“The Cost of Caring: The lives of the immigrant women who tend to the needs of others.” is a New Yorker story that reveals some of the mechanics of illegal immigration.
That year, after her two oldest daughters entered college, Emma, who was forty-four, realized that she could never afford to pay tuition seven more times, so she applied for a tourist visa to America. At her interview, at the U.S. Embassy in Manila, she said that she wanted to go to California, to visit Disneyland. … Her application was rejected. She waited three months and applied again. This time, she paid a wealthy friend to provide her with “show money”: the friend temporarily deposited half a million pesos, roughly twelve thousand dollars, into Emma’s bank account, so that officials at the embassy would believe that she was a wealthy tourist. The friend owned a rice mill, and she created papers for Emma that made it appear as if she were the owner of the business. On the day of the interview, in July, 2000, Emma fasted and prayed all morning. Her sister Nella, who accompanied her to the embassy, said that after the interview Emma ran toward her shouting, “I got it!” “She was jumping,” Nella said. “She was so happy. I said, ‘Go, go—before they take it back.’ ”
[One interesting sentence is “A tenth of the population now works abroad, supporting nearly half of the country’s households and leaving some nine million Filipino children missing a parent.” I.e., it is supposedly bad when a child is cut back to one parent, yet most U.S. states provide large cash incentives to Americans who want to do just that to their own children.]
The article is also interesting because it shows how much demand there is for labor in the U.S., despite our sinking labor force participation rate. Probably a U.S. citizen could earn more from collecting welfare than these immigrants from the Philippines, but if there were no welfare it seems as though jobs would be waiting. Alternatively, if there were no immigration these jobs might start paying more than welfare.
There’s an engrossing, pensive movie called “Mammoth” (2009) [poster here], about that very issue(?): 3d-world women needing to leave their children behind in order to care for 1st-world women’s own.
Why is it called “Mammoth?” I figured it out: for the same reason that the earlier Gus Van Sant’s movie about Columbine was called “Elephant” – and a mammoth, as we all know, predates that equally unmentionable… pachyderm by a sizable margin.
Your last sentence says it all. There isn’t any mystery about it.
Well…, no, not when you’ve read it, but you should hear actual moviegoers trying to fit the title into some logic or visual framework, e.g. attributing it to by the director obviously laid out false-flag trail of sorts… an expensive fountain pen with mammoth bone inlays having a peripheral rôle in it.
When I was in university (1973-1978), many/most students worked summer jobs to pay for school. Roofing, house-painting, landscaping, fish processing in Alaska, etc. My National Guard paycheck (about $130/month) paid *all* of my college expenses as a full-time student. Then along came easy-to-get student loans that could pay for *everything*, not just tuition and books, and American students stopped doing labor-intensive work over the summer. The vacuum for those summer jobs was quickly filled by illegal immigrants. Other than National Guard “jobs”, when was the last time you saw anyone with white skin and speaking English doing any of those jobs? This is a James Burke-style connection that most people don’t think of (ref: the 1978 BBC/PBS series Connections).
Other anecdotal evidence. Probably over 95% of 40+-year-old women in Hong Kong who have profiles on online dating web sites are from the Philippines. So I think it’s more an issue of poverty in third-world countries that forces women to find ways to emigrate to other countries to make a decent living. It’s a lot easier for them to get work/tourist visas in countries other than the U.S.
My brother met and married a Filipina on an online dating site about five years ago. During the time that was happening, he sent me a link to a newspaper article that pointed out that the lead time for getting a “family repatriation” visa to enter the U.S. from the Philippines was 15 years. I don’t know if that’s the correct term for it; when an immigrant to the U.S. becomes a citizen, they can then sponsor their relatives to come and become permanent residents/citizens. So it’s not hard to understand why a woman like Emma would do what she did.
I used to date a wonderful Vietnamese woman who came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975, along with her mother and ten sisters (two brothers and two brothers-in-law who were in the SVN Army stayed to fight; one brother was later killed trying to escape). Over the past forty years they’ve collectively brought scores of their relatives — including the two brothers-in-law; the other brother preferred to stay in Vietnam — to the U.S. under “family repatriation”. About six years ago one of her great-nephews brought his wife and daughter after he’d been here five years, became a citizen and thus became eligible to sponsor them. The lead time for “family repatriation” visas for Vietnam is a lot shorter than it is for the Philippines.
I’m curious to know how many immigrants (legal or otherwise) come here and get jobs that pay an above average wage in their field. Conversely, it’s a tautology that every immigrant working for a below average wage, is lowering the national average wage.
There was a charming conversation at Megan McArdle’s blog a while back where some guy who hired stonemasons was lamenting how Americans didn’t want well-paying stonemason work. Except he was paying either 18 or 25/hr when the market rate was 50/hr for legally hired stonemasons with experience and apprenticeship.
This how many people sell the idea of illegal immigration– they pay below-market but well above minimum wage and people have no idea that little rhetorical trick is being played.
@ Lynn, #5 … “thinks it’s more an issue of poverty in third-world countries that forces women to find ways to emigrate” – you never finished that sentence: more than what?
[…] “It’s a lot easier for them to get work/tourist visas in countries other than the U.S.”
Let’s not use the USA as the Yardstick of Everything (“the answer to everything is 42” pace Douglas Adams). Other, to the Philippines (and Bangladesh/India, the other source of English speakers) nearby rich city-states and countries have their own needs for menial labour of the kind that the locals find either beneath their station in life, or by now so saturated by foreign/ lower class workforce, that they wouldn’t dream of trying to “break back into” what used to be their summer job domain.
@ He-who-holds-Ayn-Rand-in-high-regard-only-I-do-not, #6
I don’t know about the numbers and conditions specifically in the USA, but those kind of questions, how migrant labour affects the economy, does it drive the natives’ market wages up or down, etc. are a staple debating point among European economists. Not being one myself, I mostly listen to these exchanges for the odd insight that goes against the grain of the allegedly consensual “immigrants are bad for the economy” argument.
My cumulative, level-headed impression is that any adverse changes from migration (as such, am not talking exclusively of the Syrian influx of late) are too narrow and too short-lived to affect Western EU states’ economies, and in the post-immediate to long term range the immigrants contribute a whole lot more to the society than they consume. This applies even in such extreme places like Greece, which, despite the fiscal difficulties they’ll be living with for a decade to come, nevertheless somehow manages to absorb and process the large numbers of UK-and-Germany wannabe-bound migrants from the East.
What makes you think your impression is level-headed? It appears quite detached from reality.
The short term costs of migrants are extraordinary (Sweden estimates about 7% of GDP, spread over 4 years, just for the migrants who arrived last fall), while existing statistics show the long term costs of low performing migrants are severe and enduring over generations. And that doesn’t even count all the permanent violence, ubiquitous surveillance, and otherwise reduced quality of life.
I’ve been turning over just those conclusions in my head for awhile now. The only question I have at this point is: Is this by design? This administration has almost doubled the national debt, partly by paying people not to work (and expanding H1-B’s), and drive this behavior. Why? What would be the goal of diluting the American population by creating a labor gap, with welfare and unemployment policies, that get filled by illegal immigrants? You could almost throw into this mix of policies the execrable standards and the terrible relative performance of the public education system. Why do all of these things act in opposing direction to a strong, self-sufficient nation of people? Are these things all so big as to explain by political payoffs for campaign contributions, or are they being coordinated? As always: follow the money, but the Panama papers prove that people with money go to great lengths to make that difficult, and the while question quickly devolves into Bilderburg-type conspiracy, and that way lies madness.
David K. – “… expanding H1-B’s” ? Is the wiki article correct on the number of H1-Bs?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa shows ~281K in 2007, the number was less in 2009-2012, followed by slight increases.