September 18, 2006

Labor Movement

As U.S. Debates Guest Workers, They Are Here Now

In Construction, 'Subidos' Don't Tax Social Services But May Depress Wages

The Epic Drives of the Cantús

By JOEL MILLMAN

The Wall Street Journal

CHARLES CITY, Iowa -- When he is home in Montemorelos, Mexico, Roberto Cantú earns $300 a week pouring concrete. Last month, a labor recruiter called him promising similar work in Colorado and Iowa paying five times as much.

Within hours, Mr. Cantú, his three grown sons and his brother were driving their white pickup truck 250 miles north to the U.S. border, on the way to job sites another 700 miles away. It was the Cantús' fifth trip this year to take temporary U.S. jobs, during which they have crossed 18 states.

The Cantús are among an estimated tens of thousands of Mexicans with an unusual place in the bitter debate over immigration. Thanks to quirks in the law, they have green cards enabling them to come to the U.S. for work stints. Many, like the Cantús, call themselves "subidos" from the Spanish verb for "to rise," because they do the grueling jobs of pouring concrete for tall structures such as grain silos for the ethanol plants increasingly rising across the Great Plains.

President Bush is pushing for the U.S. to adopt its first formal guest-worker program since 1964, a contentious proposal that has helped stall broader efforts at immigration-law changes in Congress. The president says the program would respond to the strong demand for Mexican labor in the U.S., and would reduce the number of undocumented workers sneaking across the border to answer it.

Employer groups and other advocates believe guest workers would boost economic growth in both the U.S. and Mexico. Labor unions and immigration foes call that employer-funded propaganda. Their view: Mexicans would steal jobs and undercut U.S. wages.

The experience of the Cantús and other Mexicans who use green cards to hop across the border provides some intriguing clues about how an official guest-worker system might play out. By quickly filling jobs and providing needed skills, such workers are a boon to employers. They rarely put a burden on social services, because they leave their school-age children and elderly relatives at home. Nonetheless, there is some evidence that the Mexicans drive down wages in the industries where they work.

Some guest workers had their status legalized under the Simpson-Rodino Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which granted amnesty to 2.7 million undocumented workers. It offered that group, who call themselves "Rodinos," the chance at green cards that confer permanent-resident status and the right to work. The act was intended to encourage U.S. citizenship, but some preferred the guest-worker way of life, as the Cantús do, earning wages in the U.S. but keeping their families and their living costs in Mexico.

Others acquired work visas through programs that legalized imported farm workers during times of labor shortages. Still others won green cards after being sponsored by a parent who became a naturalized U.S. citizen, or by marrying a U.S. citizen. About 100,000 Mexicans also legally commute short distances across the border for day jobs in the U.S.

Mr. Cantú's father arrived in the U.S. as a relief laborer during World War II. He worked regularly in the U.S. under the Bracero program for farmhands, which ended in 1964. He became a U.S. citizen in the early 1990s. His citizenship made his children and grandchildren eligible for green cards. It took eight years to obtain them. Since 2003 they have been taking advantage by landing concrete-pouring jobs in the U.S.

The five Cantús keep a brutal pace and spend as much as eight months in the U.S. annually. One day last month, after finishing two 89-hour workweeks in Pueblo, Colo., they barreled across three states in 14 hours to start a job in Iowa. The older brothers, Daniel, 45 years old, and Roberto, 47, split the long drive and arrived just minutes before the night shift began. Daniel headed to a motel to nap; Roberto quickly started work, hoisting himself up a 30-foot scaffold he wouldn't descend until dawn.

Roberto's three sons, 18-year-old César, 20-year-old Mario and 24-year-old Roberto Jr., hopped into town to look for a Mexican restaurant, or at least a 7-Eleven store selling tortillas. They are more comfortable in the U.S. than the older men, mostly because they speak English better. They are the ones who mollify truck-stop waitresses who grow impatient waiting for the older men to order a meal or politely respond to state troopers who occasionally stop them on the road, demanding papers showing they are in the U.S. legally. "We know not everyone wants to see Mexicans in their town," Mario says.

The Cantús are skilled in the continuous-pour construction specialty of subidos, where fresh concrete is pumped nonstop for hours into wooden trenches to harden. That eliminates seams that can trap moisture and freeze during Corn Belt winters. The younger Cantús work as "finisheros," sanding down rough edges of dried concrete.

A $2.4 billion ethanol-plant construction boom is under way in the U.S., according to the Renewable Fuels Association, an industry trade group. Continuous pouring for the silos means round-the-clock work, requiring twice the number of laborers on site. Ethanol plants, situated near their raw grain supply, often are built where skilled labor is scarce.

Midwest construction firms including Fagen Engineering Inc., Granite Falls, Minn., and T.E. Ibberson Co., of Hopkins, Minn., and subcontractors Todd & Sargent and McCormick Construction Co., of Rockford, Minn., find Mexican subidos through a loose confederation of recruiters on the Texas-Mexico border. Those include Ray Maldonado, a Puerto Rico-born, transplanted New Yorker now based in the border town of Eagle Pass. A former laborer, the 52-year-old Mr. Maldonado manages a loyal pool of Mexican workers. He vets work documents of subidos referred by his network of scouts across northern Mexico. He also places some subidos in permanent jobs with U.S. employers.

On a recent Saturday in Laredo, Texas, Mr. Maldonado shepherded 20 workers with their belongings in tiny suitcases and plastic garbage bags onto vans bound for North Dakota. The chain-smoking Mr. Maldonado checked names off a list and answered cellphone calls from workers still en route. As he talked, more crews rolled out of town, two drivers in front, passengers crowded behind, for the two-day drive. Bathroom and food stops are allowed only during refueling.

Sometimes Mr. Maldonado advertises by paying disc jockey Juventino Botello $10 for a 20-second spot on his morning show, on border station XEMU in Piedras Negras. "Workers needed, heavy construction, report to Beto's place in Eagle Pass," Mr. Botello calls out over accordion-laced "ranchera" music.

Around the corner from Mr. Maldonado, rival recruiter Pepe Regosa beat the sidewalks for Younglove Construction LLC of Sioux City, Iowa, which needed 55 men for a job in Missouri. Younglove "hires local guys to do this work, but they don't last," Mr. Regosa said with a grin. "Some leave after one day."

The work isn't just difficult, it is dangerous, too. Just before dawn Friday, 67-year old Jesus Guerrero fell 120 feet to his death, slipping from a scaffold at a silo one of Mr. Regosa's crews is erecting in Underwood, N.D., for Blue Flint Ethanol. "They'll ship the body back to Laredo," Mr. Regosa said. "The company pays."

In Charles City, Iowa, the Cantús joined nearly 100 of Mr. Maldonado's workers building an ethanol-plant corn silo for VeraSun Energy Corp. of Brookings, S.D. Phil Sargent, executive vice president of Todd & Sargent, based in Ames, Iowa, is a subcontractor on the site. He says he would prefer to use local workers but can't find enough of them. "Years ago, this was a summer job for college kids," Mr. Sargent says. He finds the local labor pool has shrunk, while the work has expanded.

Todd & Sargent says it doesn't pay imported workers less than Americans. Most jobs are nonunion. The company must pay additional housing and transportation costs for the subidos.

The accommodations aren't lavish. At the Best Budget Inn in Charles City, the five Cantús were crowded into $30-a-night rooms paid for by Todd & Sargent for the two-week job. Workers on the day shift used the beds by night, while late-shifters crawled in after the shift change at 7 a.m. "I don't have the staff to change everyone's sheets," said motel manager Linda Webb. "I tell each one to show courtesy to the man he's sharing with, and shower before going to bed."

Guest-worker proponents argue that a formal program would minimize costs to U.S. schools and welfare agencies, compared with undocumented workers, because guest workers would be free to cross borders legally and would likely leave their families behind.

Agustín García, a 62-year-old subido from General Teran, Mexico, a city southeast of Monterrey, says he never brought his wife or three children with him to the U.S. during 20 years of temporary work. "A man goes from hotel to hotel, works for maybe a week or two," he says. "He really has to travel alone."

Now, he and his wife share a tidy home in Mexico by a gentle stream, surrounded by households supported by subidos' wages. Mrs. García suffers from high blood pressure and circulatory problems, and benefits from Mexico's free health-care system. Mr. García says if they lived in the U.S., he couldn't afford to pay for her care.

In the U.S., his wages are taxed -- about $25 for every $100 he earns, according to a pay stub from a job Mr. García did this summer building a flour mill in Roanoke, Va. Generally, subidos pay all state, local and federal taxes. They also are covered by workman's compensation insurance in case of on-the-job injury, paying into a fund covering all workers on the job.

Undocumented workers, by contrast, are less likely to pay taxes. They frequently pay thousands of dollars hiring guides to help evade the Border Patrol. That gives them a big incentive to stay longer periods in the U.S. and bring their families across the border, often crowding into the poor neighborhoods they can afford. "We're turning people who would otherwise be temporary workers into permanent settlers," says Wayne Cornelius, an immigration expert at the University of California at San Diego.

The subidos rarely mix with local townspeople. In four years on the road, the Cantús say they haven't attended a baseball game, gone to a movie or visited a national park in the 20 states they have motored through. "We went past that rock in South Dakota once where they have the presidents' faces carved, but it was at night and we couldn't see it," says César Cantú, Roberto's youngest son.

Immigration critics argue that a guest-worker program wouldn't stem the flow of illegal immigrants but simply legalize lawbreakers. Some have a problem with workers like the Cantús as well, contending they are subverting the intent of their visas, which are meant to establish U.S. residency, not just working rights. Technically, they should have a commuter version of the green card, though the distinction isn't strictly enforced.

The presence of so much Mexican construction labor worries union officials in Midwest and mountain states, though demand for construction appears strong enough now to support both foreign-born and local workers. The Pueblo, Colo., cement plant being built by subidos, for instance, is within sight of a massive project, Xcel Energy Corp.'s $1.3 billion Comanche-3 power plant, which employs union workers, nearly all U.S.-born. Ethanol construction tends to be divided between union shops in large towns and subidos in rural areas.

Union officials complain bitterly that competition from Mexico is driving down wages, and there is evidence to back them up. Roberto Cantú's Pueblo pay stub shows he earned $14 an hour for a 45-hour week, and $21 for every additional hour. Pete Mustacchio, business manager of Cement Masons Local 577 in Denver, says Colorado's union pourers earn twice that, including an hourly wage of $23.40, plus health-insurance and pension benefits valued at another $9 an hour. Overtime starts at $35.10 an hour.

Figures compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate wages in concrete work fell 16.5% in 2005 from 2000 -- to $508 a week from $604, adjusted for inflation -- despite a soaring demand for workers. Meanwhile, the proportion of cement workers described as "foreign-born Hispanic" has risen to almost 55% from around 35% in the late 1990s. Statistics suggest many are replacing African-Americans, whose employment in concrete work declined to 9,000 in 2005, from 18,000 six years ago.

David Card, a University of California at Berkeley economist, says the decline in earnings is part of a long-term trend of nonunion construction workers replacing a unionized work force. Other factors are at play besides the subidos. Illegal-immigrant labor drives down wages even more than do legal subidos, and technology has reduced the need for some skilled workers.

An expanded guest-worker program probably would deepen the wage squeeze, says Harvard University immigration economist George Borjas. "I find a 10% rise in worker supply results in a 3% decline in wages" locally.

Earl Agan, business manager of Cement Masons local 51 in Des Moines, says ethanol-plant construction should be a reason to hire more union workers, not fewer. He has 260 members qualified to pour silos, at least 50 of whom are presently without work. "Contractors have my guys traveling all over the country," Mr. Agan says, arguing that remote work sites shouldn't justify importing workers. His conclusion: Contractors want a bigger share of the profit and won't employ union labor if they don't have to.

The Cantús, who were in North Dakota last week building a grain elevator, know their work is controversial. "Our first job was in Peru, Illinois," recalls Mario Cantú, Roberto's middle son. "There was a protest at the gate of the place we were working. I remember they had a big, inflatable rat bouncing around. And people held signs: Mexicans Are Stealing Our Jobs." Nowadays, they sometimes endure the silent treatment on the jobs from other workers, even those born in Mexico. "They say, 'Our job is next,' " Mario adds.

The five Cantús estimate they each earn around $35,000 a year working in the U.S. Daniel Cantú figures it will take him just a few more years of U.S. work to save enough money for his own contracting business. Then he will compete for work year-round in Monterrey, Mexico, where construction is booming. His wife might want to open a dress shop there, he says.

"We wanted to see what working in the U.S. was like," Daniel says. "Well, we've seen it. It's not something you can do forever."

Write to Joel Millman at joel.millman@wsj.com3