Immigrant Workers

WASHINGTON -- The vast majority of immigrants to the United States don't arrive through seaports. But the Dubai ports debacle, now an emblem of economic nationalism, has a lot in common with the sorts of arguments used against immigration. Like those who opposed the Dubai deal, foes of foreign workers, whether low-skilled guest workers or high-skilled techies, miss a central point. The U.S. isn't an economic bubble. Snapping out of the protectionist mood and playing by the rules of open markets are both good and necessary.

As Congress struggles with the politics of dealing with a flood of illegal immigrant workers, relatively little attention is being paid to the issue at the heart of the problem: the fact that they are lured here by American businesses offering millions of jobs. It is against the law to hire an unauthorized immigrant worker, but neither the employers nor the federal government has been paying much attention to that fact. In the fiscal year that ended in September 2004, the government issued just three notices of intent to fine employers for hiring unauthorized workers - down from 417 in fiscal 1999.

A federal grand jury returned an indictment yesterday against the owners of Kawasaki restaurants, a collection of well-regarded Japanese establishments in Baltimore whose proprietors are accused of hiring illegal workers and pocketing customers' tips the employees earned. Tzu Ming Yang, 48, his wife, Jui Fan Lee Yang, 49, and business partner Jack Chang, 41, all of Clarksville, were originally charged by criminal complaint. The indictment formalizes the charges, which include conspiracy to harbor illegal immigrants, unlawfully employing them and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

NOGALES, Mexico -- They had made it across the border, 20 of them, through a hole in the barbed-wire fence in the dark Arizona desert. Juan Carlos Reyes Hernandez, 25, with two children at home and a third on the way, was among them. He planned to work in construction and send his earnings back home. He had promised to pay the "coyote," or smuggler, two months' wages to lead him safely to Tucson. Instead, he walked into a trap. The group was less than a mile into the United States when three men with pistols set upon them.

Saying their clients were duped by unscrupulous employers, an immigrant advocacy group filed a federal lawsuit yesterday against a Howard County contracting company, saying it refused to pay 35 Maryland laborers hired for cleanup projects along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, contends that the Mount Airy firm MFC General Contractors Inc. refused to pay its workers the $10 an hour it promised them and offered no overtime pay. The owners of the company denied the accusation yesterday, saying delays in worker payments resulted from problems with the firm that hired them to do the work.

GULFPORT, Miss. -- There's gold along the storm-wracked Gulf Coast, where jobs are plentiful, pay is good and billions of dollars of reconstruction aid are available. At least that's what some labor contractors are telling migrant and foreign workers who are trickling into devastated fields and construction sites from as far away as Florida and Mexico. But like the fabled streets paved with gold of immigration lore, the promising job market along the Gulf Coast can be illusory. Although opportunities abound, many workers are finding a harsh and inhospitable environment, according to their advocates from Florida.

HOOPERS ISLAND - The nimble fingers of Consuelo Morales, 52, were flying through what looked like mountains of steamed crabs piled high on stainless steel tables. Gripping her paring knife, she ripped away shell after shell to dig out fluffy white lumps, deftly flicking the crab meat - the Chesapeake's most prized bounty - into plastic "Capt. Charlie" brand containers. After months of uncertainty, Morales and a dozen other veterans from central Mexico were back at work yesterday in a crab-packing plant in this swampy corner of Maryland's Eastern Shore.

WASHINGTON - At first, I thought Mexican President Vicente Fox was trying for some sort of laugh line when he asserted that his country's migrant workers in the United States do work that "not even blacks want to do." I wondered what jobs those might be. Shining shoes? Cleaning homes? Washing dishes? Tending the garden? Raising other people's kids? How about picking cotton? No-suh, boss. Black workers are like other workers. There's hardly any job that we won't do, if you'll pay us a decent wage.

GRIPKI, Russia - This is the end of the road for some of Moscow's foreign workers, the Severny Detention Center, a four-story jail in a suburb of scruffy dachas and industrial plants. Behind barred windows and locked behind 3-inch-thick doors languish about 450 inmates awaiting deportation. Many are economic refugees from Central Asia or Eastern Europe, lured by labor brokers with promises of wages 10 times what the workers could earn at home. But they arrive at one of Moscow's major construction sites only to become virtual prisoners - stripped of their passports, on the job 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week, and locked up at night in dormitories or battered trailers on the site.

Don't encourage new immigrants to break the law It is well-known that reinforcing a behavior results in more of that behavior. So why is The Sun supporting illegal immigration, and urging Baltimore to assist people who are in this country illegally ("Protecting workers," editorial, Feb. 28)? In whose interest is it to allow millions of illegal immigrants to enter the United States every year? Certainly not that of the American worker, who has seen his or her wages steadily driven down because of millions of illegal workers who are willing to work for one-half, or even less, of the wages that an American citizen needs to live a middle-class life.