The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives by Sasha Abramsky Read Free Book Online Page B

counties of their existence, even absent zoning permits and ownership titles. Others are more haphazard; pirated electricity, water trucked in from miles away, septic tanks in place of sewage pipes, kerosene stoves in place of gas pipes. They are desolate places, overcrowded and underserviced, as rife with sickness and despair as thetenement slums of New York photographed by Jacob Riis more than a century ago.
    Living in abject poverty, America’s undocumented are peculiarly susceptible to disease, to criminal victimization, to workplace exploitation, to living in shanties and colonias. And ultimately, none of the problems that percolate in these environments long remain sealed off within the world of the undocumented. Crime, disease, economic dislocation—all eventually percolate out from their epicenters. When sociologist Katherine Newman, a widely published author on poverty in America, and dean of the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, analyzed data about states with the highest tax burdens on poor families, she found that not only did these states also have higher poverty rates, but most of them had higher crime rates as well as a larger percentage of their population incarcerated. Higher crime rates affect not only poor neighborhoods but entire regions; higher incarceration rates—even if, as many conservative analysts have concluded, disproportionately accounted for by the numbers of undocumented immigrants who end up behind bars—have to be paid for by all taxpayers. And, as anyone who has studied incarceration can tell you, locking people up doesn’t come cheap. In fact, in most states, it costs about as much money to keep someone in prison for one year as it would cost to send that person to an Ivy League university.
    For broad public health and safety reasons, as well as simple budgetary math, any twenty-first-century movement to tackle poverty will have to propose solutions not only to the ingrained hardship of the Lower Ninth Wards of America, but also to the problems of the undocumented. In the same way as those in New Orleans marginalized by the wider society present a set of specific challenges to those interested in tackling poverty in America, so too the undocumented need to be unmarginalized. That is not just a matter of altruism; rather, because of the financial impacts of problems that originate in impoverished communities, it is a matter of profound self-interest for the wider population. The undocumented must beintegrated as much as possible into the broader economy, while at the same time the country works out ways to regain control over its borders, so as to prevent a reemergence down the line of the entrenched poverty of today’s undocumented populations.
    Such is the political balancing act around immigration that a modern-day war on poverty must engage in. It isn’t easy, but it is vital.
    “We have thousands of people crossing into the United States to look for agricultural work in this region. It’s something historic, not created from one day to the other,” said Sin Frontera’s Carlos Marentes in El Paso, Texas, as he walked along the lonely, early morning, detritus-strewn streets lining the U.S.-Mexican border.
    On a day here, we have hundreds of workers coming to this area next to the international border looking for work, and labor agents coming looking for workers. By one or two in the morning, you have many workers looking for work and many employers looking for the most productive workers. In general, the wages of farm workers in the United States are bad. Here, in particular, they are really bad. A farm worker who wakes up at midnight and sets off for the fields at one or two in the morning, and returns to El Paso at four or five or six P.M . It’s so many hours, and they bring in from the fields $20 or $30. They get paid on a piece-rate basis.
    Most of the farm worker families lack a permanent place to live. The farm workers’ center is a