Cape industry: lawyers and advocates who help workers and employers sort through the tangled web of immigration policy.
The INS isn’t the only agency with its eye on the immigrant work force in Massachusetts. Last spring the Social Security Administration began contacting businesses across the country, requesting that they resolve apparent discrepancies between information provided to the agency and other government records. The “no-match” letters–more than 800,000 were sent in 2002–are intended to root out the use of forged documents. But they can be triggered by as little as a misspelled name or transposed digit in a Social Security number.
The agency maintains that the letters are simply part of an effort to improve record keeping, and that errors can be easily resolved. But for workers singled out in the letters, repercussions can be severe. Too often, says Hurst of SEIU, employer reaction is to fire first and ask questions later.
“We had one employer who got ‘no-match’ letters for 50 percent of her employees,” says Hurst. “She got rid of people as fast as she could replace them.” As part of the strike settlement, the union negotiated language with cleaning contractors that prohibits them from such pre-emptory firings.
Da Rocha estimates that some 15 percent of Boston’s Brazilian immigrant work force may have been let go in response to “no-match” letters. But that doesn’t mean they’re out of work, he notes. “What we see instead are cases of informal hiring, people working for cash,” says da Rocha. But even in that case, the state pays a price. “Informal hiring means that no taxes are paid,” he says. “That has an impact on the economy.”
It’s not only at the low end of the job ladder that immigrants fill vital jobs in Massachusetts. High-tech companies imported thousands of highly skilled immigrants under H1-B visas (temporary visas given to workers in “specialty occupations” who meet specific educational requirements) during the years of spectacular growth in the 1990s. So far, the slowdown in tech work has masked any difficulty in tapping immigrant sources of expert labor. “Demand has slowed down so much. There aren’t as many people coming in,” says Rodney Brown, managing editor of Mass High Tech. But the chilling effect of the immigration crackdown may ultimately extend to the high-skill end of the job scale as well, he says. It is “bound to have some kind of effect eventually,” says Brown, “especially when the tech market heats up again.”
According to a study by MassINC and economist Andrew Sum, of Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies, immigrants accounted for 82 percent of the net growth in the state’s labor force from the mid-1980s through the late 1990s. In other words, immigration largely fueled the Bay State’s most recent economic boom. So could a crackdown on immigrant labor further imperil an already tenuous Massachusetts economy?
Maybe. But that’s only part of the question, says state Sen. Jarrett Barrios. “If you’re going to make the argument that immigrant workers are necessary for economic growth, you also have to ask what strategic investments we are going to make in our immigrant communities,” says Barrios, a Cambridge Democrat. “The debate is about more than immigration restrictions. It’s about the right to seek a better life.”
Jennifer C. Berkshire is a freelance writer in Arlington.