While immigration may not dominate the headlines, it’s one of
those issues that simmers under the surface and rises to the top
with just the right news story. Such was the case with the now
well-known yarn of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who outed
himself as an illegal in a recent issue of the New York Times
Magazine. A new paperback released this week,
Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs [Most]
Americans Won’t Do, tells a similar story. The book is
written by a white, American, Spanish-speaking journalist who spent
a year doing migrant jobs.
In Working in the Shadows, Gabriel Thompson, a
journalist who covers Latino culture, decides to go undercover and
work several migrant jobs for two months at a time and detail his
experiences. Thompson’s various jobs provide for eye-opening
journalism. The work — he cuts lettuce in Yuma, tears chicken
breasts at a poultry plant in Alabama, shuffles flowers and
delivers food in New York City — is physically demanding and
emotionally taxing. The hours are as long as the pay is small.
Thompson’s reporting sheds light on dreadful migrant labor
conditions — his peers in the bike-delivery industry are severely
underpaid and overworked — but the political undertones in his
book reek of common liberal arguments on the issue.
Those arguments have been popping up everywhere lately,
since Jose Antonio Vargas — a Filipino shuffled in with fake
papers who didn’t realize until his teens that he was, in fact,
undocumented — came out in his
4,500-word piece. Vargas’ story is not entirely uncommon, but
it is rare that someone of his profile — he shared the
Pulitzer Prize with a group of Washington Post reporters
for coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings — should out himself
purposefully. Vargas spends most of his first-person narrative
describing the logistics of maneuvering through typical American
stepping stones, hurdles to him— Social Security cards, driver’s
licenses, job applications — while declaring that his motivation
was pure: He believed if he just contributed to American society in
a major way, he would “earn” citizenship. It
provokes a debate about self-worth as much as it does about
immigration, but his attempts to solicit empathy about his hidden
life grow tiresome and by his article’s conclusion incite the
opposite emotion.
Writes Vargas: “There are believed to be 11 million
undocumented immigrants in the United States. We’re not always who
you think we are. Some pick your strawberries or care for your
children […] I grew up here. This is my home. Yet even though I
think of myself as an American and consider America my country, my
country doesn’t think of me as one of its own.”
No, America doesn’t. Just as scribbling down a few paragraphs
does not a Pulitzer-Prize winner make. Never does Vargas
contemplate that immigration restrictions exist for reasons that
have little to do with him personally. This same mindset plagues
Working in the Shadows (to which Vargas would probably
give two thumbs up.)
Thompson uses his experiences to highlight both labor and
immigration reform. It hardly seems fair to him that so many
migrant workers — legal and illegal — are performing jobs
Americans won’t do, yet their compensation, emotionally and
financially, remains small. Indeed, many Americans won’t cut
lettuce in the blistering Arizona sun for twelve hours a day, but
then, many migrant workers aren’t willing to stay in their home
country earning $10 a day for the same work, when they can earn
nearly $9 an hour in Yuma.
Vargas tried to “earn” American citizenship through his
vocation. Ironically, the migrant workers Thompson gets to know do
as well. Both the undocumented and guest workers he meets seem glad
to earn American wages with which they can support themselves and
even loved ones back home.
Both Vargas’ and Thompson’s tales testify that in the right
context, hard work and upward mobility go hand in hand. But neither
makes a very compelling case that an entire country’s immigration
policy should be based on the self-esteem of two unrepresentative
individuals.
