Immigration - Part 4 - Fear

My boss’s family is from mainline Philadelphia. His mother’s father was a society doctor and they moved in the orbit reserved for hangers-on to the well-to-do. The family tree she chooses to remember is her mother’s from Virginia.

She was raised to rule, and she and one of her daughters treat our foremen and a few of the workers as "our darkies." They make familiar comments to them about their families or waist lines, that have the unspoken message of control.

But like many one-time southerners, they divide our workers into the equivalent of house slaves and field slaves. At the same time the woman treats the foreman as a family retainer, she harbors the darkest suspicions which usually emerge in facile generalizations about "Mexicans." Just the other day she said the foreman thinks like a Mexican, but that can’t be helped, it’s what he is. Anyway, he has to be watched, or else he’ll lay off all the Anglo workers and hire only Mexicans he can control. He wants to be a padrone.

In her inherited world of privilege, children do not aspire to be employees or bureaucrats or professionals, but entrepreneurs. Her son, my employer, decided he could never become independent as a contractor to the wealthy; his only hope was real estate.

Like many others, he’s been buying middle class homes in a changing neighborhood, then subdividing them into apartments. The local rents are so high, people can only afford them if they double up. So, the tenant of record is essentially forced to convert the apartment into a boarding house. To keep this illegal density hidden, his mother and wife watch that utility bills betray nothing.

He prefers to rent to immigrants because they are hard working and less likely to cause problems or trash the property. They also rarely speak English, which means the foreman must act as a go-between.

My boss converted the garage of one of the houses into an office, and is working to have the lot subdivided. Until that happens, our office is a zoning violation and we cannot have any identifying sign outside without attracting the attention of the building inspector. If we hadn’t tried to renew our business license, he wouldn’t know about us and our name would still be over the door. We’d be illegal, but not harassed.

Recently, we did not receive our checks from our payroll service. This has happened before when someone new at the express delivery company left our packages at the house with our address. The tenants sent their children over with it. This time, school was in session and no package.

My boss’s mother, who manages the office, began to panic. The fact her son was away for training fed her feeling she was in charge and had to act to protect his best interests.

We sent one man who speaks rudimentary Spanish over to the tenants to ask after the package. One unit was empty; a sleepy man answered the door in the other. He probably didn’t recognize our employee and said there was nothing.

The woman decided it was time to act. She called the payroll company and demanded they void the checks and resend new ones.

Meantime she was talking to her other daughter, still in suburban Philadelphia. The woman’s a recovery alcoholic; her daughter’s in the process of divorcing one. The younger woman apparently blames immigrants for some of her woes, especially the fact that the only job she can find is managing a restaurant with higher paid immigrant workers.

The older woman began talking about how "these Mexicans" can’t be trusted and began suggesting they had opened the package and cashed the checks. With all those illegal documents they have, it’d be simple. Who knows what other fantasies formed in her mind. She began to sound like she’d met Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas.

The one idea that didn’t occur to her was that the tenants weren’t likely to jeopardize their apartment by opening something with their landlord’s name on it.

We called the Spanish-speaking foreman who called the woman at work. She told him the package was in the house and we could go in to get it.

Only, we didn’t have a key. In all the manipulations to convert and maintain the apartments at minimal cost, duplicate keys had gotten hopelessly confused.

We took the one key that had the apartment’s label and tried it. We went together because I wanted a witness if I entered someone else’s abode. She wanted company because she was simply afraid. The key didn’t work.

We went back to the office and waited. To fill time she sorted keys until she found another that might fit. By then though, she was too worked up to go over. She spent the remaining hours telling me I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.

She also went over to the offices of the express delivery company and complained. The new route driver came over to apologize, and demonstrate he now knew where we were. She called the man responsible for the lot split demanding action. He didn’t return her calls. She demanded answers when a subcontractor came in who used to have the apartment keys. He finally offered to test things for her on his own time.

She was helpless passing time, waiting for someone to come home, but she had successfully proven she could make other people jump to her bidding.

When the replacement checks arrived she put them in her brief case.

When the foreman returned, late in the afternoon, he called the tenant again and was told the man was on his way home. She fretted, until the foreman finally got the misrouted package. She put it her briefcase and left.

The next day, after 5:30, the foreman and some of the guys were having a beer and talking when one of the men called to say his check had been refused at the bank. The foreman’s wife called to tell him she saw two deposits in their account.

When I called the woman, she refused to let me write replacement checks for anyone but the person who had been refused, and then only because he was going on vacation. She claimed it was just his bank. If he had taken it to the bank that wrote the check everything would be OK. She implied Mexicans just needed to learn how to do things in America.

Her plan was that each person should try to cash his check Saturday morning at the issuing bank and leave a message on the answering machine if they had problems. She would then write only the necessary checks on Monday.

It didn’t occur to her she was demanding that they each risk humiliation or embarrassmet, or that they might prefer their usual bank.

After everyone left, I called her son to let him know I did not know if we had paid his employees or not. He was angry he had not been notified as soon as the package did not appear.

We got lucky. The checks were OK, and only the one employee had a problem. Since I assume he had used that bank before, he must have come upon an employee suspicious of any customer with an accent. The banks posted the voided transactions over the weekend.

The woman has been angry with me ever since for notifying her son, and instead of accepting his requests that she have nothing to do with the company’s finances, has made it clear I’m not to have anything to do with payroll or checks.

She’s also still pressed to show she’s in charge. She relabeled the keys another employee just reorganized, returning them to the chaos only she understands. She’s still asking the subcontractor why he hasn’t tested doors and is calling the surveyor everyday for a progress report. Her son is finding other ways to extricate the company finances.

Life as it’s lived in the demimonde of an aging woman determined to stay useful to her son, the long term consequences of petty slights suffered by children who grow up treating others as servants whose role is to take blame and smile, the hell of alcohol and failed marriages. That day the personal intersected with the grey world created by politicians elected by such people who intimidate managers whose employees then feel free to act on their fears and prejudices to turn the lives of immigrants, legal and otherwise, into an invisible world of humiliation and overcrowding that forces them to have to accept the unacceptable - leaving work on payday not knowing if their checks are good enough to buy groceries.