I’m not trying to be facetious at all … just thinking about this today, all the ways low-wage, mostly immigrant labor makes my life easier:
- Feeding me. Like many Manhattan residents, I very rarely cook for myself. Instead I just eat out. I can get a good meal for $5.50 at the Desi Deli Indian place on 10th Ave., and there’s many other cheap eats in the nabe. Even when the person who takes my order is a native-born American, chances are much of the service staff are immigrants.
- Delivering my food. Also, when I don’t want to actually go and get something to eat — often because it’s cold, rainy or hot — an immigrant will bring it to me for a $2 tip.
- Washing my clothes. I don’t actually do my own laundry — for $.65/pound I have it washed and nicely folded for me. The current place I use ships it somewhere in the Bronx to have this happen, but the woman I deal with at the counter is I believe a native-born Chinese. And the two laundromats I used previously were run by immigrants.
- Taking me to work and about town. When it’s cold or rainy or whatnot, all I have to do is stick out my arm and a guy (often a Muslim or Sikh immigrant) driving a big yellow car will come and take me where I want to go for a few bucks. It’s great!
- Moving me. I’ve lived in a couple different places in NYC, and the last two times I’ve been able to hire movers to move me. It’s great not having to struggle with my dressers. Not all the movers were immigrants, but some were.
- Cleaning my apartment. I don’t have a maid now, but I did when I lived with Tallman. Such a luxury! (I’m very messy).
- Selling me stuff. When I need beer or milk or cat food at 2 a.m. I can count on the 24-hour bodega on the corner to have it in stock.
- Assorted & sundry other stuff. When I had a car on hot days immigrants would bring me ice-cold water at busy intersections for just a buck and would clean my car for at car-wash places for cheap. On hot days immigrants also sell my icees on street corners for just a buck.
(Also, this doesn’t fall into the category of low-wage labor, but a lot of my dentists and family practice doctors have been immigrants.)
I don’t mean this in a mean or condescending or patronizing way at all — but, thanks guys. Because you chose to come to New York to work, in a very real way I’m a wealthier man today. My dollar goes further. I hope I always manage to tip you well.
Oh where do I begin with this one. Very nice of you to thank them. But just remember as you enjoy your [large unnamed news organization] health care and your growing retirement nest egg how these guys and gals a) are paid subpar wages b) have no health care and c) are generally treated as underclass. Derek, youve entered true yuppie-dom!
I think most New Yorkers appreciate the services that service workers provide, whether immigrant or not. I don’t think they are “generally treated as underclass” when most New Yorkers tip generously and are respectful to their neighbors (some, I’m sure, are not). I also appreciate the people who write the articles in my morning fishwrap and update (without pay!) my favorite blogs.
Ahh, but shouldn’t we distinguish between illegal immigrants and legal ones? Those cab drivers are legal immigrants, the delivery boys, well I suspect most of them aren’t.
It is nice that this labor is available for cheap, but I don’t think it is good for the U.S.’s unskilled labor force. Good for you and me, but not so good for the highschool drop outs who are competing with illgeal immigrants for jobs. While I like that stuff is cheap, I kind of get tired of dealing with really poor people who don’t speak English very well. I think it creates a larger class gulf between me and the poor and it frankly is slowly warping my view of humanity and certain ethnic groups. When the person driving your cab or taking away your dinner clearly speaks English, you will occaisionaly interact with them, share a joke or a common interest. But when they are an immigrant that doesn’t speak English, the tendencay is to ignore them, almost like they aren’t human. I don’t think that is a great thing. Tipping nicely isn’t enough. If you sit down in someone’s car and it is just the two of you for 15 minutes, the normal human thing is to exchange a few words (How about them Mets?), but we don’t do that in this town because the guy in front of us often can’t speak enough English to make that interaction anything but torture and a waste of time. Example, last week I took a cab into Brooklyn to visit my Mom. The cabbie recognized the area and said, “Don’t worry I know where it is I grew up there.” Turned out we grew up a block away from each other, I knew exactly what building he had lived in. We talked for 20 minutes about the old neighborhood and how it had changed. That is a normal interaction and it is intereactions like that which keep connected the different classes. We have so few of those types of interactions in this City because we have so many immigrants who don’t speak English. To sum up, I think there is cost to all of us because of that divide.
>.It is nice that this labor is available for cheap, but I don’t think it is good for the U.S.’s unskilled labor force.
Being unskilled is what’s bad for the U.S. unskilled labor force. Maybe if someone smacked these 16-year-olds upside the head and told them to stay in school, that would be more productive than spending taxpayer money building a fence from Yuma to the Rio Grande and obsessing over a bunch of Mexicans willing to risk life & limb for the right to mow my lawn for $8 an hour.
If you can’t get cheap and compete on price, get smart and compete on skill. How hard is it to figure that out?
All good comments. Ariana, I hope I manage to tip well and manage to treat everyone with respect. Otherwise what more can I do? Maybe if I hit the lottery I could endow a foundation to provide people with health care but that hasn’t happened yet.
Tallman, I agree with you that multiculturalism causes us to lose a certain sense of shared identity, esp. regarding people who don’t speak English well. I lived in Astoria in 2001, and it was great for awhile — excellent restaurants, all these Greeks and Muslims and Brazilians — but ultimately I got tired living in a neighborhood where it seemed like I was the only native-born American.
However, think about how much more that cab-ride would cost if there wasn’t immigrants to drive the cabs here … there are tradeoffs both ways.
P.S.- Ariana, how the hell did you know where I worked?? I’ve been so careful not to say! (and edited it out of your comment). I do know you in real life, don’t I … who the devil are you??
Tallman makes a great point that it is impossible to build community with people that you can’t communicate with. I have noticed that the immigrants with the worst English skills end up with the worst jobs because they require the least communication. Learning a new language is a difficult skill. It takes a lot of time for even the most motivated immigrant. Not every newcomer is up to the task. Tallman is right to be concerned about the effect this has on our society.
Mofo: In a perfect world, we could all take advantage of the best of American higher education and write software. Unfortunately, there are some that just don’t have the ability. I have a brother who works on a cleaning crew. He’s not lazy, just not cut out for higher education. Its not that he’s entitled to anything, he needs good work and the world needs clean office buildings. Its not fair that he competes with people who broke the law to get here and employers who break the law by paying less than the minimum wage. Why don’t immigrants have to play by the rules?
In the larger picture, our country has serious problems with people who lack medical insurance, overcrowded and re-segregated public school classrooms and (as Derek eloquently pointed out in an earlier post) Americans (minorities and others) who can’t find jobs. Importing millions of poor people only makes these problems harder to solve.
I don’t see how deporting millions of immigrants and then telling poor Americans, ‘Hey, look, you can now be a clerk at 7-11’ will really make the poor’s situation any easier.
And given that there’s an estimated 7 to 20 million illegal immigrants in the United States, it’d mean like enormous city-sized internment camps.
Cabs are a bad example about how much it would cost without immigrants. Cab prices are set by the City authorities (MTA, I think, but I’m not sure). The cabbies then negotiate with the medalion and cab owners how much it costs to rent the cab per hour. The difference between the rental and the fare they bring in is what they get to keep. Because there are so many immigrants who will do the job for cheap, Medalion owners can charge pretty good rents. But that doesn’t effect the price for us. We just pay the set rate. The hi rents result in the cabbie not taking home too much of the money.
Delivery is probably the best example of something that we use all the time that would be more expensive as that is done in this city almost exclusively by very recent immigrants.
True Tallman but about 35% of the city’s population is foreign-born, and fully 84% of the city’s cabbies are, according to this 2004 study. NYC cab drivers averaged just $29k in 1999 working 52 hours a week, the study sez … If NYC didn’t have immigrants I suspect the Taxi and Limousine Commission would have to raise rates to attract native-born Americans.
Yes I think we should respect all workers who provide us with services. However I do not think there is anything wrong with appreciating the immigrants who give up so much more to work here a little more.
If there weren’t immigrants willing to work for cheap then maybe a taxi medallion wouldn’t go for $200k. Maybe rates would go up, but they wouldn’t go up that much. Some of the raise would come out of the profits that the medallion owners collect.
I just came back from Brava, and I heart immigrant labor, too. Because it changes the world in more ways that we, in the developed places, will ever see or imagine.