LISTINGS |  EDITOR'S PICKS | NEWS | MUSIC | MOVIES | DINING | LIFE | ARTS | REC ROOM | CLASSIFIEDS | VIDEO

Illegal immigrants help take care of our dirty business

North of the border
June 27, 2007 3:05:18 PM
Last July, the Boston Globe found that the Massachusetts State Police employed janitorial crews staffed overwhelmingly with illegal immigrants. The company providing those workers was said to have state contracts worth more than $2 million. The Globe also found that landscapers working at the home of then-Governor Mitt Romney, now a GOP presidential hopeful, had immigration issues.
 
What does this tell us?
 
It shows how illegal immigrants perform part of America’s dirty work, and how many of us choose to more or less ignore this.
 
It’s logical then to conclude that not only “border states” are involved in profiteering on the backs of undocumented workers. Rhode Island mirrors the national conundrum. Employers demand cheap labor; illegals provide it. Weak laws go unenforced. The pool of potential deportees has reached unmanageable proportions, so the problem festers and grows. Yet there is something wrong when the law is flouted.
 
The prestigious Pew Foundation estimates Rhode Island had between 20,000 and 35,000 undocumented workers in 2004.
 
Lisa Hill, a buyer in the Division of Purchasing, says there are 50 active janitorial contracts for state facilities, worth a combined $5,858,000. Of those, 40 contracts (75 percent of the money spent on state janitorial services, not including the courts, which are negotiated separately) are split between TriState Enterprises of Providence and Falcon Maintenance of Johnston. Seven firms share the remaining 25 percent.
 
Cleaning crews for TriState and Falcon include mostly foreign workers willing to work for low wages. Though vendors collect documentation (Social Security numbers, photo ID, and the like) verification of workers’ green card status is not required under federal or state law.
 
The review of the state police in Massachusetts found that 163 of 192 submitted Social Security numbers were bogus, usually lifted from the deceased. So what, one wonders, would a check of Rhode Island’s Social Security lists turn up? (As a result of this inquiry, Hill says the Purchasing Division is considering including a green card pledge in bid specifications.)
 
TriState owner Anthony DeSimone says he accepts workers’ documents at face value and has never fired a worker because of illegal status. DeSimone says the majority of his workers are Latino, although some are from Eastern Europe, Portugal, and elsewhere. (Vincent D’Elia, Falcon’s owner, did not return phone calls seeking comment.)
 
Meanwhile, Bill Shuey, executive director of the International Institute in Providence, which aids immigrants, says it’s hard to imagine tens of thousands of undocumented workers being rounded up and deported.
 
So what’s the answer?
 
The avoidance of anarchy demands laws either be enforced or modified to be enforceable. State and federal officials, more importantly, are bound to uphold those laws, not to ignore or circumvent them to protect profit or avoid inconvenience.
COMMENTS

The dirty work isn't that dirty, cleaning companies is not like picky vegatables in the hot sun. Janitorial companies are loaded with undocumented workers but in your article, you didn't mention health care, as the US is paying for free health care to undocumented workers. Completely free in most cases. I agree there are jobs that Americans won't do and also our national has gotten so expensive but also we have not fixed the US visa system either. I am fustrated with cleaning companies taking business and doing it for nothing, I mean nothing. If this was India or China, I wouldn't have anything to complain about but since it is in our soil, it is getting worse. Here's a company I can talk about for example. Executive Janitorial has for years been using illegal tactics by hiring illegal immigrants from Mexico. They hire people giving them the lowest wages possible and putting them in unsupervised offices which is impossible to detect. Growth is based on under bidding all the competition and making their profit by hiring undocumented workers by cutting their wages. It is terrible that these immigrants work so hard and they make nothing, no benefits, nothing as they are being used for cheap slave labor. Most people who hire Executive Janitorial services know they have possible illegal immigrants working for them but with inflation prices nation wide people just don’t say anything and give them the business anyway. Real Sad Beware, this company has loads of suspicious illegal immigrants, don’t trust them. They pay the lowest wages possible as they under bid all their competition hiring suspicious illegal immigrants to profit from low labor cost. See their web site: //www.executivejanitorial.net Read the story on their success but the editor didn't question their employees //www.topix.net/content/kri/1087892555098107947731848562063103423931 Executive Janitorial has more than 35 vehicles serving San Luis Obispo and Santa Maria California. They employee almost 99% immigrants from Mexico like family members, relatives, cousins, you name it, and they will hire them. Wages they will not tell you over the phone nor will they tell you anything about their clients locations or even if you want to find their locations and report them in. The US Customs Enforcement but is so out numbered as California is loaded with undocumented workers as businesses like this just take advantage of it and employ them. The immigrants come here illegally under difficult situations living in small homes with many people sharing everything in bad conditions. It is horrible that they work for so little are taken advantage of by people employing them for hardly anything to live on. Because Executive Janitorial under bids every client it comes across, they flood the area with their low low competition service as the bidding becomes a medium instead of being competitive, the service is like a bad real estate market going down instead of going up making it a rip off not to the clients but to the workers. If there employees were legal, Executive Janitorial wouldn’t have all these immigrant workers working for them, as they would go somewhere else and make a better living. . If the workers are working for these wages and they have nothing, it is a rip off.

POSTED BY Clark AT 09/19/07 6:31 PM

Login to add comments to this article
Email

Password




Register Now  |   Lost password


MOST POPULAR

ADVERTISEMENT

BY THIS AUTHOR

PHOENIX MEDIA GROUP
CLASSIFIEDS







TODAY'S FEATURED ADVERTISERS
   
Copyright © 2008 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group