There Are None So Deaf . . .

You know how this American dream is. People come here with the hope that they will be able to do what they could not do before--people who are deaf and people who are not. But all of those people come to suffer. The deaf just suffer more.

--A friend of deaf Mexican immigrants who sell trinkets, as quoted in the New York Times.

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Three years ago California conducted a noisy debate on illegal immigration. Well, something got left out. There was plenty of hot rhetoric about “invaders” from Mexico who “just keep coming” to take advantage of the generous American taxpayer. The premise was that these people traveled north, not so much to work, but rather to place their children in public schools and their sick in public hospitals.

This version of reality was more than a little cockeyed, but it prevailed. Prop. 187 passed easily--doing little to staunch the steady human flow northward, but adding a measure of additional misery to the already uncertain lives of undocumented field hands and domestic workers.

Throughout the campaign--for reasons rooted in focus group politics--the best argument was rarely, if ever, raised. The problem with illegal immigration isn’t that, as the Prop. 187 proponents would chant, what’s illegal is illegal is illegal. Nor is it that undocumented workers are stealing good jobs away from Americans.

Rather, it is this: Exploitation. Which is the point now being made, too late for the California debate, with dispatches out of New York City and Chicago and the Carolinas: Stories of deaf Mexican peddlers lured to America and trapped in conditions of servitude, selling trinkets in airports and shopping malls, keeping only a penny of every dollar earned.

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It’s almost laughable, the Prop. 187-induced notion that undocumented workers are the exploiters, while employers and consumers who reap the benefits of low-waged toil are the exploited. Most realists--read, non-politicians--understand the dynamics, understand the tilted balance of power.

California farmers, for example, might pound their chests in public about illegal immigration, but when they talk privately many tend to praise the field hands who drift north without papers. Illegal immigrants aren’t likely to rabble-rouse for union representation. They no sabe Agriculture Labor Relations Board.

And everyday suburban folk who employ the undocumented as their maids and gardeners and nannies might speak loftily about the American dream, about giving someone a chance to earn a decent take-home wage in the underground economy. At the same time, they don’t need to give voice to the obvious: The INS is but a telephone call away. They know it. The nannies know it. It keeps everybody, as they say, on the same page.

Even before Prop. 187, illegal immigrants had reason to be wary of seeking out public services. They might enroll their kids in school, but should trouble come in the night a call to the cops was not necessarily the best option. Cheated of wages, or forced to endure sweatshop conditions, a complaint to the Labor Department was not in the cards. And those whose employers deducted for Social Security always have understood it’s simply lost money, a tariff paid for the chance to work.

What a deal, eh?

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Not surprisingly, it took the deaf Mexicans now in the news some time to summon the courage to approach the police. The familiar dynamics of fear, of powerlessness, were firmly in place. From a federal agent’s criminal complaint, filed in U.S. District Court:

The victims described, upon arrival in New York City, being placed in the two houses. The victims were told to work seven days a week, for 10-11 hours a day or more. They were given sacks to carry the trinkets and were driven, or told to go to, various locations, such as subways and city streets. Most of the victims were threatened with physical harm, loss of food, or other sanctions if they did not make enough money.

. . . Victims have described giving the money they earned to ADRIANA at the end of the day and ADRIANA feeding them small portions. ADRIANA threatened the workers by saying that she would report them to the authorities if they didn’t sell more and make more money.

Of course, conditions are not so bad on most farms, in most garment factories. And of course, the unfortunates did have the option of staying home. Or did they? A raisin grower in Selma, himself an immigrant from Armenia, put it this way a while back, at the height of the Prop. 187 uproar. A man, he said, patting his stomach, has to feed his family. A hungry belly, he said, honors no boundaries.

In the end, the deaf Mexican peddlers have provided only a novel twist on an old, old tale. For all the same, old reasons, “they” keep coming and “we” keep hiring them. And as for their exploitation, well, who wants to hear about it?