Commerce Dpt.: The Privilege to Work

At least every six months, some enterprising reporter ventures into the garment district of New York City looking for scandal: illegal aliens working in sweatshops. The reporter’s message is a grab-bag of contradictions. Sweatshops (he says) indicate that the government hasn’t yet fully stamped out capitalist exploitation. The presence of illegal aliens indicates that non-citizens are taking jobs from true citizens. What is the reader or viewer to conclude? That only documented citizens should be allowed to work in sweatshops? Or that out of sympathy for illegal aliens, we should send them back to a place they preferred to leave?

Whether the villain of the story is the businessman or the wetback, you can be sure that the government will be portrayed with clean hands and a pure heart. It, against great odds, works valiantly to save American labor from the twin evils of exploitation and cheap, foreign competition.

Yet anyone with a clear head probably wonders why the reporter neglects some obvious questions. A recent CBS television news story is fairly typical. The reporter, Richard Wagner, describes the sweatshops as dirty, unsafe, and illegal, then notes that there are more of them than ever, “chiefly because of the soaring number of illegal aliens in this city.”

The camera pans to show a dingy, crowded sewing room with people hard at work. The pathos is overwhelming, and the CBS crew goes in for the kill. Wagner speaks with a woman from Honduras who is making less than the legal minimum wage. She says she was told the minimum wage is not for piece workers.

“Informed that this was not true,” Wagner reports, “and that she was being exploited, Ophelia said she needs the money.” The per capita income in Honduras, we’re told, is $480 a year. She is making $100 each 60-hour week. Even Wagner had to concede that “the money, meager though it is, often looks good compared to what they’ve come from.” Nevertheless, the solution promoted by interviews with government officials is the closing of sweatshops and the cessation of illegal immigration.

The viewer is justified in wondering why the employer is portrayed so poorly. Hasn’t he, after all, provided a relatively lucrative option to people otherwise consigned to abject poverty? If the options are few, is it the fault of those who provide them? If the conditions are wretched, why do the workers stay there, rather than seek better conditions?

The last question tears asunder all the premises of the story. Workers such as Ophelia are subject to exploitation, but it is not the classical Marxian version. For example, there are indeed cases where a worker, having performed the job, is denied the pay he or she was promised. It is also true that illegal aliens have their array of options artificially narrowed. So what is the source of this exploitation? It is, contrary to every one of these news reports, the government, specifically, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

If an American citizen is not paid for his work as promised, he can sue the employer for breach of contract. If the citizen dislikes the working conditions, he can complain to the employer or use any of dozens of ways to discover alternatives. But these are precisely the kinds of things an illegal alien cannot do without risking deportation. An illegal’s ability to improve his or her condition is seriously hampered when anyone can threaten to call INS the moment the person “steps out of line.” But who is the ultimate exploiter: the person who so threatens or the source of that power, the government? When Wagner says, “The exploited workers, in large part, seem willing to continue to labor in silence,” he shamefully ignores the government-sponsored threat that forces this “willful” decision on the workers.

Illegal aliens lack a constituency. The government is their enemy. So are most labor unions, which exist to stifle the competition. (Check Cesar Chavez’s horrible record on this issue. The exception among unions reportedly is the Teamsters, which allegedly operates some sweatshops. The ICC sees to it that illegals don’t compete with the truckers.)

Much of the business community would have a natural common interest with aliens, because they are potential employees and customers. But too obvious a public sympathy would tend to get them in trouble with workers and unions, and open them to the accusation of being exploiters.

The taxpayers have been maneuvered into hostility against immigrants by a welfare state that requires compulsory “charity.” This creates the spectacle of refugees from tyranny being sneered at by Americans whose recent forebears were once in the same circumstances.

Despite all this, 2.7 million people are in the United States illegally. The Border Patrol, even with help from the Ku Klux Klan, hasn’t been able to stop the movement across the U.S.-Mexican border. Mexicans, Haitians, Cubans, and El Salvadorans still manage to sneak in. This has led officials to seek new solutions. (A very old solution—liberty—is out of the question, of course.)

A Reagan administration task force recently proposed a set of measures so horrendous that its authors deserve a dose of their own medicine. First— and this is the only good part— amnesty would be granted to the illegal immigrants now here. This is not motivated by a consideration of justice, simply by helplessness. To sell this “generous” amnesty to the country, several other measures are proposed. Hiring illegal immigrants would be a crime. To make sure that employers know who is legal and who is not, everyone would be issued a counterfeit-proof Social Security card. The task force conceded that this “is a national identity card by another name” and “an additional intrusion of government into our daily lives.” But they didn’t let that stop them. (A Carter task force rejected this measure.)

Nor is that all. Illegal immigration is not the only problem the task force had to solve. There is also the refugee “problem.” To prevent repetition of the Cuban and Haitian exoduses, the task force proposes that the President be empowered to have the Coast Guard intercept boats en route to the U.S. INS officers would board the boats and determine on the spot who was eligible for asylum. The others would be returned to the home country. Those admitted to the U.S. would be held in camps, which the task force itself said would resemble concentration camps and would bring charges of racism.

The admittedly draconian measures are thought necessary because “the amnesty will be a big thing to swallow politically. The only way to sell it is to say it’s a one-time thing and it won’t happen again. That’s where tough enforcement comes in.”

President Reagan has not yet decided whether to accept the recommendations, which are endorsed by Attorney General William French Smith. In a speech before the Business Council in May, Smith promised “a comprehensive and rational policy on immigration and refugees” because “our society cannot much longer countenance the dislocations, sometimes invisible, that result from the swelling onslaught of illegal aliens.”

On the contrary. What our society can no longer countenance is hypocrisy. How else can one describe an administration that professes devotion to individual freedom and limited government, and that declares holy war on communism for its denial of human dignity, while simultaneously entertaining proposals to restrict free movement and issue national ID cards to those who “belong” here?

Once again, we arrive at the junction of economic freedom and civil liberties. Employers are to be told whom they cannot hire, and to enforce this, all are to be issued a government serial number, which presumably they will be required to show on order. The reason is the arbitrary lines called national boundaries, which may not be crossed without permission.

Devotion to liberty means more than playing with budgets and taxes and talking a good game. It means working to remove the state’s impositions on human freedom. And freedom is a necessity for those on both sides of America’s borders. ■