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Within seven months of arriving in Laredo from Veracruz, Mexico, Abel Luna, an undocumented worker, was busy selling tamales door to door. His wife and sister-in-law made the tamales in a tiny apartment kitchen really too small for the business venture. Abel had come illegally with his wife, brother, and sister-in-law in search of a better life. At first, he tried securing an income by offering his labor as a gardener. That produced a few jobs mowing lawns for thirty-two-year-old Abel, though he could barely pay the rent and was afraid they would use up all they had saved for their new life. As Christmas arrived, Abel’s wife Conchita wanted to make the family some tamales Veracruzana style. Abel asked one of his gardening customers if he could borrow some banana leaves from the family’s small plot of banana trees. In the holiday spirit, Abel and Conchita shared their tamales with neighbors and were soon inundated with requests to buy these southern-Mexico-style tamales—and their tamale business was born. When the tamales wrapped in banana leaves proved to be very popular and unique to the neighborhood, Abel exchanged a few dozen tamales every now and then with the tree owner. Over the two months since the tamale business started, the foursome has been able to generate sales of $300–$400 per week. This supplants but does not entirely replace the gardening business. Word-of-mouth promotion has helped their small informal enterprise as it continues to slowly grow. Though they fear being caught and deported or that others will prey upon their undocumented status, Abel and his family hope to one day regularize their immigration status and learn English. Abel is one of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., of whom two-thirds are thought to be from Mexico.1 But unlike most of CHAPTER 4 Informality and Undocumented Workers Richardson-final.indb 110 Richardson-final.indb 110 8/7/12 10:30:23 PM 8/7/12 10:30:23 PM Informality and Undocumented Workers 111 the undocumented Mexican workers who enter the U.S., Abel and his family are part of only 7–8% of this population who seek to remain in the border area.2 Abel is also unlike many of the migrants who settle in the border area because he came without an embedded social network of family, friends, or contacts already living in the area. He may have chosen the border area because it is less expensive and ethnically more similar to Mexico than other parts of the U.S.3 In addition, Laredo’s proximity to Mexico allowed Abel and his family to come to South Texas with fewer start-up resources, though with greater opportunities of melting into the local environment, where 95% of the population is of Mexican origin. But Abel and other immigrants who settle along the border pay a cost. Orrenius, Zavodny, and Lukens found an earnings penalty of $1.61 per hour (in 2006 dollars) for illegal Mexican immigrants who stop at the border rather than continue further into the U.S.4 So the earning prospects for Abel and his family are not robust in the short term, given his border destination, educational background, lack of social network, and short time on the border. Nonetheless, if Abel and his family stick it out, within approximately 30 years they should expect to earn a modest living.5 So, although Abel will struggle financially for some years to come, he has good reason to believe that he and his children will ultimately come out ahead for his decision to enter the U.S. illegally and work informally in a border location. On the border, one runs into difficulties in precisely identifying who is undocumented and how their labor is informal. Officially, an undocumented worker is one who does not possess the proper entry and work authorization documents.6 But as we discussed in Chapter 1, there are varying levels of documentation. The documentation continuum ranges from the polar ends of zero, or no documentation, to fully documented (i.e., U.S. citizenship). Some visas do not include work authorization, so, for example, those who come with a student or laser visa are unauthorized to work, but not undocumented. In this book, we refer to those who have such visas and work without authorization as “quasidocumented.” To this category we might also add those who have...

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