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 Post subject: Re: Illegal Immigration and Restaurants
PostPosted: Tue Jun 26, 2012 3:59 pm 
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Location: Denver
Tim wrote:
gardnercook wrote:
Tim wrote:
Hi,

I find it ironic that two segments of food industry highers undocumented workers and have different experiences with immigration offficials.

    Ethnic restaurants hire or enslave (The local Mongolian BBQ did not pay their workers.) immigrants and seem to get raided frequently.

    The huge hog processing plant hires hundreds of workers and has no problems.

Tim


Then there is Major League Baseball, which has never had a problem getting legal status for any player they want to bring to the US,


Ilene,

The important difference is that Major League Baseball does obtain "legal status" for their immigrant players. Cargill does not!

Tim


I understand that Tim, it's just that they never seem to have a problem securing the proper legal status, while the hospitality, agriculture and landscaping industries face quotas that are filled the day the visa's become available and the the number of visa's available, for temporary workers is never enough to meet the need.

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 Post subject: Re: Illegal Immigration and Restaurants
PostPosted: Tue Jun 26, 2012 11:03 pm 
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Location: Portland, OR
Well, I can tell you, having worked as a farm labor organizer, there are three reasons farm corporations* employ temporary and illegal immigrants:

  1. They work cheaper
  2. Especially since you can cheat them on their paychecks
  3. And if they complain, Immigration will deport them for you

If farm corporations had to employ only US citizens, they would have to raise pay significantly and improve working conditions. Which is the last thing they want to do. Hence: braseros.

What makes the exploitation of the farm worker extra-gratuitous is that, unlike restaurants, for produce labor is less than 10% of the total cost. So if you doubled farmworker pay, the cost at the store would go up less than 10%.

(* I say "farm corporations" rather than "farmers" because the vast majority of farmland in the USA belongs to a tiny handful of multibilliondollar corporations. In my experience as a labor organizer, independant farmers paid their workers better than large corporations like Del Monte did).

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 Post subject: Re: Illegal Immigration and Restaurants
PostPosted: Wed Jun 27, 2012 12:53 am 
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Location: Cordillera, Luzon, Philippines
Darcie, I agree with you about the vast difference between immigration when my English and Irish forebearers came over to the North American continent and today. No vast swaths of land to be offered up these days. And that is the gist of the problem. People have to deal with the circumstances they find. Just as our great grandparents took advantage of opportunities available to them but faced challenges we do not. If we need workers, which we obviously do, then the rule of law should reflect the necessity. Haphazard enforcement, special entitlements, and simply ignoring it are not, to me, the sort of application that warrants respect. I want to encourage foreign workers to come and work legally, not shut them out or make the process something out of Kafka novel. It is a complex problem that deserves a thoughtful and balanced solution this is both protects and encourages workers and employers to do it the right way.

My time here in the Philippines with its strong OFW culture has been something of an eye opener for me. Along with seeing first hand what people will do to have a chance at a future within my own family and the sort of things they have had to deal with has me holding a fairly liberal viewpoint these days, but one that rewards people for honest efforts and not for "working" a poorly designed and implemented system.

The child labor laws may, and I am not a legal expert, allow children to work, something I have doubts about but will bow to your superior knowledge. However, there were no children delivering papers in Portland Oregon or its suburbs when I lived there for decades. And the strawberry farms no longer hired children to help pick their crop. I heard many folks reminisce about that and were unhappy they could not send their kids to do that same seasonal work in the fields. And I remember at least one strawberry farmer stating it was child labor laws that kept him from hiring kids. Now that may have been Oregon State laws, but I doubt it or it may have been the cost of insuring child workers that really whacked him. I don't know, but I do know no kids except maybe the farmer's were in the fields picking strawberries.

Kids may be able to cut lawns but before I left I didn't see them. I saw adults doing "lawn care" driving pickups with trailers doing that sort of thing. I can't remember one teenager in my neighborhood coming by to see if I wanted my lawn mown in the 20 years I had my house there. But I was cutting lawns at the age of 11 back in Iowa.

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 Post subject: Re: Illegal Immigration and Restaurants
PostPosted: Wed Jun 27, 2012 7:18 am 
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Steve, kids here CAN do those things as far as I know, but you are right, few actually DO. In the few states where I've lived, child labor laws were usually like this: no work under age 14 (unless a family business), ages 14-16 permit required & restricted hours and job types, after age 16 maybe restricted hours but not much. I have no idea what Oregon's laws were.

I know that there are agricultural jobs here for kids, usually hiring the neighbor's kids to feed cattle, make hay, etc. There was a recent "to do" about a rider on a bill in the U.S. Congress that would have put limits on the types of equipment kids could operate and number of hours kids could work on farms but it died after intense lobbying by farm groups.

I think the things Fuzzy mentioned (more homework and activities), plus factors mentioned previously, contribute to fewer kids having jobs. I know several parents who don't want their kids to work "because the kids are too busy." I say have them give up an activity and let them gain a skill and work ethic, but no one wants parenting advice from a childless person ;)


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 Post subject: Re: Illegal Immigration and Restaurants
PostPosted: Fri Jun 29, 2012 7:08 pm 
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I've been busy with a family emergency this week, so this is my first chance to chime in.

Teenagers -- Whether they are lazy or overburdened, well, I tend to lean toward the latter. I guarantee that I heard about the alarming degree of sloth in my generation and I'm pretty sure that's likely of every other generation. ("In my day, we brought home the WHOLE mastadon. We didn't just pick and choose the tastiest bits like these lazy whippersnappers today!") Most restaurants just can't make meaningful use out of a labor force that can't work past 9 o'clock.

I think the root of the problem is our American "Land of Plenty" mindset that food should be cheap. I know that among most of the people I know (present company excepted) the highest praise you can give a restaurant is that there is relatively large amounts of food for small amounts of money. This leads to most of the current sins of the food industry -- slaves in the fields, pink slime in the meat, subsidized corn and soy beans in everything, and illegal immigrants in our restaurant kitchens.


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 Post subject: Re: Illegal Immigration and Restaurants
PostPosted: Sat Jun 30, 2012 1:31 am 
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Location: Chico, CA
I am immigrant (legal, but I could have just as easily not been), who had to work 20 to 30 hours a week through high school and college and full-time Child Protective Services Worker during grad school (40-50 hours a week). I had to get a work permit in high school (VA), but no one checked how many hours I worked and by age 17 I was in charge of helping close up a large store and one of the last out the door even on weeknights. I also had to work all through college and take a minimum of 18 units, sometimes 21. It was not easy and I would have done even better in school if I had not worked.

So with my children, I did not want them to work and we were lucky we did not need them to do so. They were busy, both 3 sports per year, student body offices, and interest clubs. Their allowance was based on home chores. Summers however, they both did volunteer work when they were too young to work and then had jobs. My daughter in stores, Baskin Robbins, Pizza, and others. My son, managed to get computer jobs (e.g. setting up websites for a radio station and setting up bulletin boards, etc.) She had the hard end of the deal I think. Both wanted advanced degrees and worked minimally during school years in college, but full-time summers. Once in grad school, they both worked as part of their free tuition deal. DD (all but diss. from Berkeley) is now happily staying home with my 2 grandkids under 2.) DS gets paid to get his PH.D. in computer science at USC. He can't put off graduation much longer (loves working at night, playing beach volleyball in the day), so he will be done by the end of this year. Their job during school was to do well in school and they excelled at that. They have a good work ethic, believe in volunteering and appreciate of what they have.

One of my first jobs was as a social worker, and because I speak Spanish, I spent a fair amount of time working with migrant farm workers here. I found that they are like any group of people, most work hard, try to do right and pray they make enough to support their families. A few took advantage, but that happens in every group regardless of composition. Our agriculture here would not survive without them, imho.

I believe that if Cubans are any example, regardless of how you enter, if you are given an opportunity to belong and a path to citizenship such as Cubans were lucky to receive, they will become higher end taxpayers and contributors to society. 39% of the first generation born here from Cuban immigrant parents have a college education with an income of over $50,000 which is higher that the average for non immigrants. They were given the chance to succeed as were most immigrant groups before Cubans. The philosophy we have is we got help, let us help others. However, if feels as if others who received similar opportunities, albeit a longer time past, now say I have mine and don't want to share. Ranting finished now.

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Last edited by Cubangirl on Sat Jun 30, 2012 9:09 am, edited 1 time in total.

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 Post subject: Re: Illegal Immigration and Restaurants
PostPosted: Sat Jun 30, 2012 8:06 am 
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Most people have stories about the immigrant parent/grandparent/selves who came here, worked hard, and succeeded. I wonder if part of that is the mind-set necessary to say, "Know what? Imma pack up and move thousands of miles away, learn a new language, and see if I can't better my life."

On the other hand, my great-great grandpa gave up and went back to France.

Oh, and re: athletes. It's easy to get a work visa when you can demonstrate a "special skill" -- such as hitting a major league baseball. That's why Sean Connery has no problems when he is shooting a film in L.A.


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