Illegal Immigrant Farm Workers: The Finances
Following up the post about American farmers moving to Mexico to get cheap reliable labor, I’d like to add some comments on the economics of leaving Guanajuato to work illegally in the States. You often read in the US newspapers that illegal workers who earn only a dollar or so an hour in Mexico can earn eight or ten times that much in the US. The implication is that of course they will flood in with that differential in wages. After talking to a number of families here who have had one or more member work illegally in the US for a while I wonder if things are that simple. The following calculations are back of the envelope guestimates based on these conversations, not well confirmed statistics.
Someone working in a laboring job for the government in Mexico (the water board, say) earns about US$ 70 a week plus social security for himself and family (health care and a small amount for retirement) plus Christmas bonus of about $150.
A construction worker (albanil) earns about US$ 120 to 150 but has neither job security nor benefits.
Suppose they give up their jobs to go to the US (and a large proportion going from Guanajuato do have jobs). The buses come round to pick them up and take them to the border in February or March, they come back under their own steam in early December. (Some stay longer but this seems to be the general pattern).
Cost to cross the border is now about US $3000
Cost of setup (you can take nothing with you so you have to buy clothes at a thrift store and anything else you need) $200
Cost to get home $300
Cost of living per week for (say) forty weeks–rent, food, your share of cable tv (the only entertainment), phone cards to call home. Say $100 a week, $4000.
Money sent home to support wife and children (judging from what I have heard) $2000
Total $10,500.
Earnings for 40 hour week for forty weeks at $10 an hour $16,000. But subtract from that the two weeks for travel there and back and to set up, the days you don’t get picked to work (there appears to be a pecking order with newcomers the last to get work), the days you work but don’t get paid (this seems to happen quite often). I’d guess that most who go for a year only work in fact about thirty weeks. That means the worker actually gets $12,000.
In sum, the net profit is $1500. And your wife and children have been struggling on about half what they had ($2000 instead of about $3500 to $4000) when you were earning in Mexico. Whoops, there went the profit.
The bottom line. Only those workers who stay for more than a year and/or work more than one job end up making much money. If money is the main reason to go to the US, and if workers make rational calculations about what they can earn, then wages do not have to go up much in Mexico for workers to decide to stay here.
With the boom in market gardening for the international market in the Bajío of Guanajuato, I have the impression that in fact this is beginning to happen.
Edit. Mexican mothers now have an average of 2.4 children instead of the 6.8 they had in 1970 according to Dowell Myers, a professor at the University of Southern California. This is not going to change immigration rates for a while, obviously, as the bulge will take a while to work through. But it’s perhaps another straw in the wind. Thanks to Kay Curtis for this pointer.
$120 a week for a semi-skilled construction help working in the U.S.? In the 1990s and early 2000s in Austin the minimum pay for Mexican nationals working on construction projects. No SSI or health benefits beyond coverage on the job, but $10 an hour was much more common than less when I left Austin in 2004.
Besides hanging sheetrock and sanding floors those brave guys also clued me in on the best deals for lunch in East Austin, Taqueria Arandas and the Asian fried sea food places. I would have been ashamed to pay anyone doing construction work less than $250 a week, including my teenaged son, who went on to get a BA in Anthropology at the University of Chicago.
BTW, I love Cuisine and Empire.