IN MY SHOES: Illegals Undermine Upward Mobility of Workaday Citizens

 

The New York Times (archived) offers a slice of life in Elmont, a suburban New York town “just over the Nassau County line from Queens [that] has always drawn immigrants or their children”:

The streets where Patrick Nicolosi sees America unraveling still have the look of the 1950's. Single-family homes sit side by side, their lawns weed-whacked into submission to the same suburban dream that Mr. Nicolosi's Italian-American parents embraced 40 years ago when they moved to this working-class community on Long Island.

 

But when a school bus stops at the white Cape Cod opposite his house, two children seem to pop up from beneath the earth. Emerging from an illegal basement apartment that successive homeowners have rented to a Mexican family of illegal immigrants, they head off to another day of public schooling at taxpayer expense. …

 

There is the gas station a dozen blocks away where more than 100 immigrant day laborers gather, leaving garbage and distress along a residential side street — and undercutting wages for miles, contends Mr. Nicolosi, 49, a third-generation union man and former Wonder Bread truck driver who retired after a back injury. …

 

"Two children are in school, and one is handicapped — that's $10,000 for elementary school, $100,000 a year for special education," he said. "Why am I paying taxes to support that house?" …

 

It is the economics of class, not the politics of culture or race, that fires Mr. Nicolosi's resentment about what he sees in Elmont, which is probably as diverse a suburb as exists in the United States. Like many working-class Americans who live close to illegal immigrants, he worries that they are yet another force undermining the way of life and the social contract that generations of workers strived so hard to achieve.

 

"The rich, they're totally oblivious to this situation — what the illegal immigration, the illegal housing, the day labor is doing to us," he said. "Everyone's exploiting these people — the landlords, the contractors. And now we can't afford to pay taxes. People like me who want to live the suburban dream, we're being pushed out unless we join the illegality." …

 

"They're telling us Americans don't want to do these jobs," Mr. Nicolosi said. "That's a lie. The business owners don't want to pay. I know what my grandparents fought for: fair wages and days off. Now we're doing it in reverse."

 

Trying not to feed the cycle, Mr. Nicolosi said, he had paid a premium to use nationally known home-improvement chains when he renovated his house. But by now he knew that was no guarantee that the people who did the work were legal, let alone fairly paid, he said.

 

Nicolosi reasoned that he could preserve the rule of law, while protecting a way of life that generations of legal immigrants had built, by reporting illicit basement apartments to local authorities charged with enforcing housing codes. In a development that The Times called “unsettling,” the family of undocumented Mexicans was evicted, because the homeowner feared hefty fines for continuing to rent out his basement.

 

The Stiletto found it interesting that The Times did not find it “unsettling” that, “In the last four years, Elmont raised school taxes by 57 percent and added 40 elementary school classrooms — partly filled, district officials agree, by families in illegal rentals, both immigrant and native-born” or that, illegal immigrants “avoid middle-class tax burdens.” 

Posted by The Stiletto at July 5, 2006
Categories: In My Shoes
 

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  • February 8, 2007 The Stiletto wrote:
    The debate continues to rage over the microeconomic effects on individual firms and businesses of raising the minimum wage from the current, $5.15 an hour, to $7.25 an hour. The Washington Post details a payday in the life of Robert Iles, 22, an Atchison, KS, store cashier who’s been living on $7.25 per hour for almost a year now – his boss had given him a raise last February: "[I]nside I was doing the cha-cha-cha. It was like going from lower class to lower middle class." Soon after, he bought his car, ...
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