I thought I share this interesting perspective on the contirbution of
"illegal immigrants" in the US:

-Laye
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What America Owes Its 'Illegals'
*by Barbara Ehrenreich
<http://www.ilw.com/articles/2007,0820-ehrenreich.shtm#bio>*

Rush Limbaugh has been expecting liberals to start "whining" about the $5000
fine undocumented immigrants will have to pay to gain citizenship under the
new immigration
bill<http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/06/12/america/NA-GEN-US-Bush-Immigration.php>,
but most liberals have been too busy chortling about the immigration-induced
split in the GOP to make their own case against the bill. So let a mighty
whine rise over the land: Undocumented workers shouldn't be fined; they
should get a hefty bonus!

All right, they committed a "crime"--the international equivalent of
breaking and entry. But breaking and entry is usually a prelude to a much
worse crime, like robbery or rape. What have the immigrants been doing once
they get into the US? Taking up time on the elliptical trainers in our
health clubs? Getting ahead of us on the wait-lists for elite private
nursery schools?

In case you don't know what immigrants do in this country, the Latinos have
a word for it--*trabajo*. They've been mowing the lawns, cleaning the
offices, hammering the nails and picking the tomatoes, not to mention all
that dish-washing, diaper-changing, meat-packing and poultry-plucking.

The punitive rage directed at illegal immigrants grows out of a larger
blindness to the manual labor that makes our lives possible: The touching
belief, in the class occupied by Rush Limbaugh among many others, that
offices clean themselves at night and salad greens spring straight from the
soil onto one's plate.

Native-born workers share in this invisibility, but it's far worse in the
case of immigrant workers, who are often, for all practical purposes,
nameless. In the recent book *There's No José Here: Following the Lives of
Mexican Immigrants<http://www.nationbooks.org/book/8/There%92s%20No%20Jos%E9%20%20Here>
*, Gabriel Thompson cites a construction company manager who says things
like, "I've got to get myself a couple of Josés for this job if we're going
to have that roof patched up by Saturday." Forget the Juans, Diegos, and
Eduardos - they're all interchangeable "Josés."

Hence no doubt the ease with which some prominent immigrant-bashers forget
their own personal reliance on immigrant labor, like Nevada's Governor Jim
Gibbons, who, it turns out, once employed an undocumented nanny. And as the
*Boston Globe* revealed late last year, Mitt Romney's lawn in suburban
Boston was maintained by illegal immigrants from Guatemala.

The only question is how much we owe our undocumented immigrant workers.
First, those who do not remain to enjoy the benefits of old age in America
will have to be reimbursed for their contributions to Medicare and Social
Security, and here I quote the website of the San Diego
ACLU<http://www.aclusandiego.org/>:


Undocumented immigrants annually pay an estimated $7 billion more than they
take out into Social Security, and $1.5 billion more into Medicare.... A
study by the National Academy of Sciences also found that tax payments
generated by immigrants outweighed any costs associated with services used
by immigrants.

Second, someone is going to have to calculate what is owed to "illegals" for
wages withheld by unscrupulous employers: The homeowner who tells his or her
domestic worker that the wage is actually several hundred dollars a month
less than she had been promised, and that the homeowner will be "holding" it
for her. Or the landscaping service that stiffs its undocumented workers for
their labor. Who's the "illegal" here?

Third, there's the massive compensation owed to undocumented immigrants for
preventable injuries on the job. In her book *Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight
for Immigrant Rights*, Jennifer Gordon reports such gruesome cases as a
Honduran who died from inhaling paint while sanding yachts in Long Island
and a Guatemalan worker whose boss intentionally burned him with hot pans of
oil for not washing dishes fast enough. "Death rates for Latino workers,"
Gordon reports, "have risen over the past decade even as workplace fatality
rates for non-Latinos have fallen."

When our debt to America's undocumented workers is eventually tallied, I'm
confident that it will be well in excess of the $5000 fine the immigration
bill proposes. There is still the issue of the original "crime." If someone
breaks into my property for the purpose of trashing and looting, I would be
hell-bent on restitution. But if they break in for the purpose of cleaning
it--scrubbing the bathroom, mowing the lawn--then, in my way of thinking
anyway, the debt goes in the other direction.

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