BY STUDENT
Many Latinos come to the United States for job opportunities
to support their families. I can relate to this on several standpoints. My
grandma came to the United States when my mother was very young to find work
and make enough money to give her family a better lifestyle. She left my mother
with her mother for a few years and made enough money to bring them over to New
York to live here for good. Although my grandmother was here illegally at the
time, she found a well-paying job and eventually got her papers to become a
legal citizen. This is a concept of Transnational urban Latinization,
remittances to be exact. This is when people go to work in another place
because of opportunities, and then either go back to their homeland or send it
to their family at home in order to support them financially. This has been
going on for decades and is still happening even today. Many politicians
including Donald Trump, who is currently running for President, don’t
necessarily like this concept because it is bringing many illegal immigrants to
our country. However, other politicians believe that the work these people are
doing for our nation is work that most Americans don’t want to do anyway, so
they feel as though they should be considered citizens simply because they are
willing to do the work.
I see this concept happen with my uncle as well. My uncle is
100% Italian and owns a landscaping company. This might be stereotypical but he
hires many Latinos to do the work for him and pays them off-the-books in cash.
Most of the Latinos he hires are actually related and all want to eventually
transfer their money back home to their loved ones. Although paying his
employees off-the-books is technically illegal, he is willing to give them good
pay for their work because his wife, who happens to be my biological aunt, went
through the same thing as my grandmother so he understands the “struggle” and
what they are trying to do for their families. Some people, however do not see
this in some migrant workers throughout the nation. Many people that undergo
this lifestyle of labor are paid very poorly and treated poorly as well. They
are taken advantage of because they ultimately don’t have the right to stay in
the country based on the law. So employers will take advantage of them, paying
them below minimum wage and giving them brutal hours but the workers don’t care
as long as they are getting enough to support their families. “Mexicans were
commonly treated as disposable workers” is a quote taken from Migrant
Imaginaries that really got me thinking (Camacho 2008). It’s sad to think
that these people who are doing extremely hands on, tough work are thought of
this way because most Americans truly wouldn’t want to do it themselves, even
though most of the time it is a task that needs to be done.
A very similar concept also occurs in the film by Alex
Rivera that we watched in class. The migrant workers came to work in the States
and worked a ton but seemed to enjoy doing it as they worked together with
other Mexican migrant workers. They ended up saving enough money to build a
baseball stadium back home where friends, family and people from the community
were able to play and watch the sport that they all loved to play as a pastime.
It was the first baseball stadium built in the area and everyone told them that
they didn’t have enough money, time or workers to build it yet they were able
to without a problem. This goes to show that when you put forth your time and
energy to do something you want, you are able to. I truly believe that although
what many of these people did was illegal, they did it for a good cause in
helping their families and communities by doing something positive.
Transnational urban Latinization is still going on today and there are
definitely pros and cons to it, but it is safe to say that the pros may
outweigh the cons.
Works Cited
Camacho, Alicia Schmidt. Migrant
Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. NYU
Press, 2008.
Decena, Carlos Ulises, and Margaret Gray. Putting Transnationalism to Work. Duke
University Press, 2006.
My dad also has a lot of latino and bengali workers who just came to America working for his construction company. He pays them in cash as well off the books. And just like you mentioned, its not to take advantage of them but to help them out. My dad understands the struggle and knows how hard it is to make in America. Its really hard to get a decent job in America, especially when you come from another country have no experience what so ever. I do see a lot of immigrant workers getting taken advantage of and poorly mistreated and it makes me feel really bad because they don't deserve to be treated like that just so someone else can make money off them. I alway ask my dad why doesn't he hired experienced workers for his company. He tells me by doing what he does, he is able to help those workers out by teaching them new skills and helping them grow so they too one day can get established. He also tells me how much he was thankful for all the people who helped and knows that you can't make it in America alone, especially when you first arrive.
ReplyDeleteThe story of your family is very interesting. You seem to have a lot of family members who have recently immigrated to the United States within the past few generations. For many other families, who have already been settled here for several generations, it is easy to forget that the United States is a country founded by immigrants from many other nations. An overwhelming majority of people in the US have a relative that was an immigrant, some of which at one point may have been undocumented. The exploitation of immigrants for cheap labor is something that many other people of various ethnicities and races have faced throughout the history of the United States and other nations as well. As someone who is close to his own Polish roots, I am aware that many Polish immigrants In the United Kingdom are looked upon similarly as Latino immigrants in the United States. The acceptance of low paying difficult manual labor by immigrants is unfortunately often met with criticism by lifetime citizens who are unable to find a job, regardless of whether or not they would be willing to take on that job in the first place.
ReplyDeleteThe connections you made in this post are can be related to in terms of family, current politics, and class--making the topic much easier to understand. Great connections. The only disagreement I may have is whether or not the pros outweigh the cons in transnationalism. These off the book workers are still putting their bodies through very difficult jobs in order to maintain their families in the US and in their home countries. I'm not saying the cons outweigh the pros.
ReplyDeleteThe story about your uncle really made this post interesting. It's great when we can connect to something on a personal level. Yes, it is illegal to be in this country without the proper paperwork, but what I always wonder is, why has no one stopped to think of basic human rights? Even if an immigrant is here illegally, are they not still human? Do they not still deserve to be treated with dignity? The right to dignity is a basic human right that we carry out even in death. An entire ceremony is performed. Why is it that so many people and politicians resort to an animal way of thinking about human beings? That illegal immigrants should be punished instead of helped. Instead of that, it would be better to help these migrants and show them what the true values of an American are.
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