Immigration crackdown
Felice Pace
Few in the West are unaware that the federal crackdown on immigration has had an impact on western industries. The March 3rd edition of HCN, for example, included this comment on the situation from Bill Crooke’s essay for Writers on the Range:“There are upsides to the employment crunch (in Cody, Wyo.): It’s harder to get fired, and the increasingly desperate business community has to keep raising wages and incentives.”
Crooke may have been thinking more about the energy boom, but the loss of immigrant labor is affecting wages and employment not just in Wyoming but throughout the West. Even Silicon Valley is feeling the pinch. But the largest impacts are on low wage service industries and agriculture. From California to Colorado and Arizona to Idaho growers are wondering who will pick the fruit, prune the vines and hoe the weeds while motel owners wonder who will clean the rooms and restaurateurs are in search of cooks and dish washers. .
Another western industry which has “suffered” as a result of the immigration crackdown is the ski industry.
There was a time when seasonal ski area jobs where in large part the provenance of young Americans - young people taking a “break” after high school, during or after college. Most college “kids” today are saddled with a mountain of debt - one result of our government’s failure to provide its citizens with the basics: health care and education. This debt serves as a deterrent - convincing many young people who would otherwise go into non-profit public and community service or spend time as “ski bums” that they must immediately choose higher paying careers.
As a result, seasonal ski area jobs have been increasingly taken by legal and illegal immigrants. Much of this transition has not been highly visible. American young people still run most of the lifts while immigrants work cleaning the rooms, preparing the food and washing the dishes. Now this trend may reverse itself. As the current western labor shortage raises wages in ski country more young people may be able to experience a period of ski bumming while still making their loan payments.
Many of us will see this as a good thing – how many of the West’s best citizens spent time as ski bums and how many eastern youngsters gained an appreciation for the West and its public lands while working a season or two as ski bums in the West?
Higher wages in service jobs translates into more sales of basics like food and health care and less dependence on public welfare systems. If this trend continues the term “working poor” may someday become part of history and not a description that fits a substantial portion of workers.
But wages and income are not the whole story. Also important to us is our quality of life and a big component of quality of life is community quality. The losses sustained by the immigrant component of our communities have helped many westerners recognize just how important to community quality immigrants have become. Immigrants - both legal and illegal - are active in our churches, schools, sports teams and voluntary organizations. And as immigrants leave these community institutions feel the pinch. If the immigration crackdown and these losses continue the quality of community life in rural communities in particular will be substantially diminished. I count this as a significant down-side.
This brief examination of upsides and downsides to the immigration crackdown has barely scratched the surface. Readers will hopefully be motivated to add their comments and in doing so call attention to more “upsides” and “downsides”. Because immigration and immigrants have become such an important part of western economies and so integral to community quality such an examination is in order. Perhaps it can help us better understand who we are, who the immigrants are and what sort of communities we want.