Imagining America without illegal immigrants: the millions of immigrants living illegally in the U.S. have long been a source of controversy. But what would life be like without them?

AuthorMurphy, Dean E.
PositionNational

Try imagining America without illegal immigrants--many of the people who flip the burgers, clean the toilets, and watch the kids. Would the country be a better place?

President Bush reopened the national debate about immigration last month with a proposal to grant temporary visas to undocumented workers. His plan would let millions of illegal immigrants obtain three-year renewable work visas, if they can show that they have jobs and their employers certify that no Americans can be found to perform the work.

The announcement was the President's first big election-year policy initiative, one intended in part to appeal to Hispanics, a particularly fast-growing sector of the electorate. Bush's proposal won praise from immigrant advocates, but drew sharp criticism from many quarters. (See Debate, about the guest-worker proposal, p. 28.)

George J. Borjas, a professor of economics and social policy at Harvard and an expert on illegal immigration, doesn't like the President's proposal.

"The one good thing you could say about it is, it takes seriously the fact that the United States is not going to deport 10 million people," he says. "We have to do something about these people."

Most everyone agrees that mass deportation is unlikely. But imagining what would happen in the U.S. if the illegal immigrants suddenly disappeared is one way of understanding the economic backdrop to Bush's initiative.

CHEAP LABOR

The Pew Hispanic Center estimated in 2001 that the unauthorized labor force in the United States totaled 5.3 million workers, including 700,000 restaurant workers, 250,000 household employees, and 620,000 construction workers. In addition, about 1.2 million of the 2.5 million wage-earning farmworkers live here illegally, according to a study by Philip L. Martin, a professor at the University of California at Davis who studies immigration and farm labor.

That is a whole lot of cheap labor. Without it, fruit and vegetables would rot in fields. Toddlers would be without nannies. Towels at hotels in states like Florida, Texas, and California would go unlaundered. Commuters at airports from Miami to Seattle would be stranded as taxicabs sat driverless. And home improvement projects across the Sun Belt would grind to a halt.

"There would be a ripple effect across the economy," says Harry P. Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy institute at the University of Southern California, a Latino research group.

But Borjas argues the disruption would not...

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