Hypocrisy on the Hiring Front: an Eyewitness Worker’s Report : Immigration: If all the people complaining about ‘illegals’ would stop employing them, we wouldn’t need expensive and divisive laws and policies.

“I need to get me a bunch of Mexicans.” Just about every Californian has heard this crude euphemistic reference to the illegal, temporary hiring of undocumented male immigrants from any Latin American country, exploiting their willingness to work well below market value on difficult or dangerous labor-intensive jobs.

This growing practice by contractors, business owners, farmers and homeowners is creating two massive problems:

It is luring hundreds of thousands of young Latinos annually into mind-numbing, futureless lives of family separation, squalid living conditions, substance abuse and disproportionate exposure to criminal activity.

In turn, this illegal practice to cut employment costs has increased illegal immigration on which, ironically, we’re spending billions to stop.

My “database” for making this criticism lies in 20 years of working and sweating shoulder-to-shoulder with these men on construction jobs in California. I’ve eaten lunch with them, visited the “homes’ (flop houses) where most of them live and brought them to mine. I’ve been to the street corners from San Diego to San Francisco where they wait for potential employers to cruise by looking for exploitable, cheap labor. I’ve met their friends, relatives and (usually) out-of-wedlock children. I’ve helped them try to legalize their residency status; tutored them and agonized over their lack of literacy even in their native Spanish; tried to dissuade them from their frequent alcoholic benders and, through it all, heard the stories of their unfulfilled, dangerous and often depraved lives in these Estados Unidos.

Likewise, I’ve heard numerous businessmen and homeowners, who would otherwise consider themselves socially conscious, law-abiding citizens, brag about how much work they got done and how cheaply by their “bunch of Mexicans.”

I worked with my most recent “Mexicans” (they were all Guatemalans) a couple of weeks ago, and nothing has changed since I worked with my first “bunch” in the 1970s. These young men (they’re almost always young because even the healthiest men don’t last very long under the deadly combination of hazardous work, backbreaking hours and lethal living environment) were typical of my 20 years’ experience: All had crossed into this country illegally, some as recently as a few weeks before; none spoke English; of the group of eight, one had a car; none appeared to be literate; all of them smelled of alcohol before 10 a.m. and several had obvious untreated health problems. On this typical day, they had made a two-hour commute to the job site and worked their hearts out for more than 10 hours for $50 cash. My fellow workers and I, pursuing another part of the same construction project, were making several times that amount for much shorter hours.

In 20 years, I’ve seen only one thing change in this work situation--and it’s for the worse: The economic effect of this ever-growing tide of illegal workers has been to keep the purchasing power and adjusted wages for legal workers steadily declining. Each year, I have observed more and more employers willing to change over to illegals in order to compete more effectively against fellow businessmen who are doing the same thing.

There are laws against the hiring of illegal immigrants, but if they are being enforced (I don’t personally know of a single instance), then it’s being done on too small a scale to effect any real change.

There is an urgent need for the people of California to quit these shortsighted and selfish practices that are bringing our state to its knees while devouring the lives of our southern neighbors.

No one is benefiting from the hiring of illegal immigrants. Most of these young men are cut off from their homelands and have no realistic chance of anything but a transient’s day-to-day existence for as long as they stay in the United States. The wages they make provide just enough to encourage their continued self-enslavement and social isolation.

And for every dollar supposedly saved by hiring illegal workers, businesses lose several times that amount in increased taxes and unemployment payments to displaced workers (as I have been from time to time) and the deterioration of social services, public education and our overall quality of life in this once-great state.

California’s ultimate solution to its illegal immigration problem is not to be found in higher border fences, more Border Patrol agents or costly high-tech equipment. When California citizens--hopefully for moral reasons but at least for legal ones--collectively withdraw the employment incentive for illegal entrants, there will be no reason for 400,000 people a year to come to this country illegally--and so they won’t.