The Undocumented Immigrant Might Be Your Neighbor

Joe DiStefano wrote an article in Sunday’s Inquirer that calls on President Obama to fix our broken immigration system.

In his piece he points out how damaging it would be to our economy if mass deportations occurred. The contributions that migrants make to our economy are rarely talked about.

Many migrant workers pay their full share of taxes. They work for employers with false papers. Though an employer may suspect that the worker has given them fake documents, they are not legally bound to turn a worker over to the police. We should all be glad for that.

Do you want your employers playing a policing roll in your life? What if your employer called the police on you suspecting that you use drugs when you not at work or because they believed that you might be a bad parent?

Employers are legally bound to make sure that their workers pay certain taxes such as social security and unemployment compensation. When you fill out your w-4 tax deduction form when you start working, you instruct your employer how much of you income tax to take out. As long as you are paying the taxes that are mandated by law, the employer is in the clear.

Most migrant workers pay their full share, if for no other reason than to not raise any suspicions.

Due to this, migrant workers have paid millions into Social Security, unemployment, Medicare that they will never benefit from. Can you imagine what bad shape our Social Security system would be without the money of migrants? Migrant workers’ money has gone in to support our parents and grandparents.

DiStefano’s pragmatic view on these issues is refreshing.

Mr. DiStefano and I got to speak a little bit for this article.

He quoted me on part of our discussion where I tried to illustrate what a big role migrants play in our society and in our communities …

“There’s a big chunk of immigrants that drive taxicabs. A large Polish and Russian population is doing a lot of service work, child care and back-of-the-hotel service stuff like cleaning hotel rooms. You have a lot of Haitian immigrants in nursing and long-term care,” Rodriguez said. In each group, there are many here without papers.

“Like my dad was for 30 years,” he said. “These people are your neighbors, raising families, going to church.”

This last bit of my quote reminds me of my childhood and how my father, an undocumented immigrant until 1997, contributed to the social fabric of the community.

On Thursday, I will post a story about our lives in Superior, AZ as an example.