Immigrants, Illegal Aliens, Cultural Norms, Child Protection and the "Emancipated Woman."

I am married to an immigrant from South America and am family with her and her two daughters. This along with ideological views I hold make me sympathetic to the plight of the new immigrants here, including those who don't have the documents the law requires. My wife came here legally but-over stayed her visa because really no one knew how to help her get asylum, or even that they could. Her husband, or I should say her children's father, had brutalized her and the two little girls often and terribly and my wife came to believe that he was going to kill her, and possibly the children too. With her visa for the US still good she came back to New York with the children and went from the streets to a domestic violence shelter to the projects.

Today in the United States there are millions of "illegal aliens" or "undocumented immigrants" who are uncounted, but estimated at up to twelve million. One indicator of how many there might be is the fact that the Internal Revenue Service says that in 2004 it got tax returns, mainly for wages and salaries, with nine million non-existent Social Security numbers. Now a phenomenon that big exists because those in power allow it to exist. Laws are on the books to penalize and even put out of business employers who hire people who do not have legal authorization to hold jobs here. These laws are very seldom enforced and do not phase the typical American boss. Here in New York City we have hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million or more such people working at jobs and unknown numbers who are paid in cash, and for whom the IRS has not a trace of information.

I read in The Village Voice that now we have "illegal aliens" replacing construction trades union workers on major projects in the heart of Manhattan, which means right under the eyes of the media, law enforcement and the powers that be. Safety laws and regulations are routinely ignored on these outlaw construction sites, which have the full participation of New York's respectable banks in their financing>

"Labor War in Chelsea
For the first time, non-union immigrants are building Manhattan's high-rise towers
by Tom Robbins May 9th, 2006 11:34 AM

Carpenters' union organizer Tommy Costello: "Our fight's not with the workers."photo: Giuletta Verdon-RoeThere's a nasty little chapter in the national immigration debate playing out along the side streets in the West Twenties in Manhattan these days. There, construction union members, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants themselves, are squared off against a contractor using just-off-the-boat employees willing to work long hours at substandard wages with no benefits.

The protests have already produced seven arrests and at least one badly bloodied head. But those wounds are minor compared to the issues at stake here, which include the increasing success of non-union builders in the city, fed by a seemingly boundless supply of immigrant workers—most of them undocumented—willing to work for much less than their union brethren."...

This is a crime. Use of illegal workers under illegal safety conditions is illegal, period. What is done about it? Nothing, except some protests and some skirmishing between union members and "illegal alien" scabs. Working conditions and wages take hit after hit in this country and life here for workers becomes more and more the life of the third world. - And who gets beat up? -People protesting the illegal conditions.

I remember as if it were yesterday a child maltreatment case I had once, a case that points to what I am trying to tell you. A thirteen year old girl from rural Mexico, for whom Spanish was her second language, and who is a mother of a healthy newborn American baby, lives in an apartment converted into a barracks for Mexican workers in a high rent district that shall go un named. She cooks for ten people. She does not go to school. The baby's father is an adult. There is at least one fifteen year old boy living in this commune who is here without his parents or other blood relative, who is holding a job on the night shift in a factory in New Jersey, and who of course does not go to school. I get the best information I am able under the circumstances, with a double language barrier and with everyone lying, naturally, and remove the thirteen year old from the home and she brings her baby who is not a foster child, but who is still under her custody.

I hear later that she is married (this was denied at the time of the intervention). The lawyers or whoever return her and the baby to their abode. I am told that as a married woman she is "emancipated" and does not have to go to school and can by definition not be a victim of statutory rape. She was married at age twelve with her parents' consent prior to coming here, or so I'm told.

Wow, an emancipated woman!

No effort is made to identify or rescue the fifteen year old child laborer.

My unanswered questions are several: What if this girl were ten years old and not thirteen? Twelve? Eleven? What if this family came from a country where polygamy is legal and she were not the only wife in the family. Would she still be an emancipated woman?

Do we want these supposed cultural norms to become legality or even "street legality" in our country, in our city? Bush does. Bloomberg does. I don't. I want laws and customs that presuppose that a child is a child, that there are protections for children from exploitation, that there are wage and hours laws, child labor laws, housing codes, the whole modern shebang. Are these poor people my foes? No, but I don't want them here living this way, pulling down the standards of modern life here. I want the landlord who takes their money locked up. I want the owners of the factory where the fifteen year old works locked up. I want the idiots who say the thriteen year old is "emancipated" fired. Too much to dream of?

There are swaths of the United States where there are not large numbers of new immigrants, and they have restaurants, hotels, construction sites, and small stores that function with American workers. We are told that American workers don't want the kind of jobs that these Americans still have in nearby places like Vermont, rural Pennsylvania and throughout western "heartland" areas as well. This stuff about Americans not willing to do these jobs is a self serving lie. What It does prove to me is that workers have no nationality, none that the bosses and landlords and governments are bound to respect.