In today’s Washington Post, Nick Miroff writes Immigrants’ Jobs Vanish With Housing Slowdown:
So [1999 Salvadoran immigrant] Guzman got a plane ticket. On Jan. 20, he is taking his family back to El Salvador, with plans to open an auto repair shop with the money he has saved. “There’s no work here anymore,” he said, having spent the past month unemployed. “And when there’s no work, it’s time for Latinos to go back to the countries where they came from.”
“The Hispanic population in Virginia has grown too much,” said Guzman, echoing the sentiments of those who support tough immigration policies, “and that’s closed off a lot of job opportunities.”
Demographers who track migration patterns and embassy staff members say it’s too soon to tell exactly how the housing construction decline has affected the region’s Hispanic population. But stories of departing workers abound. Some workers say they’re headed home; others, spurred by rumors of construction jobs, try their fortunes in the Carolinas, Georgia, New Orleans.
“It’s a little better here, but not much,” said Raul Amayas, 21, a Salvadoran immigrant reached by phone in Charlotte. Amayas left Manassas last month after losing his $400-a-week landscaping job. Now he’s making $300 a week as a busboy at a Mexican restaurant. “It’s hard here. Ugly,” Amayas said.
All this is really odd, because just yesterday in an editorial, the Washington Post suggested just the opposite:
Herndon’s Hispanic-free leadership is pushing its agenda despite deep divisions there over the immigration issue, despite a Hispanic community that accounts for a quarter to a third of the town’s population of 23,000, and despite the local economy’s evident demand for immigrant labor, legal and illegal. And to what end? Mr. DeBenedittis seems to think that if he turns the heat up sufficiently, the immigrants will simply disappear. More likely, they’ll just play cat-and-mouse with the police or move one town over.
Further, Mr. Miroff finds yet another person who disagrees with his employer’s opinion:
Tracking the departure of immigrants from the Washington area is difficult. “In terms of actual data, it’s too soon to say,” said Steven A. Camarota, research director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports limiting immigration. “If the economy turns down and we were to ratchet up enforcement, there would be a multiplier effect. But that isn’t likely to happen. The most likely scenario is movement into other sectors of the economy and greater geographic dispersion.”
It isn’t clear which part of his first scenario Mr. Camarota thinks is not likely to happen, but I suspect from the context that it is that same increased enforcement that just yesterday the Post insisted would do little to drive illegal immigrants away, given the “evident demand for immigrant labor”.
Again from Mr. Miroff’s article:
“A slowdown in the construction industry hits illegals much harder than the rest of the general population,” Camarota said.
Gustavo Torres, executive director of CASA of Maryland, said he’s concerned that tensions over immigration will spread and intensify if large numbers of idle construction workers are not quickly absorbed by other services and industries. “We’ve seen workers leaving for other states for jobs in construction or agriculture,” he said.
Torres argued for the need for job training programs to help workers make the transition into other sectors, saying he feared that “confrontation will accelerate further” if the slowdown worsens.
So the Central Americans come here illegally to take advantage of a job surplus, and when the surplus evaporates, or even, as we have seen previously, when more come than there ever were jobs for, it becomes the responsibility of the local taxpayers to provide welfare and training for these excess workers who aren’t even supposed to be here in the first place. And if this support isn’t provided, we need to prepare for “confrontation”. Given Mr. Torres’ history of confrontational tactics, it isn’t clear if this is as much a genuine concern as a threat. Would a frustrated illegal immigrant be more likely to hear Mr. Torres’ words as an appeal for calm, or a rallying call? And if the illegal immigrants leave the Washington area in droves, what happens to Mr. Torres’ line of work? Could he, at least in part, be concerned about his own future here?
“That’s one of the dangers of importing lots of workers,” said Ira Mehlmen, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which seeks to curb illegal immigration. “After their services are no longer required, you end up with them and with their families. “There isn’t much reason for them to return home when services and other benefits are available.”
And, I would add, there isn’t much reason for the “services and other benefits” if they all leave anyway.