The Hunted

"What we need to do is create an immigration system that will fill the gaps of the jobs Americans are leaving," says Ben Johnson, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Immigration Policy Center. "American workers are going after jobs with more education and training, but building houses, cleaning and caring for children still need to be done, so the role of a functional system is to provide legal ways for workers to come here. All the picture-taking and all the border-watching isn't going to change a broken immigration system."

A large number of experts agree that immigrants fill a labor vacuum that's broadening as baby boomers retire and Americans become more highly educated. Immigrants fill one-fourth of construction jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, and a high number of those workers are in the country illegally.

"There's a lot of construction work in the area, and there's a limited workforce," says James Schwinkendorf, executive director of the North Texas Contractors Association. "The average age of a construction worker is approaching 50. In some segments of the industry it's pretty tight right now—the number of individuals pursuing those trades, there's simply not enough of them."

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in October that immigration would have to rise to 3.5 million people annually to overcome the effects of an aging population, and while the close-the-border camp rightly points out that immigrant labor hurts low-skilled, American-born workers, the 500-plus economists who sent a letter to President Bush in June calling immigration a net gain for the economy said the depression of wages is relatively small. A pair of Harvard economists found that dropouts suffered most from immigration and had seen their wages fall by 8.2 percent, but many experts also point out that the share of American adults without a high school diploma has plunged from more than 50 percent in the 1960s to just 15 percent today.

On October 10, his wife had been admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with placenta previa, a condition in which the placenta implants in the lower uterus near the birth canal, often causing hemorrhaging. He visited her every evening while their 3-year-old stayed with relatives. The electricity in their apartment had been shut off because he couldn't afford to pay the $300 he owed for the past two months.

Most of the other laborers were also getting less work, and as they stood in the cold waiting for jobs, they talked about forming a union, a remarkable step for people whose existence here depends on silence, on eking out a living under the radar screen. It was an idea that had been kicked around for a long time and resurfaced whenever someone was stiffed by a contractor who failed to pay and then disappeared, or promised one hourly fee in the morning and paid another at the end of the day. The year before, a contractor who hired Jimenez to dig ditches in Lancaster switched the hourly pay from $8 to $7 and told him there would be no lunch or water breaks. When Jimenez balked, the man told him to fuck off and left him standing in the field. He hitchhiked back.

La Estrella had reported that the Minutemen were sending letters to contractors, and now that the workers saw the results, their talk translated into action. Jimenez and a half-dozen other laborers called Spanish media outlets, heard about the National Day Laborers Organizing Network—a coalition of day laborer unions across the country—and got in touch with Carlos Quintanilla, a Latino activist frequently quoted in the media.

Some of their peers approved of the idea, but others said it would do nothing but get them in trouble. Even if la migra didn't come for them, they said, it would just be a waste of time because no one would ever listen to them. But Jimenez was determined.