The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (15 page)

Nowhere is the attempt to wall off the poor as having, somehow, separate narratives from the rest of us more overt than in the roiling politics around illegal immigration. Many observers have noted that starving public institutions of cash is a pastime that state electorates sign off on during times in which populaces are in flux. Smaller, more homogenous populations rarely vote to defund social safety nets and educational infrastructure that they see as benefiting mainly people culturally, linguistically, and racially more like themselves. When, by contrast, public goods are seen mainly as benefiting “others,” people who are blacker and browner, who don’t speak English well, and who have a different set of cultural references, then support for the public sector wobbles.

That’s a theme well developed by the California journalist Peter Schrag in books such as
California: America’s High-Stakes Experiment
. Schrag describes something akin to a breakdown in collective empathy, and a growing sense, based more on illusion than reality, that the taxes paid by one group are going to fund the benefits received by others. No accident, this analysis goes, that social democratic systems emerged in historically homogenous countries such as Sweden; no accident, either, that as those countries have absorbed
more immigrants in recent years, more “others,” so support for the comprehensive welfare state has shown signs of stress. It’s an issue that Harvard University’s Richard Parker also deems to be critically important. Large pools of undocumented immigrants and transient workers, he says, make it that much harder to generate mass support for institutions seen as somehow illegitimately rewarding these families for their illegal entry into, or stay within the borders of, America. And as with southern Louisiana parishes and the racism of some of their residents, oftentimes the most extreme politics on immigration comes from people who live in close proximity to, and experience the daily presence of, undocumented populations.

FIGHTING TALK

In a televised debate in 2010, Arizona state senator Russell Pearce, author of the nation’s toughest anti–illegal immigration law, argued that the Constitution “does give the federal government the responsibility to protect the states from invasion. But it’s right also in the Constitution, it says, when there is an invasion the states have a right, even—even to declare war if you will, you know, they have a right to protect. And again, we’re sovereign states, I mean, just like everybody here. We’re not citizens of the United States. We use that term, well, we’re actually citizens of one of the several sovereign states.”
²²
Pearce, who strongly felt that Arizona was, indeed, suffering an invasion, believed that there ought to be a moratorium on all forms of immigration into the country, be it legal or illegal; that the right to citizenship for those born in the United States should be modified to exclude children of illegal aliens; and that such children should be barred from all state benefits—including access to education and healthcare. His bill gave police in Arizona the power to demand residency papers of anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally—a vague criteria that, not surprisingly, immediately ran into a barrage of litigation—and was specifically crafted to scare large numbers of immigrants into moving away from Arizona. It was a clumsy law, unsubtle in its requirements,
and likely to lead to almost as many problems, almost as many run-ins with law enforcement, for “legitimate” immigrants as for their undocumented neighbors. But for Pearce, a onetime sheriff’s deputy in Maricopa County, it was a call to arms. “I will not back off until we solve the problem of this illegal invasion,” Pearce averred during a National Public Radio interview in 2008. “Invaders, that’s what they are. Invaders on the American sovereignty and it can’t be tolerated.”

For Fox News pundit Glenn Beck, “If there’s a reason to suspect that you’re in the country illegally, why wouldn’t I ask? Citizenship is valuable; the Statue of Liberty says I hold my torch before a golden door. You don’t put a golden door on an outhouse. You put it on someplace special. Citizenship is something to be cherished. We’re not citizens of the world; we’re citizens of the United States. At least right now, we still are.”
²³

Life, though, is rarely as black-and-white as men like Russell Pearce and Glenn Beck make it out to be. Like it or not, the reality is that many millions of undocumented migrants consider America to be their home; that no deportation program could possibly deport so many people; and that unless their children are schooled and provided healthcare and other vital assistance, the effects will be felt throughout society over the decades to come. Any meaningful anti-poverty movement will, therefore, have to first convince a majority of Americans that the undocumented ought to be worthy of help; and, second, ensure that immigration reform—through moves such as the DREAM Act—is a core part of its strategy. For whatever one’s theoretical take on immigration—whether one favors a route to legalization, or an emphasis on border control and the deportation of the undocumented; whether one believes that the initial act of illegal entry into the United States renders all subsequent actions moot, or whether one judges the undocumented by how they act and live once in the country—in reality many millions of undocumented residents will likely continue to live in America for the foreseeable future. And thus, for the foreseeable future, any discussion of American poverty is going to, in part at least, overlap with discussions on immigration.

Talking about the events that led to her arrival in the United States as one of the millions of undocumented immigrants fleeing violence and economic devastation south of the border in the 1990s and 2000s, Maria explained, “I came because my daughter died,” speaking in Spanish, via a translator, in a community center in downtown Albuquerque. “My youngest daughter and myself were threatened with our lives.” In Albuquerque, Maria eventually found work caring for an elderly person as a live-in help. She and her teenage daughter Yasmin found themselves on call pretty much around the clock.

I worked to have a place to live and for food. The church, the family I worked for, gave me clothing, articles I needed. Sometimes the service providers who came to the person’s home, the nurses, would bring gift certificates, things they bought at Walmart. I don’t speak English, have education. I don’t have a grand thing that I can say is mine. I don’t have a house. I don’t have a bank account. I don’t have any money saved. There’s not enough. I’ll keep working while I can. My life scares me. I look at the people I work for and think about how I have seen some people treat them. I worry, because what will happen to me when I’m old? I want to study; I want to be a nurse. That’s my biggest dream.

Dotted through the West and Southwest, illegal immigration encampments have been built up in recent years. Cumulatively, many hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children now live in these communities. The buildings are basic: third-hand trailers; wooden, cardboard, and tin shacks. The amenities are improvised: some are hooked up to the power grid, water delivery systems, and sewage lines after the fact—a de facto acknowledgment by local counties of their existence, even absent zoning permits and ownership titles. Others are more haphazard; pirated electricity, water trucked in from miles away, septic tanks in place of sewage pipes, kerosene stoves in place of gas pipes. They are desolate places, overcrowded and underserviced, as rife with sickness and despair as the
tenement slums of New York photographed by Jacob Riis more than a century ago.

Living in abject poverty, America’s undocumented are peculiarly susceptible to disease, to criminal victimization, to workplace exploitation, to living in shanties and colonias. And ultimately, none of the problems that percolate in these environments long remain sealed off within the world of the undocumented. Crime, disease, economic dislocation—all eventually percolate out from their epicenters. When sociologist Katherine Newman, a widely published author on poverty in America, and dean of the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, analyzed data about states with the highest tax burdens on poor families, she found that not only did these states also have higher poverty rates, but most of them had higher crime rates as well as a larger percentage of their population incarcerated. Higher crime rates affect not only poor neighborhoods but entire regions; higher incarceration rates—even if, as many conservative analysts have concluded, disproportionately accounted for by the numbers of undocumented immigrants who end up behind bars—have to be paid for by all taxpayers. And, as anyone who has studied incarceration can tell you, locking people up doesn’t come cheap. In fact, in most states, it costs about as much money to keep someone in prison for one year as it would cost to send that person to an Ivy League university.

For broad public health and safety reasons, as well as simple budgetary math, any twenty-first-century movement to tackle poverty will have to propose solutions not only to the ingrained hardship of the Lower Ninth Wards of America, but also to the problems of the undocumented. In the same way as those in New Orleans marginalized by the wider society present a set of specific challenges to those interested in tackling poverty in America, so too the undocumented need to be unmarginalized. That is not just a matter of altruism; rather, because of the financial impacts of problems that originate in impoverished communities, it is a matter of profound self-interest for the wider population. The undocumented must be
integrated as much as possible into the broader economy, while at the same time the country works out ways to regain control over its borders, so as to prevent a reemergence down the line of the entrenched poverty of today’s undocumented populations.

Such is the political balancing act around immigration that a modern-day war on poverty must engage in. It isn’t easy, but it
is
vital.

“We have thousands of people crossing into the United States to look for agricultural work in this region. It’s something historic, not created from one day to the other,” said Sin Frontera’s Carlos Marentes in El Paso, Texas, as he walked along the lonely, early morning, detritus-strewn streets lining the U.S.-Mexican border.

On a day here, we have hundreds of workers coming to this area next to the international border looking for work, and labor agents coming looking for workers. By one or two in the morning, you have many workers looking for work and many employers looking for the most productive workers. In general, the wages of farm workers in the United States are bad. Here, in particular, they are
really
bad. A farm worker who wakes up at midnight and sets off for the fields at one or two in the morning, and returns to El Paso at four or five or six
P.M
. It’s so many hours, and they bring in from the fields $20 or $30. They get paid on a piece-rate basis.

Most of the farm worker families lack a permanent place to live. The farm workers’ center is a place where farm workers can spend the night; during the summer we have whole families using the center as a shelter. They don’t have access to health. Their children don’t have access to education. Most of the farm workers quit school at a very early age, to work in the fields and add to the income of the households. In March of this year, we did a survey, where we were developing a plan for our kitchen—because we cook every day for the farm workers when they are coming back from the fields. We did a survey of three hundred farm workers; the first question was, “How many days of the week do you not have food
in your home?” The majority answered that during the winter they are having problems to feed their families. When we asked, “How many times a day do you have something to eat?” the answer was once a day.

The twenty-first-century farm workers in Southwestern border towns have much in common with immigrant sweatshop workers or meatpackers living in tenements in New York or Chicago a hundred years ago. In their hand-to-mouth existences, they live lives similar to those of sharecroppers in the post–Civil War South. In the anger hurled at them by men such as Russell Pearce are echoes of the rage and contempt directed against migrants from the 1930s Dust Bowl along the highways leading westward. Rage mixed with fear: fear of impoverished immigrants bidding down the wages of local workers; of diseases brought into communities by malnourished, nomadic migrants; and of crimes carried out by young, hungry desperadoes.

The faces of those living along society’s margins have changed over the decades, but the stories behind those faces remain fundamentally the same. The moral challenge posed in Jacob Riis’s documentation of tenements is similar to that captured by Dorothea Lange’s camera and to that articulated by Bobby Kennedy in describing hunger in the Mississippi Delta. And it is essentially the same as that detailed by Carlos Marentes in El Paso or Tom Costanza in New Orleans today.