Mexican New Yorkers Are Steady Force in Workplace

Marcus Yam/The New York Times

Teo (last name withheld), a Mexican worker, has a job in a Brooklyn grocery.

By KIRK SEMPLE

Published: September 22, 2010

Night and day, the heavy front door rarely stops swinging. Men and women pass one another at the entrance of a four-story building on 21st Avenue in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, on their way out to work, or back in for a few hours of sleep between shifts. They are line cooks, construction laborers, delivery men, deli workers, housecleaners and gardeners.

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Marcus Yam/The New York Times

Alex (last name withheld) comes home to his wife, Agnes, in Brooklyn about 8 p.m. after working at a grocery six days a week.

A dozen of the building’s 16 apartments are occupied by Mexicans, and most of those have two families per unit, sometimes more. Except for a few women caring for small children, all the adults — about 50 — are employed. Most work long hours, six days a week, for minimum wage or less. Some have two jobs.
The building is a microcosm of Mexican industriousness in New York City. And there are hundreds of others like it, bastions of low-wage work, crowding and hope.
In a time of widespread joblessness, Mexicans in New York have proved unusually adept at finding and keeping work. Of the city’s 10 largest immigrant groups, they have the highest rate of employment and are more likely to hold a job than New York’s native-born population, according to an analysis of the most recently available census data. They are even employed at a greater rate than Mexicans nationwide.
And as they have filled the city’s restaurant kitchens and building sites, they have acquired a reputation for an extraordinary work ethic.
“They put their heads down and work,” said John Delgado, business manager of Local 79, a general building laborers’ union in New York. “They’re very, very humble. They’re dedicated, whether they work half a day or a day and a half.”
That success, though, has a flip side. One reason Mexicans have found work in such numbers, experts say, is that many are illegal immigrants, and less likely to report workplace abuses to the authorities for fear of deportation.
“Illegal immigrants are very convenient,” said Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington. “Employers are quite interested in employing people who are willing to work and to overlook some labor laws.”
Several tenants in the Bensonhurst building said they had held jobs that paid less than the minimum wage. The tenants, who asked that their last names be withheld because they feared being fired or deported, said they had never been paid overtime compensation, were routinely handed the least desirable tasks and were sometimes forced to work on their one free day.
“They can call me and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got to come in tomorrow and work,’ ” said Francisco, 36, who lives in Apartment 3D with his wife and two other couples, and prepares food at a nearby deli. “There’s nothing I can do. I have to go work.”
Across the country, immigrants in general are more likely to be employed than the American-born. They tend to be more willing to move in pursuit of jobs and to take any job they can find, especially if they lack access to unemployment benefits. But Mexicans in New York still stand out in employment statistics, not only in the city but also in the nation.
About 75 percent of all Mexicans in the city between ages 16 and 65 are in the civilian labor force — either working or looking for work — according to calculations by the sociology department at Queens College for The New York Times, based on 2008 census data. Of those, about 96 percent have jobs. Among Mexicans nationwide, that figure is 94 percent.
The employment rate just for New York’s working-age Mexican men is even higher: 97 percent. Only Italians have a higher rate of employed men — 98 percent — though some analysts believe that the census underestimates employment rates for populations with high numbers of illegal immigrants, like Mexicans, because those without papers fear revealing their employment status.
A major reason the job rates for Mexican New Yorkers are so high is the disproportionate number of men and younger people among them, said Laird Bergad, director of the Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
About three of every five Mexican immigrants of working age in the city are men, according to the census data, and more than four of every five Mexican immigrants are in their mid-teens to mid-40s. Those numbers are smaller for Mexicans nationwide — in part, experts say, because the Mexican population in the American Southwest, where Mexican immigrants are concentrated in their greatest numbers, is more established.
Many Mexican men in New York left their wives and children behind when they came in search of jobs. Some of them say the absence of families makes it easier to endure the hardships they have faced, like poor living conditions, and to focus on work.
“Employers love them because they want to work as many hours as they can,” said Robert C. Smith, an associate professor at Baruch College and a leading expert on the Mexican diaspora in New York. “Americans expect accommodations to be made in their personal lives. But these guys have no personal lives.”
The separation can cause deep emotional stress. “It puts tremendous strain on them,” Mr. Smith said. “These guys are away from their families for years at a time. There’s a tremendous amount of loneliness and alcohol abuse.”
He added that while there was nothing intrinsic to their culture or character that made Mexicans better workers than others, a certain pride came with the toil.
Alex, 35, who lives with his brother and their families in Apartment 3C of the Bensonhurst building, said that the hardest tasks at the Manhattan supermarket where he works fell to him and other Mexicans at the bottom of the staff members’ pecking order.
“The Mexicans do the hardest work,” he said. “It’s not necessarily what we want to do, but it’s what we can get to survive.”
In New York, Mexican immigrants are most heavily concentrated in occupations that involve food preparation, according to data collated by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in New York. About 28 percent of all working-age Mexicans are in food-service jobs, while some 20 percent work in construction, the institute found.
The resilience of immigrants in New York has been put to the test during the economic downturn. According to a study released last month by the institute, unemployment rates increased for both immigrants and nonimmigrant New Yorkers from early 2008 to early 2010, but the rate for immigrants remained two percentage points lower than that of nonimmigrants.
The study also revealed that while the percentage of native-born residents in the city’s labor force fell as the worsening job market led many to abandon their search for work, that rate increased for immigrants, as family members with limited or no access to welfare payments and other safety-net protections sought jobs.
Indeed, while several Mexicans in the Bensonhurst building said they had suffered cuts in hours and even days during the worst months of the recession, none said they had gone without work for more than a few days at a time.
Still, most expressed a fear that their most recent paycheck could be their last.
Agustín, 45, who lives in Apartment 1A with four other men, left his wife and children behind in Mexico when he came to the United States in 2006 to find work. He spent most of the first few years picking up construction work around Brooklyn. But with the downturn in housing construction, he looked elsewhere, finding a job this year at a supermarket in Bensonhurst.
He now works 12 hours a day, seven days a week, he said, and is paid $4 an hour, more than $3 below the minimum wage. He sends whatever he can back to Mexico.
“I have a family, so I have to work,” he said late on a recent Sunday as he returned from his shift. He looked ragged.
“If I don’t work,” he said, “they don’t eat.”