Immigrants Are Vital Part of Economy, Businesses Say

Hy Zornes hires illegal aliens to sew vinyl luggage in his Santa Ana plant. He says he has no choice. “I don’t see a lot of Anglo-Saxons rushing in,” Zornes said.

Paul Dreiseszun pays illegal aliens an average of $4.50 per hour to assemble electronics pieces that will eventually find their way into Air Force F-16 jets. “I couldn’t get the same amount of experience from anyone else for what I pay,” he said.

Nor can many residential builders. Carpenters’ Union official Baldwin Keenan estimates that undocumented workers make up 10% of the Orange County district’s 8,000 active union members and perhaps as much as 30% of the non-union hammer and nail trade. “In some crews,” he said, “half the workers are undocumented.”

As in other areas of the West and Southwest, Mexicans looking to flee the poverty of their homeland have become a vital part of Orange County’s labor force. These men and women do not fit the stereotype of illegal aliens of the past who migrated across the border to work in the fields each spring. Today’s undocumented workers increasingly hold full-time, year-round jobs in manufacturing and service industries that are the backbone of the county’s prosperity.

Over the last 15 years, Orange County’s expanding economy, low unemployment and growing need for cheap labor have combined to attract the nation’s fourth-largest permanent settlement of undocumented Mexican immigrants, behind only Los Angeles, New York and Chicago.

According to estimates from the U.S. Bureau of the Census and others, between 80,000 and 100,000 undocumented immigrants, or about 5% of Orange County’s population of 2 million, have become permanent residents. As many as 100,000 more illegal immigrants spend at least a portion of the year in the county, studies estimate.

At any one time, experts say, between 50,000 and 100,000 illegal aliens, or as much as 10% of the county’s civilian work force, are employed by Orange County companies.

As employees of subcontractors, they assemble Catalina swimsuits, Ocean Pacific shirts, defense systems components and parts for the IBM personal computer. They cook in fast-food restaurants and in the cafeterias of Fortune 500 companies. They work in hospitals. They clean up behind the millions of tourists and conventioneers visiting Orange County each year.

More Labor Needed

And although efforts are building to outlaw the hiring of illegal immigrants, several researchers predict that counties such as Orange will need still more low-wage immigrant labor to satisfy their booming economies.

Even Immigration and Naturalization Service agents acknowledge how much the county’s economy depends on these workers.

“In the normal course of any day the average person will buy something made by an illegal or be served in a restaurant by one,” said Al Bracamonte, an INS supervising agent and the agency’s top man in Orange County. “They are everywhere.”

And many native-born Americans are becoming increasingly angry.

The tensions are particularly evident among whites in the urban areas of central Orange County where the largest number of illegal aliens have congregated. Homeowners, particularly in Santa Ana and Costa Mesa, have complained to municipal officials about the life styles of their immigrant neighbors and the proliferation of sidewalk hiring halls in those cities.

In addition, Orange County is now home to Americans for Border Control, the nation’s first citizens’ group organized to lobby for tougher immigration laws. The Orange-based organization, which includes a handful of influential Southland business leaders as well as INS Regional Commissioner Harold Ezell, has joined the call for tighter controls along the Mexican border, stricter enforcement of existing immigration laws and, most important, penalties for companies who knowingly hire illegal aliens.

Threat to Businesses

Yet, such changes in the law, which have been stalled in Congress for years, pose a major threat to many businesses, particularly the low-wage manufacturing and personal service concerns that have come to rely on the ready source of cheap labor steadily streaming across the border.

“Our economy depends on this type of labor,” argues Lawrence Kimball, director of the UCLA Business Forecast. “It’s a much more stable part of our economy than most of us realize. They are part of ‘us.’ It’s not just a question of ‘them’ anymore.”

Indeed, studies have repeatedly shown that without illegal aliens, some businesses would face severe problems. When researchers from the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego asked 177 Southern California executives what they would do without undocumented workers, more than half responded that they would have to go out of business, transfer jobs overseas, raise prices or reduce profit margins.

At Ditronics Inc., a Santa Ana maker of electronics components for such big-name customers as Xerox Corp. and IBM, workers say that “almost all” of the nearly 65 Latinos on the company’s 80-member assembly line are illegal aliens. Nelson Lopez, the company’s co-founder and general manager, said he would be forced to close Ditronics if he lost his labor supply.

“We have tried several Americans, but they quit,” Lopez said. “These are jobs that American youth don’t want.”

And according to some studies, the trend isn’t likely to change.

These studies predict that economically vibrant regions--particularly affluent, service-demanding areas such as Orange County--will continue to need low-wage, entry-level labor. The demand will stem from needs to supply the county’s economic growth and to compensate for the declining birth rate of the “baby bust” generation, which will soon be entering the job market.

“High-income, high-life-style areas like Orange County produce a big need for service jobs. But these jobs are low paying and native residents can’t afford to live on those wages,” said Thomas Muller, a researcher and author considered among the nation’s foremost authorities on the economic impact of immigration. “So where do you go to fill the jobs? You get immigrants.”

Muller, who is affiliated with the Urban Institute in Washington, has predicted that Southern California employers will be unable to fill about 390,000 of the estimated 1.6 million new jobs created during the 1980s, most of them in the unskilled and semi-skilled occupations, the positions most often filled by illegal aliens.

Relied on Mexican Labor

Like much of the rest of the Southwest, Orange County has traditionally relied on immigrant Mexican labor to bolster its work force, particularly in its agricultural fields, where migrant farm workers steadily returned each year to pick citrus and strawberries.

However, experts say the profile of the typical immigrant worker has shifted over the last two decades, causing corresponding changes in immigrant employment and life styles.

In place of the seasonal, predominantly single and virtually all-male work force of the past, today’s pool of undocumented workers includes a substantial number of women and entire families willing to spend at least several years in the United States.

According to Jorge Bustamante, president of the Colegio de la Frontera Norte research institute in Tijuana and a leading Mexican authority on immigrant laborers, the length of stay of undocumented workers in California has nearly doubled in the last 17 years, from an average of less than six months in 1968 to about 11 months in 1985. In addition, his studies of border crossing trends show that the women among those making the trip increased from less than 1% in 1968 to 24% in 1985.

At the same time important changes have occurred on the job.

Bustamante said just 32% of the undocumented workers today take jobs in agriculture, compared with 86% in 1968. In the place of farm work, Bustamante’s survey shows that 15% of illegal aliens work in factories and another 50% or more have jobs in service companies, a category that runs the gamut from luxury hotels and restaurants to car washes, and includes virtually every part of the county’s thriving tourism business.

The service industry, which rivals manufacturing as Orange County’s most important sector of the economy, has also provided a substantial number of jobs for the increasing number of women crossing the border. At the Marriott Hotel in Anaheim, general manager Joel Rothman estimates that 20% of his 900 employees are Spanish-speaking. Most, he said, are housekeepers.

Because undocumented workers have become permanent fixtures on some payrolls, employers have started to offer some novel benefit programs to accommodate the habits and needs of this work force.

Subsidized English

For example, some companies offer subsidized English language lessons and lunch wagons catering to the Mexican tastes. At one factory, Good Friday is a companywide holiday because virtually all the company’s Mexican workers are practicing Catholics.

And one plant, which has been raided by the INS half a dozen times in the last five years, is now teaching its workers how to react when immigration authorities make what has become an annual inspection.

Ben Bukewihge, owner of B. P. John Furniture Co. in Irvine, said employees who run and hide give agents probable cause to detain them. So he’s trying to teach them to stand still when the authorities enter the factory and to give agents only their names. “We think we’ve trained them pretty well. But we’ll see what happens on the next raid,” said Bukewihge, who saw 194 of his workers hauled off in a June, 1985, raid.

Although the INS makes some well-publicized raids several times a year in Southern California, agency officials say they are becoming more infrequent. Instead, said Richard Hugg, the INS assistant regional commissioner for investigations, the agency is focusing its efforts at the border and on finding and deporting illegal aliens who are committing illegal acts in the United States--people such as smugglers, drug dealers and con artists.

According to INS statistics, more than 90% of the agency’s apprehensions occur along the Mexican border. Arrests in the interior stretches of Southern California totaled just 7,226 in the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30, 1985, compared to 427,772 arrests at the Tijuana border in the same period.

Chance of Capture

The underlying message in these statistics, the experts say, is that as illegal immigrants begin to put down roots in a community and take year-round jobs, their chances of capture by the INS declines.

Still, it takes a while for many illegal immigrants to find year-round work--or to even decide that they want to settle in the United States for any length of time.

Typically, newly arrived illegal immigrants are more apt to work in the fields or as casual laborers at construction and landscaping sites. Often these workers, many still in the clothes in which they crossed the border, congregate at one of about half a dozen sidewalk “hiring halls” in the county, waiting to be driven to construction and landscaping sites where they will work for $3 to $4 per hour at menial and sometimes backbreaking tasks.

Francisco Guttierez, 36, arrived from Michoacan in central Mexico in February with hopes of earning enough to care for the wife and four children he left behind. On most days he stands at the corner of First and Euclid streets in Santa Ana waiting for employers with odd jobs to drive by with an offer.

Although he planned initially to work only briefly in the United States, Guttierez, like many immigrants before him, is now thinking of prolonging his stay, finding a full-time job and continuing to wire money back home.

“Which is better?” he asks. “To be with your family and have them suffering, or to be away from your family and have them eating?”

Census and labor researchers estimate that about 75% of the so-called permanently residing adult illegal aliens eventually find year-round jobs. The vast majority will work for small, privately held companies, rather than with large, public corporations which often have precise employee regulations and stringent hiring practices.

Contract Workers

However, large corporations use illegal labor, too. Many have undocumented contract laborers, such as cafeteria workers, gardeners and janitors who are employed by a company that has been retained by the corporation. Still others farm out work, such as garment and electronic assembly, to small companies that hire illegal aliens.

Like the immigrants before them, some of the current group of illegal aliens are slowly climbing the economic ladder.

Consider Jerry L., a 25-year-old native of Guadalajara who did not want his full name to appear in print for fear of deportation.

Immediately after arriving in Anaheim 10 years ago with an older cousin, Jerry found a job in a small wood shop where he stained wooden steering wheels for yachts. His salary was $1.80 per hour at a time when the federally set minimum wage was $2.65.

Over the next six years, Jerry learned to speak English and acquired some skill working on manufacturing assembly lines. Four years ago he was hired at a Santa Ana sheet metal plant, where today he supervises a production line of 32 men for a salary of $10 per hour plus the standard assortment of health and other benefits.

“I think I’m doing all right,” Jerry said. “I want more and I can get it because I have a chance to go higher.”

Such predictions often unleash charges that illegal immigrants take jobs away from native-born Americans and other legal residents.

In one oft-quoted 1982 study, Rice University economics professor Donald L. Huddle estimates that for every 100 illegal aliens given work, at least 65 domestic workers are displaced from the labor force. According to his calculations, about 3.5 million domestic workers were denied entry to the labor force in 1982 as a result of illegal alien hirings.

Economic Drain

Huddle calculates that the displacing of domestic workers drained $30 billion from the American economy in the form of unpaid wages and tax payments and in welfare benefits given to the jobless.

Huddle’s conclusions have drawn substantial criticism. One of the most detailed attacks comes from Urban Institute consultant Muller, who contends that illegal aliens typically do not compete directly with native workers for the same jobs, taking instead the entry-level and lower-paying positions in virtually every industry. Muller also contends that because illegal aliens are available for the lower-paying jobs, they push domestic workers into better paying positions and create a need for supporting and supervisory jobs.

In his 1983 study of the Los Angeles County labor force, Muller estimates that without Mexican workers, 65,000 manufacturing jobs would have been permanently lost in the 1970s because employers could not afford to hire the native born. In addition, he calculates the loss of another 25,000 non-manufacturing jobs that rely on spending from manufacturing payrolls.

Although he conducted no separate survey in Orange County, Muller estimates that the loss of illegal aliens would have an even greater impact here because of the county’s low unemployment. The county’s 1985 jobless rate was 4.4%, a level considered almost “full employment” by some economists. The rate was the lowest for all of Southern California and one of the three lowest in the entire state.

Savings for Employers

The willingness of illegal immigrants to work for the minimum wage, or wages considered minimal by the native-born, can mean substantial savings for employers.

For example, an inexperienced dishwasher belonging to the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union in Orange County would start at $4.62 per hour, according to union official Dave Shultz. A union cook would start at $7.50 per hour. Illegals holding identical positions in one non-union Costa Mesa cafeteria earn the minimum wage of $3.35 as dishwashers and $4.50 per hour as cooks.

The fact that most illegal aliens are willing to work for low wages--and indeed consider the minimum wage a quantum leap from their earning potential in Mexico--fuels contentions that these laborers are open to exploitation of the type usually associated with the worst immigrant sweat shops of the late 1800s.

Tales of unscrupulous and unfair employers abound. Some workers are not paid the required time-and-a-half overtime rate when they work more than eight hours a day. Some are not given health and welfare benefits usually provided by employers. Still others are boldly cheated by employers who know the workers are unlikely to report the abuses to authorities.

In his study of undocumented workers in Southern California, a UC San Diego researcher found that the median wage for illegal aliens was $4.69 per hour, compared to $6.88 per hour for legal immigrants.

Health and welfare benefits vary. More than half the companies surveyed by the researcher reported providing health care insurance for all their workers. Less than one third said they offered pensions.

Bill H., who has about three dozen illegal immigrants on his manufacturing plant payroll, offers no benefits to his production workers, most of whom started at the minimum wage and now earn an average of $4.80 per hour.

“Sure I feel some guilt,” said Bill, who lives in Coto de Caza and drives a late-model Audi 5000. “But I deal with it by being a friend and giving them a good place to work.”

For many workers, what matters most is that they are earning more than they would if they had not crossed the border.

“I can earn $4 to $5 per day in Mexico,” reports one illegal who has worked as a janitor at a K-mart department store for the last seven years to support his wife and four children. “Here I make nearly $6 per hour.”

Times staff writer Bob Schwartz contributed to this story.