By PATRICIA V. RIVERA
The News Journal
05/07/2006
Weeks before Gladys gave birth, she sat inside a small Georgetown clinic, talking about the uncertainty she faced. A basic ultrasound detected an irregular heartbeat in her unborn daughter and doctors wanted a more extensive test that would cost $900 in cash -- as much as her husband makes in a month.
She couldn't afford it, so she waited.
A 21-year-old illegal immigrant from Guatemala, Gladys could do nothing more for her unborn baby than she could have in her impoverished homeland because between 1996 and 1997, federal and state lawmakers slashed health care subsidies to illegal immigrants, cutting them off from many specialized medical services.
In the end, Gladys' baby was born perfectly healthy.
The child is now a U.S. citizen -- eligible for all the medical benefits denied Gladys. That is a perfect illustration of the complex relationship the United States has with many immigrants. Gladys asked that her last name not be used out of fear she could be arrested and deported, an outcome that could force her away from her child -- one of thousands in Delaware born to immigrant mothers.
In 2005, 9 percent of Delaware births involved an immigrant mother, legal and not, producing about 1,030 children. Immigrant mothers accounted for 22 percent of all births in the state financed by Medicaid in 2005, at a cost of $7.6 million.
The economics of illegal immigration are complex. For every study that shows how immigrants boost the economy, another concludes that they deplete the nation's financial resources.
Congress recently stepped into this divide – pitting supporters of
amnesty or guest worker programs against those who want to build a wall
along the Mexico-U.S. border or turn illegal immigrants into felons.
The same debate has consumed many Delawareans – from protest marchers in
Georgetown and Wilmington to residents of Elsmere who defeated a measure to
grant police the power to assess a $100 fine on anyone who couldn’t prove
legal U.S. residency within 72 hours.
By any accounting, the impact in Delaware of immigrant families is growing:
• The children of immigrants are diversifying schools in Delaware – and
overwhelming the state’s classes in English as a second language. Education
officials say they need $1 million to keep up with the growing number of
non-English-speaking students.
• Between 13,000 and 35,000 illegal immigrants hold jobs in the First State
– but the federal State Criminal Alien Assistance Program spent $131,263 in
2004 to incarcerate illegal immigrants serving time here for a felony or two
or more misdemeanors.
• Illegal aliens in Delaware won’t benefit from taxes withheld from their
paychecks for Medicare and Social Security – but 1,628 immigrant children in
the state collected more than $1.5 million in food stamps in 2005.
Recalls fear
Osiel Villalobos was 4 when his mother, with her four children in tow,
made the harrowing trip into the United States to join his father, a
carpenter earning 10 times more than he could have in Mexico.
He can barely remember the trip. Yet he clearly recalls the fear that
gripped the family afterward when even a routine traffic stop could have
meant deportation. The fright evaporated in 1986 when an amnesty for illegal
immigrants allowed his parents to apply for legal resident status.
“We could move around freely without looking over our shoulders,” Villalobos
said.
Today, instead of laboring for long hours and low pay, the Villalobos family
of Bridgeville boasts two nurses and a schoolteacher. Villalobos, 29, is a
skilled welder of high-pressure chemical lines.
Illegal immigrants may not be the drain on the economy many claim.
“The costs affiliated with immigrants are very real,” says Horacio
Aldrete-Sanchez, a director with Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services. The
firm, which provides research and bond ratings to brokerage firms and
investment advisers, released an analysis of illegal immigration last month.
“We concluded that the costs aren’t as significant as most people think,
because the contributions that immigrants make offset the costs to a large
extent,” he said.
The U.S. Social Security Administration maintains roughly $7 billion in
contributions in an “earnings suspense file” made up of W-2 tax forms that
cannot be matched to the correct Social Security number.
The vast majority are attributable to undocumented workers who will never
claim their benefits, Aldrete-Sanchez added.
Immigrants, legal or otherwise, are also consumers who pay sales taxes and
property taxes. The latter help pay for many local services.
The larger problem that Standard & Poor’s identified is that local and state
governments, which provide the majority of the services to immigrants,
receive no benefit from the Social Security funds that could be reallocated.
Living with secrets
Even in today’s high-tech economy, there is a demand for low-paying,
labor-intensive jobs in agriculture, manufacturing and service industries.
The trade-off is a life with many secrets.
“Too often, we think about how much better our lives would be and how much
more we could earn,” said Jorge Luis Perez, 27, a Guatemala national. “We
don’t think about how we’re also selling our souls.”
With other immigrants, Perez founded a theater group in Georgetown. Under
the name Picumay (which stands for Principios de cultura maya or
Fundamentals of Mayan culture), his group is developing scripts about the
struggles of undocumented workers. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, a
nonpartisan research center based in Washington, D.C., undocumented workers
in the United States make up 25 percent of the meat and poultry workers, 24
percent of the dishwashers and 22 percent of the maids and housekeepers.
Foreigners who came to the United States without proper paperwork, or who
outstayed the time allowed by their visas, now live in a social and
political limbo. They face increasing social tension, fueled by economic
factors and arguments that they won’t assume responsibility for having
broken the law by entering illegally.
A bill that passed the House of Representatives would make living in the
United States illegally a felony and would have imposed criminal charges for
helping illegal immigrants. Senators offered competing bills to expand guest
worker programs, but by April the House and Senate versions stalled and
hundreds of thousands of immigrant supporters protested in Los Angeles,
Chicago, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Georgetown, Kennett Square and Washington.
Immigrant protests caught the attention of lawmakers and piqued public
irritation.
Former Lewes councilman Judson Bennett admitted that he had turned a blind
eye to illegal immigration.
“Then I saw these foreign nationals protest on our streets, waving their
Mexican flags and demanding rights that they shouldn’t have,” he said. “I
don’t think I’ve ever been so angry in all my life.”
Illegal immigrants find enough work now, he added. When the construction
boom in Sussex ends, Bennett fears the financial toll the immigrants’
presence might take on the working middle class.
“I want them out of here,” he said flatly.
Villalobos said he sees a growing resentment against immigrants in general.
“We’re being blamed for so many problems,” he said. “Everything nowadays
seems to be our fault.”
The possibility of mass deportations propelled him to lead immigrant rallies
in Sussex County to energize people silenced by fear.
Illegal immigrants can’t use their legal identities and papers to obtain a
job, a driver’s license, or insurance. Without a Social Security card, they
can’t access public services or study in college.
But fake papers do not provide any guarantees, either.
Enrique Orellana, a 40-year-old native of Ecuador, tried to avoid assuming
someone else’s identity, but he found it increasingly difficult to find
good-paying landscaping jobs without them. He finally caved in and bought a
Social Security card and driver’s license.
He was in handcuffs a week later, moments after police stopped him for a bad
headlight. The papers he had purchased matched those of a man named Claudio
Diaz, wanted on drug-dealing charges.
“I finally decided to just do the time so that I could at least have a
chance of staying in the United States,” Orellana said. He spent eight
months in jail and was released when doubts arose that he was not the man on
the driver’s license.
Today, he works in the country illegally under his own name, taking
harder-to-find jobs that pay under the table.
“I’ve already paid for the freedom that I have now,” he said. “I don’t
intend to lose it again.”
Escaping poverty
Today’s illegal immigrants resemble those who arrived in the United
States throughout the early 20th century, said Mark Krikorian, executive
director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington.
They want to escape oppression and improve their children’s future.
Maria Roblero, a 20-year-old Guatemalan now living illegally in Delaware,
left behind a 3-year-old daughter to break out of the cycle of poverty that
had trapped her family for generations.
She endured 12-hour days as a farm worker, barely making enough to pull
meals together. Her daughter played barefooted outside their mud-and-thatch
hut. At times, she wanted more food than her mother could offer. Maria saw
her own sadness reflected in her daughter.
“I never had shoes as child. That was too much of a luxury for my parents,”
she said. “We were really very poor.”
A brother had made his way to Delaware and one day she decided to join him.
Now her daughter plays with dolls and shows off the gifts sent from the United States by her mother, a woman she barely remembers. Maria hopes to return to Guatemala within two years.
Studies show that more than 75 percent of illegal immigrants come here from Latin America.
"Immigrants don't leave industrialized Europe as often anymore," Krikorian said. "They don't need to come here to fill jobs as cheap labor."
The backdrop of the United States, however, is far different now than it was in the early and mid-20th century. The technologically-driven economy demands more, and education plays a key role in success, Krikorian said. That, he said, is where modern-day illegal immigrants run into problems.
A study of undocumented immigration conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center found that undocumented immigrants are far less educated than the rest of the population.
Estimates are that 49 percent of undocumented immigrants have not completed high school, compared with only 9 percent of native-born U.S. citizens and 25 percent of legal immigrants.
"They're not morally different," Krikorian said. "They're still the working poor with kids, but because they're in a highly industrialized society, their use of government services balloons."
Other immigrants come to escape political oppression.
Juan Perez, 47, once taught peasants living in remote Guatemalan villages how to develop cooperatives. The government, however, maintained that his actions provided support to guerrillas engaged in a long war with the country's military.
He never expected to leave his homeland. Then in 1982, from the top of a mountain, he witnessed the massacre of an entire village.
"They came in and shot everyone in sight. I saw everything from afar," he said. "I can still see it all so clearly."
He fled across the border to Mexico. Life was no better there. He lived as a nomad, still in danger from the Guatemalan military. As he moved farther north, he made the decision to jump a notorious fence between Mexico and Arizona.
Today, he's a legal resident and a respected artist who has been supported by the Dover Art League. Perez uses his paintings and other pieces to capture the injustice he endured in Guatemala and the local struggles for workers' rights and socioeconomic justice.
With his wife, Pilar Gomez, he is raising a son.
Immigrants at school
Not everyone comes to the United States to work.
Some undocumented residents come here to search for their families. Others come for an education.
Julio, 18, came for both reasons.
As a child he hoped to be someone important in his community, someone smart and educated. But after his eighth birthday, Julio joined his mother in the coffee fields of San Marcos, Guatemala, because the school in his village ended at the third grade. As he picked the fruit from the coffee plants, his mother promised she would find a way to brighten his future. She confided that his father had chased his dream to El Norte, slang for the United States.
Six years after his mother died of a sudden illness, Julio convinced an uncle to help him track down his father. The journey brought him to Georgetown, where his father had started a life with another woman and saw the teenage boy as an unwelcome burden.
Orphaned and alone, Julio turned to what had offered him comfort so long ago: books. At 16, he enrolled in high school. Julio did want his last name used for this story, fearing arrest and deportation.
No one knows how many undocumented immigrants study in Delaware schools.
Under the 1982 Supreme Court ruling in Plyler v. the Department of Education, public schools can't deny students a kindergarten-through-12th-grade education on the basis of their immigration status.
"We simply do not ask what their status is; we have no data on the number of illegal immigrants here or the dollar amount spent on their education," said Ron Gough, spokesman for the Delaware Department of Education.
The number of students learning English in Delaware schools, however, has doubled since 2000.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that Delaware spent $22.4 million educating illegal immigrant students in 2004. If U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants are included, the figure increases to $53.8 million.
Julio may not realize it yet, but under current law, a high school diploma will not open the doors to a college education. Most states, including Delaware, don't offer in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants, although a few -- such as Utah, Oklahoma, Texas, California and New Mexico -- have residency programs for immigrants.
Treating the children
Nearly two-thirds of the children living in undocumented families are U.S. citizens by birth, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
"The large number of U.S citizen children born to parents with no legal status highlights one of the thorniest dilemmas in developing policies to deal with the unauthorized population," said Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center.
Just weeks before Gladys gave birth, she sat at a small Georgetown clinic, talking about the uncertainty she faced. Another undocumented mother, Clara, and her husband, both of Mexico, listened intently.
Clara, who didn't want her last name used, knows only too well what life is like caring for a child who is not born healthy. Her 3-year-old son suffered from an intestinal defect that an ultrasound specialist spotted when she was pregnant.
"Because of my status, they had to wait until he was born to do anything," Clara told Gladys.
In Delaware in 2005, Medicaid paid nearly $19 million for the treatment of 6,450 children of undocumented immigrants and 3,042 adult undocumented immigrants.
Free prenatal care and testing would almost certainly reduce Medicaid payments for immigrant mothers.
The lack of prenatal care can lead to such medical problems as gestational diabetes, a condition that affects women of color at a higher rate than white women. Many immigrant mothers never get the initial test that would reveal the condition because it is an out-of-pocket expense.
"They don't know that they have it, and that's the biggest risk to the baby," said Cheryl Kokkinos, a nurse midwife at La Red clinic in Georgetown. "It's not unusual for a diabetic woman to have a 10-pound baby."
Larger babies force their mothers to undergo a more costly Caesarean delivery. The child also has a greater chance of developing Type 2 diabetes later in life, another condition that requires continuous care.
Kokkinos said that from a purely economic standpoint, it makes little sense to cut off prenatal care for low-income mothers because taxpayers will pay a much higher bill later when complications arise with their newborns.
During his first two years of life, doctors operated on Clara's boy three times at a cost of more than $100,000 -- paid by Medicaid.
Clara is expecting a second child, who faces some risk of a similar defect. She can't do much other than wait, she said, and pray.
Contact Patricia V. Rivera at 856-7373 or privera@delaware online.com.