PhillyDeals: Benefiting in their labor, but refusing legal status

The 42 janitors busted last week in Norristown for sweeping without papers, and the Bryn Mawr and Cherry Hill car-wash managers indicted in May for giving dozens of car-buffers phony IDs, and the 64 Christmas-novelty workers charged earlier this year with being "illegally present" at their Bristol jobs were caught in a growing crackdown on foreign laborers who lack U.S. work permits.

At the rate it's going, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement district based in Philadelphia will detain 7,000 workers this year, up from 5,600 last year, 4,000 the year before, and 3,700 in 2005, said ICE spokesman Harold Ort.

Nationally, immigration prosecutions are also way up. Immigration-law violations accounted for more than half the 16,000 cases filed by U.S. attorneys in April, and phony-work-document charges have replaced drug charges as the lead accusation in federal district court prosecutions, says Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

"We've ramped up the enforcement efforts. We're going to continue to do so," Ort said.

Agents don't like it when we call them raids. "Everything we do is the result of a lengthy investigation," Ort said. "We believe strongly in what we do."

The Norristown job was smooth: ICE had the janitors' boss, ABM Industries Inc., call suspected foreign workers to a King of Prussia meeting, grabbed them, and let the working moms - half the group - go home with electronic monitors. Plans are to deport them all.

The Norristown workers got unusual attention because they cleaned county-owned buildings at taxpayer expense. They got unusual public support because some were active in the Service Employees International Union, which has organized ABM workers to push for better working conditions, and at St. Patrick's Church, which has ministered to Norristown immigrants since the days, before the laws changed, when a laborer like my grandfather could take a ship to Ellis Island and get permission to work here just by asking for it.

There are signs the crackdown is working as designed. Mexico's central bank last month reported that money sent home by Mexican workers in the United States dropped slightly from the year before for the third straight quarter.

Is less immigration good? Not for U.S. employers who want immigrant labor, or consumers who buy their goods and services.

But others want illegal immigration stopped. Last summer, I interviewed Elsmere, Del., councilman John Jaremchuk at a small rally in Wilmington's Rodney Square, where he was protesting a big bank that makes loans to noncitizens.

Jaremchuk, who has sponsored anti-immigrant ordinances, made it clear that he and his supporters, many of them middle-age homeowners, like their towns quiet and don't like the impact of all the young immigrant workers who fill low-rent apartments and crowd the new stores and restaurants catering to their community.

Well, lots of people don't like their neighbors. But Jaremchuk doesn't see why he should have to put up with them, if they're not here legally.

Being here legally isn't an option for most unskilled immigrant laborers under current U.S. law. The choice they see is: risk working here to feed the family or stay home and let the kids go hungry, as janitor Lucia Bacilla, one of the Norristown janitors, told Inquirer reporter Nick Pipitone.

Whose problem is this? In the Philadelphia area, bakeries, cleaning services, farms, lawn services, restaurants and small factories rely on immigrant labor. Some have for a couple of generations.

They'll have to pay more, charge higher prices, or cut production if their low-wage labor supply gets tighter. All bad choices in a recession.

It's hard to fault immigration agents for doing their job. It's not hard to question Homeland Security's focus on busting poor workers instead of focusing on other needs, or to blame the strange combination of government policies that has allowed employers and consumers to benefit from underground foreign labor, while refusing legal status.

States like Pennsylvania have even stopped their former practice of giving residents driver's licenses without regard to legal status. Does Harrisburg feel safer if the alien nationals among us are unregistered and uninsured?

Both major-party presidential candidates - and President Bush - have supported more-realistic immigrant-labor policies. But they have failed to get useful reforms past Congress. Too many people prefer to keep most immigration illegal, even as the nation benefits from underground foreign labor.

"We need immigration reform," said Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Ort. "Until then, we're going to do what we do in a safe and professional manner."

has headed north for vacation, and will return Aug. 18.