Workers of our World, Legal or Not

Around the world, May 1 is celebrated as International Workers' Day. For the last two years, Americans have marked the holiday with marches demanding reforms to improve the lot of working people and immigrants, both legal and illegal.

It's an instructive transformation because, political posturing and media demagoguery notwithstanding, America's immigrants belong to the world of work, and their interests and those of the U.S. economy are inextricably linked. The number of marchers was down this year -- partly, analysts believe, because there's no prospect of winning comprehensive immigration reform in Congress, partly because activists are busily turning legal immigrants into citizen voters (2.7 million immigrants are still eligible to register in L.A. County alone) and partly because a wave of federal raids has thrown a chill on immigrant communities.

One of the singular features of this year's rallies in L.A. was the vocal support marchers received from Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and an array of business leaders who have asked that federal authorities confine their raids to abusive workplaces. As economist Jack Kyser pointed out, local industries that employ high numbers of immigrants -- fashion, food processing and furniture manufacturing -- created 500,000 jobs and paid $18.3 billion in wages in 2006.

Immigration is one of those campaign issues in which rhetoric and reality continue to move further apart. Cardinal Roger M. Mahony -- like Villaraigosa and Police Chief William J. Bratton (who recently affirmed his support for Special Order 40) -- knows this issue from the street up. That's why he wrote to the presidential candidates in December, decrying an electoral debate "characterized by verbal assaults on undocumented immigrants, assaults which have had the effect of alienating immigrants to our country -- not only the undocumented but also legal immigrants and newly naturalized citizens."

That alienation is no doubt part of what chilled this year's May Day turnout in Los Angeles. As Mahony went on to point out, "Immigrants are needed to work in industries important to our economy, yet there are insufficient visas to allow them to enter and work legally.

"It's easy to proclaim support for legal immigration. It is more difficult to explain that the current system does not encourage legal immigration of low-skilled workers and that the best interest of the nation requires that the rules be changed."