Let’s Make a Deal

Everybody knows the deal is rotten:

Old Black Joe’s still picking cotton

For your ribbons and bows.

Everybody knows.

--Leonard Cohen

As they do every day, the men came to Villa Street on Tuesday morning to stand and wait. There were a hundred of them, maybe more. They arranged themselves in clumps of half a dozen or so along the sidewalk, conversing quietly in Spanish. They wore the stoical but determined expression of fishermen. Cars would drive by and the men would straighten their shoulders and stare searchingly at the driver. For a pickup that looked like it could belong to a contractor, the men would all but preen.

What the men were waiting for, of course, was work. Work is why they come to this country. Work is why they come to Villa Street. They do not come for tuberculosis checkups or public schools. They come to work, and every Californian with at least one eye open must know this. They come to work.

What kind of work? “Anything,” said Daniel Mendez, who is 33 years old and the father of two children. “Handyman. Painting. Gardening. Digging. Fences. Roofs. Drywall. We do any kind of work.”

Work.

*

Mendez crossed the border when he was a teen-ager. The Proposition 187 posse need not wake the hounds. He became a legal resident during the last amnesty program. He said many of the men who stood with him on Villa Street this morning were the same. People only assumed they were illegal--because of their skin color and accents. One problem with Proposition 187 is that it would institutionalize these mistaken assumptions, transferring the burden of proof of legal status to people like Mendez. This is why four out of five Latinos oppose the measure. Who wants to walk through life a perpetual suspect?

Are you worried about Proposition 187? Mendez was asked. He waved a finger high over his head and smiled.

“Politics,” he said. “What I am worried about is work.”

Mendez understands the deal. His part of the bargain is to keep quiet and work. On a good day, he might make $60. It is more than he could earn in Mexico and enough to feed his family. To those who employ undocumented workers, the deal means money and convenience. A dollar not spent on wages is a dollar kept in the wallet. And an employee with uncertain legal footing is an employee who won’t make trouble. The INS is but a phone call away, as everybody in the deal knows.

Employers, of course, are not the only ones who profit from the awkward mechanism that attracts immigrants, both legal and illegal, to the sweatier frontiers of the California economy. We all do. Just one example: Visit any supermarket when California produce is in season. Great fruit. Greater bargains. The prices do not reflect the beneficence of anyone named Ralph or Von. They are a byproduct of the wages paid to farm workers. Part of the deal.

*

For purposes of politics, Pete Wilson now pretends he’s onto something new and horrible with illegal immigration. They keep coming, he complains. Well, of course. This is a deal with a long history, written in part by Wilson himself. As a U.S. senator, he worked to make sure that field hands kept coming north and that the INS kept its nose out of the businesses of his friends. He knew back then what he chooses to forget now--the deal.

Border Patrol agents always have known it. And it’s been a morale-buster. The deal has made them Vietnam soldiers in miniature--sent off to fight a war no one back home is committed to winning. This has been their implicit marching orders: Close the border a little, but never close it all the way; create an appearance of control, but not enough to discourage all the workers.

In a fundamental way, the deal, as the poet suggests, is a rotten one. People like Daniel Mendez sacrifice a measure of their humanity when they come north. They enlist in an underclass, unable to retrieve wages deducted for Social Security payments they’ll never receive, unqualified for most societal perks, uncertain even whether they can risk calling a cop when trouble comes. Powerless.

In this sense, what Proposition 187 does is take a rotten deal and make it a little more rotten. It is intended to cut off the medical care of these workers and to chase their children out of school. What it won’t do is change the basic deal. Not one bit. Next Wednesday after Election Day, the men will be back on Villa Street, waiting for work and willing to accept the low pay employers love. Wilson insists the issue with Proposition 187 is fairness. Although his reasoning is wrong, he also has never been more right.