A Slippery Place in the U.S. Work Force
By JULIA PRESTON
Many immigrants from Latin America are learning how uncertain their foothold is in the work force.
MORRISTOWN, Tenn.—The faithful stand and hold their hands high, raising a crescendo of prayer for abundance and grace. In the evangelical church where they are gathered, the folding chairs are filled with immigrants from Latin America.
Balbino Lopez Hernandez, who came here illegally from Mexico, closes his eyes to join the hallelujahs. But after the service Mr. Lopez, 28, a factory worker who has been unemployed since June, shares his worries about jobs and immigration raids with other worshipers.
Like many places across the United States, this factory town in eastern Tennessee has been transformed in the last decade by the arrival of Hispanic immigrants, many of whom are in this country illegally. Thousands of workers like Mr. Lopez settled in Morristown, taking the lowest-paying elbow-grease jobs, some hazardous, in chicken plants and furniture factories.
Now, with the economy spiraling downward and a crackdown continuing on illegal immigrants, many of them are learning how uncertain their foothold is in the work force in the United States.
The economic troubles are widening the gap between illegal immigrants and Americans as they navigate the job market. Many Americans who lost jobs are turning for help to the government’s unemployment safety net, with job assistance and unemployment insurance. But immigrants without legal status, by law, do not have access to it. Instead, as the recession deepens, illegal immigrants who have settled into American towns are receding from community life. They are clinging to low-wage jobs, often working more hours for less money, and taking whatever work they can find, no matter the conditions.
Despite the mounting pressures, many of the illegal immigrants are resisting leaving the country. After years of working here, they say, they have homes and education for their children, while many no longer have a stake to return to in their home countries.
“Most of the things I got are right here,” Mr. Lopez said in English, which he taught himself to speak. “I got my family, my wife, my kids. Everything is here.”
Americans who are struggling for jobs move in a different world. Here, it revolves around the federally financed, fluorescent-lighted career center on Andrew Johnson Highway, a one-stop market for unemployment insurance and job retraining.
One worker who frequents the center is Joe D. Goodson Jr., 46, who was laid off more than a year ago from his job at a nearby auto parts plant. Born and raised in Morristown, Mr. Goodson said his savings had run low but his spirits were holding up, so far.
Through the career center, Mr. Goodson enrolled in retraining at a technology college. He believes that the government aid system, though inefficient and overwhelmed, will give him just enough support to survive the economic storm.
“I just try to look on the positive side always,” Mr. Goodson said. “Work hard. Things get bad? Work harder.”
What help there is for illegal immigrants in Morristown comes mainly from churches, like Centro Cristiano Betel Internacional, where Mr. Lopez connects with a word-of-mouth network to find odd jobs.
Nationwide, Hispanic immigrants, both legal and illegal, saw greater job loss in 2008 than did Hispanics born in the United States or black workers, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Nearly half of foreign-born Hispanics are illegal immigrants, according to the center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.
Some illegal immigrants who lost jobs here, mostly workers with families back home, have left the country. Most are determined to stay. Employers, wary of immigration agents, now insist workers have valid Social Security numbers. Mr. Lopez, who does not have one, said, “Without the number, you are nothing in this country.”
Gaining a Foothold
In a paradox of globalization, immigrant workers moved from Mexico to Morristown just as many jobs were migrating from here to Mexico.
The influx here came as Hispanic immigrants were spreading across the United States, moving beyond traditional destinations in California and the Southwest to take jobs in the Northern Plains and deep into the South.
As recently as 2006 and 2007, more than 300,000 Hispanic immigrants, legal and illegal, were joining the United States labor force each year, drawn by jobs in meatpacking, construction and agriculture. They now make up nearly 8 percent of the work force.
In Morristown, a manufacturing city set among Appalachian farmland, the loss of jobs to Mexico and other countries with lower wages depressed local factory pay long before the immigrants appeared. But while the poorest American factory workers watched jobs leave, Americans with skills found new jobs in plants making auto parts, plastics and printing supplies.
The 1960 census did not record a single immigrant in Hamblen County, of which Morristown is the seat. By 2007, Hispanic immigrants and their families made up almost 10 percent of the county population of 61,829, having nearly doubled their numbers since 2000, census data show.
The immigrants started in tomato fields nearby, but by the late 1990s labor contractors were bringing migrant crews into town, to fill jobs in construction and at factories like two poultry plants belonging to Koch Foods, a company based in Illinois.
The result was a two-tier blue-collar work force. Hispanic immigrants—many hired through temporary staffing agencies that offered no vacation pay or health coverage—were on the bottom, in jobs where they faced little competition from Americans.
Prof. Chris Baker, a sociologist at Walters State Community College in Morristown, said many factories in the region had been able to hang on because of the immigrant workers. “The employers hire Latinos, and after that, they leave,” he said. “It goes from white to black to Latino to—gone.”
Some residents did not take kindly to the immigrants, especially the illegal ones. But their ire was not about jobs; it was mainly directed at the school board, for devoting tax money to an international center to help Spanish-speaking students learn English.
In the summer of 2006, one member of the Hamblen County Commission, Thomas E. Lowe, organized a demonstration against illegal immigrants in front of City Hall. It fizzled after the police, fearing disorder, turned out in a show of force.
Then the friction abated. The United Food and Commercial Workers won an organizing drive at Koch Foods by gaining the support of immigrants.
Mr. Lowe did not win re-election. The city chose a mayor, Barbara C. Barile, who describes herself as “an inclusive kind of person.” She created a diversity task force and proposed an annual immigrant fiesta. In December, she sent police officers to accompany a midnight procession through downtown honoring the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Mexican patroness.
But an immigration crackdown by state and federal authorities stirred the waters again.
A few years ago, even illegal immigrants in Tennessee could obtain driver’s licenses, buy cars, open bank accounts and take out mortgages. In 2006, the state canceled a program that authorized immigrants who were not legal residents to drive.
Cooperation increased between state and local police and federal immigration agents. For illegal immigrants, minor traffic stops could escalate and end in deportation. After immigration raids in the region, employers and temporary agencies started to give closer scrutiny to identity documents.
An Immigrant’s Life
One immigrant whose Morristown welcome ended abruptly was Balbino Lopez Hernández.
After sneaking across the Arizona border at 17, he joined a brother who lived in Morristown. In 2004 he landed a job at Berkline, a furniture company known for reclining chairs whose headquarters are in town.
Mr. Lopez earned a minimum of $8.85 an hour assembling heavy metal frames for chairs and sofas. But, like other immigrants here, he measured the job against pushing a plow in Mexico. By that standard, he said, it was a “blessing.”
At Berkline, seasoned American employees tended to avoid the physically demanding position in which Mr. Lopez was placed, at the head of an assembly line. Mr. Lopez loved the job, and before long he was one of the more productive workers on the floor. The high productivity of new immigrant workers was one reason employers like those in Morristown were glad to hire them, economists said.
Mr. Lopez’s task was to swing metal bars into place, then use a noisy drill, over and over, to secure dozens of screws, nuts and washers. The bars had sharp edges, and his arms are covered with scars. Still, he was content because he set his own pace.
“Always,” he said, “I go to work and do my job and come home, to make myself happy and make them happy too.”
Though he is not a legal resident, Mr. Lopez allowed his name and photograph to be published because his status is known to immigration authorities.
The assembly floor operated on an incentive system: the more frames Mr. Lopez made, the more he earned. But his energy put pressure on others on the line, including some Americans who were not interested in doing more work without a raise.
Mr. Lopez, shy and soft-spoken, did well at work but poorly in love. One girlfriend, an American, three weeks after giving birth to his son, Jacob, left Mr. Lopez to raise the boy alone. Another took to drugs and was frequently in trouble with the police.
His luck changed when he met Brittany Martin, 18, a tall blonde with a level head. Last January, he decided to spruce up his cottage in preparation for marriage, so he picked up his speed at Berkline.
“I would get my sandwich and just eat there, eat and work,” Mr. Lopez said. “I never stopped for nothing.” Soon he was producing three times his weekly quota of chair frames, sometimes making more than $1,000 a week, pay stubs show. Some Americans started to taunt him, calling him “money man.”
“Why does that Mexican make so much money?” Mr. Lopez said one worker asked within earshot.
Not long after, on June 11, a senior manager summoned Mr. Lopez, saying Berkline had been alerted that he might be an illegal immigrant. He confessed and was fired.
Mr. Lopez believes that someone, perhaps a co-worker, turned him in. Two days later, the Morristown police, citing the false Social Security number he had presented at Berkline, arrested him on charges of criminal impersonation. Although those charges were soon dismissed for lack of evidence, the police reported Mr. Lopez to federal immigration agents.
Dennis Carper, senior vice president for human resources at Berkline, confirmed that Mr. Lopez had been terminated because of his invalid Social Security number. He said Berkline did not report Mr. Lopez to the police.
Mr. Lopez is now fighting deportation. He and Ms. Martin married in July and are expecting a child in May. He was released from detention to care for his wife and son, but since he was ordered deported before the wedding, it is not certain he will be able to stay.
While his immigration case proceeds, he remains unauthorized to apply for a job. He is scrounging for bits of work, fixing cars and patching roofs, and praying at Centro Betel. It is bad, he said, but Mexico would be worse. “In my country,” he said, “I’m just going to feed my family salt and tortillas.”
The Shadows
In some ways, since Mr. Lopez no longer has to hide, he has advantages over many immigrants in Morristown.
Enrique C., 48, and his wife, Rita, 38, both illegal immigrants from Mexico, learned how vulnerable their livelihood here was when both of them lost their jobs in recent months. The couple, neither of whom speaks English, asked that their full names and photographs not be published because they feared detection by immigration authorities.
During the long nights of winter, after their sons, 12 and 13, finished their homework, they turned off all the lights in the cottage they own except one bulb and gathered around a space heater. On some nights cockroaches emerged, seeking the heat.
Rita had held night-shift jobs in sweltering factories and on the chilly deboning line in a Koch chicken plant. Since she worked mainly through temporary agencies, when the crunch came she was one of the first to go.
Her husband worked from 2001 until last August at Hardwoods of Morristown, a wood-floor maker, earning $8.75 an hour splitting planks with a whirring saw. For years Enrique liked his job, and his bosses praised him, he said, for doing the work of two men.
But over time he had run-ins with supervisors, starting when they disagreed over the treatment of a wrist injury.
He complained that splinters tore his gloves. Bathrooms were filthy, he said, and the plant posted a rule limiting when workers could use them. He took photographs of clogged toilets and collected bagfuls of ragged gloves.
After seven years, Enrique, who admits he can be ornery, lost his temper one day and insulted the plant manager. The official separation notice states that he was fired for insubordination. Tim Elliott, a top executive at Hardwoods, wrote in an e-mail message that a worker who “refuses to do a task assigned to him” would disrupt the teamwork the company requires.
“They fired me because I started to make demands,” Enrique said.
Once defiant, Enrique now lives looking over his shoulder and avoiding confrontation. Although his driver’s license has expired, he drives a carpool with three other workers for an hour twice a day to a job he found through a temporary agency in a furniture factory for $7 an hour.
It is a job he cannot lose. He has a mortgage to pay, and he is determined to see his sons go to college. “We’re going to go along very quietly,” Enrique said. “We don’t want to be deported.”
The Americans
At the Five Rivers Regional Career Center, the cubicles of computers with free Internet are filled every day with anxious job seekers. For several weeks in January, phones the state set up to receive applications for unemployment insurance were inundated, often giving callers only busy signals. Career center staff members did their best to help, but more than one of them said they had taken a “cussing ” from a desperate worker.
For Joe Goodson, however, the recession is old news. He was laid off in December 2007, along with 67 other workers, after 17 years at the Morristown plant of the Lear Corporation, which makes auto seats.
One day at the career center, Mr. Goodson, a welder and United Automobile Workers member, spoke with pride of his skills. He started out as a manual welder, but through retraining he learned how to operate the metal stamping press he was running, for $17.80 an hour, when the layoffs came.
Mr. Goodson said he watched the Lear work force shrink over the years, as the company installed robots and sent manual welding work to a plant in Mexico. These days, he said, managers are only “thinking about self.”
“It’s gone away from the team thing,” he said.
Four months after being laid off, he took an offer for retraining at the Tennessee Technology Center in Morristown, where he is studying coils and coolants to become an air-conditioning technician.
Through the career center, he collects unemployment insurance and a gas allowance, and his tuition is paid by federal Trade Adjustment Assistance funds, which support workers laid off when jobs move overseas. He squeaks by on odd jobs he does for his parents, both retired.
“I’ve never seen a car that didn’t have a seat,” said Mr. Goodson, who still believes that Lear will one day call him back. If not, he is ready to put his new skills to use in another career.
Because of the government support and retraining, Mr. Goodson is not considering the low-paying manufacturing jobs that Morristown’s immigrants hold.
“I’m not too good to do any job that another man would do,” Mr. Goodson said. “But I’ve got many other skills.”
Other Americans in tougher spots who visited the career center said those jobs were their last resort. Donnie Parker, 45, was laid off in September from his $14-an-hour job as a skilled machine mechanic at a Koch poultry plant.
Because of a bureaucratic snag, Mr. Parker has not been able to collect unemployment insurance. After paying a mortgage for 13 years, he missed three payments and lost his house in December. He and his teenage son moved in with his 72-year-old mother. He borrowed from his sister to buy gas to make the trip to the career center. He traded his new truck for an older one, then the old truck’s transmission gave out.
His only defense against the calamity is a wry laugh.
Like Mr. Goodson, Mr. Parker sees a narrow path opening before him through the unemployment system: he recently received a retraining grant. With food stamps and his income tax refund, he might just make it.
While he is waiting for school to begin, Mr. Parker is adopting a new strategy. He decided last week to apply for a few minimum-wage factory jobs that were advertised at the center, after having avoided them until now.
“I didn’t know it would get this bad and last this long,” Mr. Parker said. “Seven dollars is better than no dollars.”
Even in the recession, he said, it would not make financial sense for him to stay for long in that kind of job. “With my kid, I can’t live on a minimum-wage job,” Mr. Parker said. “There is no goal to reach. You’re pretty much stuck.”
Although Koch has hired more Americans this year for its poultry production lines, Mr. Parker is not thinking of going back there in a low-end job. “It’s nasty and cold,” he said.
Hanging On
As the recession worsens here—unemployment in this region was 11.2 percent in January, compared with 8.5 percent nationwide—Americans and immigrants are struggling, separately, to hold on to their gains. To date, tensions over jobs have not surfaced.
Melissa B. Reynolds, the coordinator for the career center, said Americans worried about receiving their benefits and getting help finding new jobs, not about competition from immigrants.
“We don’t have anyone that has any beefs with the Latino population that I’ve seen come and go through here,” Ms. Reynolds said.
If the slump is long, unemployment benefits run out and the safety net wears thin, that could change. Across the country, in an industry like construction with large numbers of Hispanic immigrants where job losses have been especially steep, the fight for jobs could produce conflict.
Demetrios G. Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research center, said that if Americans were forced to take jobs below their expectations for too long, competition—and animus—could increase.
“American people who are hurting economically for a long while may start to identify immigrants as the cause of that pain,” Mr. Papademetriou said.
Mr. Parker, though he is hurting, said he did not look to place blame. “It’s not Hispanics I’m competing with,” he said. “It’s everybody. I’m not angry at no one who’s trying to find a job and work. They’re doing the same thing I’m doing.”
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James P. writes:
Tim W. writes: