Brokered Boundaries: Immigrant Identity in Anti-Immigrant Times

4. Worlds of Work

81 Chapter 4 Worlds of Work T he primary point of contact between immigrants and U.S. society is usually the labor market. As we have seen, one of the most prominent reasons immigrants give for coming to the United States is economic conditions, and even those who were motivated by the pull of family ties, the fear of violence at home, or some other reason usually end up in the workforce. What happens to immigrants as they make their way through the world of work can thus be expected to play a disproportionate role in determining their perceptions of life in the United States and in shaping their construction of identity. Chapter 3 described what is a particularly difficult and hostile context of reception for immigrants in the United States today, one typified by anti-foreign hostility in the media, high levels of repression in public policy, and an increasingly precarious economy; all of these conditions put immigrants in a very vulnerable position. It would be surprising if this vulnerability were not expressed somehow in U.S. labor markets, and indeed, a recent survey conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center found that discrimination against Latinos has been rising. Whereas 44 percent of respondents viewed discrimination as a major problem in 2002, 51 percent said so in 2004, and 58 percent in 2006, with an additional 18 percent in 2006 seeing discrimination at least as a minor problem (Kohut and Suro 2006). Thus, a large majority of Hispanics have come to perceive discrimination as a problem in the United States. This subjective perception is borne out by objective data on conditions in America’s low-wage labor markets. A 2008 survey of low-wage workers in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York by Annette Bernhardt and her colleagues (2009) revealed that two-thirds were immigrants and that 56 percent of these were undocumented. Their finding that only 6 percent were white whereas 63 percent were Latino, 14 percent were black, and 17 percent were Asian confirms that low-wage workers in the United States are now predominantly immigrant, minority, undocumented , and Latino. Among them, 26 percent earned less than the legal 82 Brokered Boundaries minimum wage, 70 percent were not paid for work done beyond their regular shift, and 76 percent were not paid extra for overtime work. Without exception, these violations occurred at higher rates for undocumented migrants, among whom 38 percent earned less than the legal minimum, 76 percent were not paid for extra work, and 85 percent were not paid required overtime (Bernhardt et al. 2009). These findings from representative urban labor market surveys are entirely consistent with the experiences reported by our own informants, who work in the New York–New Jersey–Philadelphia urban corridor. In many ways lowwage work in the United States has become an underground economy that is increasingly detached from federal, state, and local regulations and that operates outside the rules of occupational, safety, health, labor, and social security law. The stories offered by our immigrant respondents thus provide a clear window on “how the other half works” (Waldinger and Lichter 2003). notes from underground To characterize the world of work faced by immigrants in our sample we compiled work histories that began with the question: “When and how did you begin working in the United States?” We paid particular attention to respondents’ first and last jobs in the United States and sought to clarify the conditions of employment for each, including the amount earned, the hours worked per day, the form of payment, access to benefits , deduction of taxes, the ethnicity of the employer, and other features of the work setting. We then asked about the intervening jobs and the respondent’s other experiences in the labor market. The answers to our queries reveal a world of work characterized by long hours, low wages, cash payment, few benefits, little job security, double shifts, and multiple jobs worked back to back in order to raise earnings. Like Bernhardt and her co-authors (2009), we found that a common work setting for immigrants was the restaurant industry, especially pizzerias owned by other immigrants. Such was the case of an undocumented Mexican man in New Jersey who reported that “three days after arriving I began to work with my brothers, because they worked in a very big restaurant.” He quickly moved on, however, to take a job in the kitchen of a pizzeria, where he worked “cooking pizzas, making sandwiches , everything,” for twelve hours...