Hard Landing
By Frank Clancy
Photo by Jonathan Barkat
(page 6 of 6)
Though insurance did not pay for Juan Antonio’s burial expenses, Carolina Installers paid for his casket and embalming in the United States, Larry Hicks told me, at a cost of nearly $8,000. A spokesman for the insurance company declined to comment. After I returned from Mexico and made inquiries, however, the company contacted Mariana and made a settlement offer.What happened at the Supervalu facility, Larry Hicks claimed, was “strictly, 100 percent an accident. It was just human error, period.” But the shelves’ collapse was essentially proof of a serious error, since OSHA rules require them to be kept stable throughout the construction process. OSHA also cited the company for failing to adequately train workers. The agency’s report, however, says nothing about what caused the collapse, other than the removal of the safety straps.
Meanwhile, Latinos and especially Mexicans are, as an Associated Press series put it, “dying to work” in the United States. Minnesota’s rough numbers—a death rate for Hispanic workers double the non-Hispanic rate—might be a statistical aberration, but the national figures (4.9 deaths per 100,000 workers for Hispanics, compared with 4.1 deaths per 100,000 workers for the general population) are harder to dismiss.
Lole and Juan Antonio were young and eager to please, poorly educated, working in a country where they did not speak the language. They were unaccustomed to the risks they faced here, to American manners and mores, to our expectations and our ways of expressing them. People who work long hours, no matter how willingly, tend to be accident-prone. Legal-immigration policies—like President Bush’s guest-worker program—might help give immigrant workers more of a voice, or at least make it easier to regulate their working conditions.
As the debate goes on, the Mexican government escapes scrutiny, at least in the United States. In Mexico, though, jobs and immigration are huge, pressing issues.
Larry Hicks says his business would shrink dramatically without immigrant labor. But his statement takes for granted the social and economic conditions under which he competes for business. Those conditions include an increasingly complex pattern of subcontracting to subcontractors who hire more subcontractors. As each company takes its profit, less remains for those who do the actual work. And as the economy is divided ever more finely, labor becomes more specialized, resulting in a rootless, mobile, perpetually off-balance workforce that many native-born Americans are reluctant to join. Dividing and subdividing our economy in this manner might be good for business (it might also be efficient), but it makes immigrant labor—hungry, even desperate labor—a necessity.
Supervalu and Kraus-Anderson didn’t ask how much Hicks was going to pay workers, whether those workers lived in Minnesota, or if they had legal permission to work here. (Neither Lole nor the Rangels did.) Meanwhile, competition drives prices relentlessly down, and wages with them. The work done by the Carolina Installers crew was no more difficult than, say, the assembly work done at the Ford plant in St. Paul. When employees work in the city where they live, for 40 hours a week and a living wage, businesses don’t have such a difficult time finding employees.
Not long ago, farm workers were, for all intents and purposes, the only migrant laborers in the United States—the terms were all but synonymous. Today’s immigrants are doing all kinds of work in all kinds of places, at the mercy of an economy that is as unpredictable as it is dynamic, in a labor market in which the owners and managers call most, if not all, the shots.
Consider the toll immigration has taken on the one isolated hill where Mariana Mosqueda Barrón lives: an absent father, one brother lost and a second trying to leave; a dead husband; a fatherless child. And still, Mariana told me, she too might cross the border someday. Porque quiero ayudar mi mamá. Because I want to help my mother.
I asked Nestor Rangel, too, if he would ever return to the United States. “Not soon, but sometime,” he said. “For us, it is always the same. Immigration will always be there. It is a necessity.”
And if the United States builds a wall to keep immigrants out?
“De cualquier manera, vamos a pasar.”
Somehow, we’re going to cross.
Frank Clancy, a Minneapolis writer, has written for many national publications.
