Three Racist Myths about Immigrants

[caitxrawks]

This is Part 1 of my series celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month. Enjoy =) I did not write the parts in black, they are from here.

Myth 1: Mexican "illegals" are "parasites" who want a free-ride from the U.S.

My experience has been the opposite. Everytime I walk in downtown area of any American city, I am constantly approached by the poor looking for a handout ("Spare change for a cup of coffee?" "Spare change for a bite to eat?" "Spare change for a beer?"). Living and working in downtown Santa Cruz, I am confronted each and every day by apparently healthy able-bodied young men wanting a handout. 

In Mexican cities, there are poorer than in American cities. However, in Mexico, it is rare to be asked for a handout! Don't get me wrong, the Mexican poor are quite skilled at separating you from your spare change, but they do it by selling you things: jewelry, souvenirs, etc. Even the small children sell chicklets chewing gum in exchange for spare change. Others offer to shine your shoes or provide some other service. However, it is quite rare to be asked for a handout in Mexico.

Moral of the story? It is a myth in America that Mexicans want a free ride. The Mexican poor, in stark contrast to the American poor, hold an unquestioned assumption that they have to earn their way, and nearly always offer something in exchange for what they need.

I agree with these statements. I don't think I've ever seen an OBVIOUS Hispanic person (obvious meaning it is extremely apparant that they are of that heritage) begging on the side of the road. In fact, every Hispanic person I have gotten to know in the past 2.5 years is an extremely hard worker. Randy works his skinny ass off for his meager paycheck. He works harder than anyone else at his restaurant, but guess what? He gets paid $10.25 an hour and his coworkers get paid more. Randy's dad (my FIL) is nearly 60 and he works 40 hours a week at a jean-making plant. He works his ass off as well, and he has since he was 16 years old. Nobody in Randy's family looks for handouts, some of his family members are quite well-off in their professions. None of them are beggars, streetwalkers, drug dealers, or homeless. It is an extremely annoying myth that ALL immigrants want is to suck our money dry like leeches.

Myth: Mexican "illegals" pay no taxes, contribute nothing to our society or our economy, then rape our social services systems for free, unearned benefits.

The southwest and California were built in large part by undocumented Mexican immigrants. There was a time when Mexican migrant workers passed freely over the border each season to labor in the Southwest. In that time, Mexicans were an important and welcomed source of cheap labor. At the end of the season, the laborers would return to Mexico. The border was always open for their return, so they had no particular reason to remain in "Alte" California ("Upper" California, as the state was called before the U.S. stole it from Mexico). 

Throughout the California Gold Rush, which commenced just months after the U.S. took over California from Mexico, Mexican mule trains were crucial in distributing supplies to mining camps and towns throughout California's Sierra Nevada mountains. (Incidentally, although the U.S. gave $15 million to Mexico at the close of the Mexican war as a token for the takeover by the U.S. of California, New Mexico and other Mexican provinces, the California Gold Strike produced hundreds of millions of dollars for America, which was equal in value to billions of today's dollars). 

Today, Mexican workers pay sales taxes and work for substandard wages at the shittiest jobs in the state. Paying illegal workers below minimum wage is very common and results in higher profits for the illegal employer, and therefore higher taxes paid by the employer. End result: worker gets much lower pay (essentially payroll withholding) which results more taxes being paid into the U.S. and State treasuries (due to higher profits for the illegal employers). Many illegal employers know their Mexican laborers are illegal, but nonetheless withhold payroll taxes from their paychecks, and rather than pay those taxes to the government, simply pocket them. Quite often the employer will not realize that the Mexican is illegal, and so will go ahead and withhold payroll taxes and pay them to the government. 

Since illegal Mexican workers live in fear of deportation, they rarely seek social services or file for income tax returns for fear of being discovered and deported (the only exceptions are emergency medical care and primary education, the two things too urgent to forgo. It's no coincidence that California recently passed a law requiring medical care providers and schools to deny services to illegal immigrants - those are the only two social services they use (in spite of the contributions they make to the economy), because those 2 are the only ones they're willing to risk deportation to use. Justice prevailed - a federal court declared the law unconstitutional).

I agree with most of this as well. People who claim that immigrants pay no taxes are grossly misinformed. What is sales tax? What is income tax? Illegal immigrants will see none of their income tax back in the form of social security when they are elderly. I will discuss how difficult it is to immigrate legally to the US in another post.

Anyway, the fear of deportation is extremely high with immigrants, especially Mexicans. I have never met an immigrant that is trying to leech off the government in the form of welfare because it's far too easy to get caught. Families are torn apart when immigrants are caught. Parents are sent back to their home country and their children are placed in foster homes. Husbands and wives are separated, boyfriends and girlfriends, aunts and nephews.

99% of these people have come to the United States to seek a better life. Many of them work the jobs that Americans will not work. No, I'm not talking about fast food, although many of you do not understand that the restaurant business as we know it would collapse if every single illegal immigrant was "tossed in a boat and shipped back to where they came from." I'm talking about those that shovel shit out in the hot sun, those that work in fields in sweltering heat and 100% humidity just to feed their families on $200 every two weeks. Employers that hire illegal immigrants are able to pay their workers whatever they want because they know it's under the table. They know immigrants will take any job offered to them. Humility does not exist for an illegal immigrant. They do what they have to do because they have to do it. Any job here is worth more than a job in their home country. The exchange rate for most countries sucks ass.

On that note, I'd like to tell you more about Randy. The job Randy had before he left for the US paid $.85 an hour. Let me say that in a bigger font.

The job Randy had before he left for the US paid $.85 an hour.

No, not $8.50 an hour, not $85.00 an hour...eighty five cents an hour. I'm not sure how much that is in Costa Rican colones, but this is something most Americans do not understand. Would YOU be able to live off $.85 an hour? No. Randy also said that many of his coworkers stayed out of school to get better hours. 11, 12, 13 year olds working for the same amount as him, some working 60 hours a week. Of course it's illegal, but they got paid under the table even in Costa Rica. If you were getting paid that much to work that many hours a week, wouldn't you want to hop on a plane and come to another country that offered you more bang for your buck? I know I would.

Myth: Illegal Mexican immigrants are criminals deserving severe punishment.

The typical illegal Mexican immigrant is an honest worker struggling for a better life for himself and his family, not a violent criminal. 

In 1995, an article in the San Jose Mercury News reported that it is quite common for families to be divided by the border. For example, the father and one of the sons are legal residents, while the mother and another son are in Mexico and unable immigrate legally. The one father and son cannot afford to give up their jobs in California to return to Mexico, and the rest of the family is unsuccessful at immigrating legally, so the family must live apart. 

The anti-immigrant folks never seem to give a second thought to rich U.S. farmers who knowingly employ undocumented workers at sub-standard wages (and in sub-standard conditions). Such employers are a major source of the draw of immigrants into California, but are rarely if ever portrayed as criminals who deserve to be "severely punished". They are indeed breaking the law by employing undocumented workers, but this law is lightly enforced if at all whereas it is becoming quite fashionable for politicians in America to call for increasing efforts at enforcing laws against illegal border crossings (and for Usenet demagogues to scream for severe punishment of "illegals"). 

In my career in California's high-tech center known as Silicon Valley, I have noticed that the janitors are almost universally Mexicans, and driving through the agricultural areas of California, the laborers breaking their backs in the fields (often covered with carcinogenic pesticides) are mostly Mexican. It seems to me that the Mexicans have really gotten the bottom of the barrel in our society. 

So how is it that Mexican immigrants are responsible for all of our economic problems and other troubles, and why all the outrage? To me it bears a chilling resemblance to the way Hitler was able to dupe all of Germany into believing that all their problems were caused by the Jews. 

We need to stop being spoonfed our issues by politicians, and stop letting the demagogues push our emotional buttons, and look at the real source of our problems, such as the fact that 50% of what the government collects from us in corporate and individual income taxes is spent on destruction (the military), rather than on building a peacetime social and industrial infrastructure, and a very significant sector of our economy is the "defense" (war) industry, which, unlike peacetime industries, drags down rather than fuels the economy. Why is there no outrage over the fact that the Trident IV first-strike nuclear weapon is still being funded at $300 million a year, when the cold war is long over? Why is there no outrage over the fact that 75% of all international weapons sales are made by the U.S., and 90% of our customers are non-democratic regimes? Why is it that the Mexican worker and welfare mothers are getting all the blame for this country's problems???? 

It never ceases to amaze and disgust me to see grown adults blaming Mexican schoolchildren and pregnant women for their economic woes, while monthly Space Shuttle missions costing billions (often on "secret military" missions) are not given a second thought.

I would like to put a brilliant statement in bigger, pinker font:

The typical illegal Mexican immigrant is an honest worker struggling for a better life for himself and his family, not a violent criminal. 

This is absolutely true.

I would like to tell you a story about one of Randy's coworkers and what he witnessed right before his eyes. If you cannot be heartbroken by this story, you have no heart.

His coworker and his brother and SIL were wading through the river from Mexico to the US. People think it's just a "stream" in most places, when in fact it is a disgusting, seething shithole of a river. People take off their clothes, people shit and piss in it, people leave drugs and broken bottles and infected syringes in the water. It is a treacherous journey to cross the border. It isn't as easy as most Americans think. Thing is, I don't think most Americans even WANT to think about it. It's easy to believe what you're told. It takes brainpower to research fact from fiction, it takes more brainpower to seek out a real immigrant and hear their story. Anyway.

They were almost to the border fences. The water was very deep there. Randy's coworker made it onto the shore and turned to wait for his brother and SIL. He noticed that his SIL was struggling to get across. His brother tried and tried to help her, but in the end he was unable to. He watched his wife, his everything, the mother of his children, drown in the river while trying to make it towards a better life. She was not a criminal. She was not evil or nasty or deceitful. She was a woman. A wife, a mother, a daughter, just trying to give her family a better life. She died trying to make it here, and that story haunts me to this day, especially when people scream about how evil and stupid immigrants are. She was not the first to die in the river, and she won't be the last.

I agree with the author that it is disgusting to watch people spew lies about immigrants without knowing the truth.

If you are truly disgusted by them, you must stop supporting them. Stop going to ANY restaurants ever again, unless you're willing to demand to see the owner and demand to know whether they employ illegal immigrants or not. Chances are the manager will laugh in your face, and if you make it to seeing the owner, they'll laugh in your face as well and tell you to take your business elsewhere.

You must stop buying any consumer goods unless you've called the manufacturers and demanded to know if they employ illegal immigrants. You must stop buying houses in developments, because chances are they've been built by illegal immigrants. You must stop shopping at the places that illegal immigrants shop, but chances are that if you stop buying any illegal immigrant-produced goods, you won't have that many choices about where to shop anyway.

You can kick and scream and whine and bitch all you want, but if you are that against illegal immigrants, what are YOU doing to stop it? I am FOR immigration, both illegal and legal. My family were immigrants once. I bet you they were illegal immigrants, because my family was dirt-ass poor in Ireland, Scotland, England, and Germany. Not everyone in my husband's family is legal. Does that make me hate them, shun them, and talk down to them? Absolutely not! They are loving, hilarious, kind, caring, GIVING people. They give and give and give without EVER EVER EVER asking for anything in return.

I do not expect to change anyone's mind from these posts, but I do expect to get the truth out there. Once you learn something, you cannot unlearn it. I will plant the seed, it is up to you to make it bloom. I want love and peace to flourish, I do not want the hatred of people seeking a better life for themselves to go on. I want the future to be bright for my little girl, I don't want her to grow up in the same hate-fueled nation that I have. I want her to be able to stand up and proudly declare "I AM a Latina American!" without having someone calling her a moocher, a leech, an illegal, a "Mex-ee-can", a wetback, a chicana, or anything else that's used to negatively describe immigrants and their families.

With that said, not all Hispanic people are immigrants. Many of them are born here and are 100% US citizens. So a word of advice...BE CAREFUL who you call an "illegal" or a wetback. They may not be as kind as the majority of Hispanic people. They may just save your life someday.

Thank you, and pura vida!

[Stacymt3b]

Sep. 22, 2009 at 12:27 PM

You said it!  I really wish this post would make a difference, and maybe it will change one person's view!

[evwsquared]

Sep. 22, 2009 at 1:21 PM

[barby402000]

Sep. 25, 2009 at 1:19 PM

I agree with you 100%. I'm Cuban and came here legally 41 years ago. Where I work, we employ a lot of Hispanics from many different countries. They are all hardworkers and will do anything to help each other out. They all have families and it kills me when customers call and say they don't want "no Mexicans" doing the job for them. AT this point, I tell them no problem, we just hired a new crew of Americans that I can send to them, but they are not as experienced, but not to worry at least they have Americans doing the job. They usually change their tu nes and say they'd rather have the experienced crew. Arghhhhhh!