Many times they come not of their choice, but because they can't help it. Are there any questions?

Mr. FEIGHAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Dubroff. You have been extremely helpful as you always have been in the past and we are very appreciative of your testimony.

Mr. DUBROFF. Thank you very much.

Mr. FEIGHAN. Our next witness will be Mr. David S. North. The problem of persons who live in Mexico and work in the United States is an aspect of Western Hemisphere immigration urgently in need of reform. There is no doubt that the entrance into the United States of many workers from Mexico has adversely affected employment and working conditions in the areas along the Mexican border. The impoverished condition of many U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens in the border areas is a national disgrace.

On March 26, 1969, I introduced H.R. 9505 together with the distinguished chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, Mr. Celler, and 23 of my colleagues. This bill would require permanent resident aliens residing in Canada or Mexico and working in the United States to receive labor certifications every 6 months. The bill would also remove the provision from the Immigration and Nationality Act which exempts from criminal sanctions individuals who willfully and knowingly employ aliens who have entered the United States illegally.

Our next witness is Mr. David North, vice president of the Trans Century Corp., a private research institution. Mr. North has served as an assistant to the Secretary of Labor, Mr. W. Willard Wirtz, and Executive Director of the Interagency Committee on Mexican-American Affairs, a Federal agency founded by President Johnson in 1967. Mr. North has just completed a year-long study entitled "The Border Crossers, People Who Live In Mexico And Work In The United States" for the Office of Manpower Research of the Manpower Administration. We are very pleased indeed to have you, Mr. North. We certainly welcome your testimony, which I am confident will be of extreme help to our Subcommittee. We extend to you a warm and cordial welcome.

I wonder, would you care to summarize your statement? How long would it take?

STATEMENT OF DAVID S. NORTH, VICE PRESIDENT,
TRANSCENTURY CORP., WASHINGTON, D.C.

Mr. NORTH. I will summarize the statement, if I may, Mr. Chair

man.

Mr. RODINO. Mr. Chairman, before Mr. North presents his testimony, may I say, as an old friend of David North that I welcome his appearance here this morning. He has been one who has been interested at all times in the affairs of our country, and I have some recollections of his aspirations in the past, and I am sure that his presentation this morning is a result of his desire to make another contribution. Mr. NORTH. Thank you.

Mr. RODINO. Dave, I am happy to see you.

Mr. NORTH. Glad to see you, sir. Thank you.

I am delighted to have this chance, Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, to testify in connection with your study of the Immigration Act,

which I know is a continuing process. I am going to be talking about a rather specific part of the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the way it is administered, as opposed to the quite broad comments of the preceding witness.

Speaking in very general terms, there are something like, nobody knows exactly, but something like 100,000 residents of Mexico who are working in the border areas of the United States, and the presence of this vast number of Mexican residents, who come in through a variety of channels which I will talk about a little later, has seriously increased unemployment along the border, has reduced wages along the border, has displaced many of the people living along the border, and forced them to become migrant workers. It is no coincidence that one of the principal sources of migrant farmworkers, which we have been hearing about so much in the last couple of weeks, is the Lower Rio Grande Valley.

This is a very poor area, as many of you know. People living there have a fondness for the area, but they do have to make a living and during the growing season they leave, they head North and West, covering most of the United States, searching for work. The work they do is generally farmwork, and they are rather poorly paid.

The border area is one of the less well publicized poverty areas of the United States. We know about the big city ghettos, and we should be concerned about them, and about southern rural areas that are very poor and about Appalachia. We sometimes forget some of the counties along the United States-Mexican border, particularly along the Texas part of the border, which is so desperately poor. The city of Laredo, for instance, in 1960, had the lowest per capita income for a standard metropolitan statistical area anywhere in the United States. It was the only place in the country where the average annual income was less than $1,000. It was $937. The second poorest standard metropolitan statistical area was nearby Brownsville when there was just a little more than $1,000 per capita income.

Commuters, I might add, should not be confused with the braceros that were the subject of congressional controversy for a number of years until the Congress ended Public Law 78.

The braceros were also Mexican nationals, to be sure. They were predominantly male or totally male as opposed to the commuters who were both male and female, but the braceros were farmworkers and farmworkers only. They only came to this country when some Federal agency, in this case the Department of Labor, ruled that there was a need for them.

Finally some efforts were made to prevent, or at least limit, the exploitation of the braceros, and the American farmworkers with whom they were competing.

None of those things are true of commuters. There is in effect no economic regulation of their arrival and departure. There are other kinds of regulations. They can't have TB and they have to fall in certain immigration categories, or get in illegally, but there is no economic regulation of their arrival. They come whether they are really needed or

not.

Finally there is no protection for them, nor for the people they are competing with. It is one of the ironies of this entire arrangement, and there are several ironies, that the people who suffer most from the

competition of the arriving Mexican nationals are resident MexicanAmericans, people who live in this country who are either citizens or genuine resident aliens.

It should be noted that this is a one-way flow. It is extremely difficult for anybody in this room to get a job in Mexico and live in the United States. If you happen to be manager of a large factory just on the other side of the border and want to live in the United States, that can be managed, but for virtually no other circumstance can it be arranged.

There are three kinds of these workers crossing the border, and I would like to touch on each of them. We have talked about the greencard commuter. Your bill, Mr. Chairman, touches on this, and I think it would be very helpful vis-a-vis the green-card commuter. These are permanent resident aliens, so far as the Immigration Service is concerned, and as the previous witness suggested, there has been an amiable fiction that allows them, although regarded as residents not to live in this country. We interviewed them in the course of our Labor Department study, a copy of which we have presented to you. We found that a substantial proportion of these people had never lived in the United States, and had no intention of doing so.

Green-card commuter families are not all of the same category. The father may have a green card and the wife may have no papers and the kids may be American citizens. It is a very confusing situation, and any legislation should be done carefully, so as not to break up the whole series of families on the border.

The second general category of people crossing the border to work are the illegal entrants. Again your bill, Mr. Chairman, would do something about that. Your bill would make it more possible for the enforcement arms of the Government to move against people who knowingly employ illegal aliens. The exploitation of the so-called wetbacks, and that is not a term that is accepted very well in the Mexican-American community, so I won't use it again, but the exploitation of the illegal entrants is a very real problem. You hear blood-curdling stories about this along the border. It is a difficult problem, because we want to have good relations with Mexico. We don't want the border to be like the border between East Germany and West Germany. But the way it works now, the border is a sieve. People pour across the border, and many of them stay and work, as they shouldn't, and that is a problem that we have been attacking only on one side. We go after the individual illegal entrant and say, "Hey, you don't belong here," and send him back to Mexico. He may or may not get across the border later that afternoon. It is a very relaxed situation, and a lot of people get across. A lot of them are caught. A lot of them aren't caught, and the employer is never punished. I think it is about time that we take a look at the employer of illegal entrants as well as the illegal himself.

Finally, there is a growing group of U.S. citizens who live in Mexico and work in the United States. Some of them have been born in this country. A handful are naturalized. Many came to their citizenship through the process of derivation. I am worried about that third group. Many of those who became citizens through derivation have never lived in this country, in some cases are children of people who never lived in this country, and I think that the process of becoming a citizen by derivation should be examined. I think it should require not only that one of one's parents be a citizen, but also that one spend a year or 2 years

living in this country, so that we do not have a class of American citizens who, for generations, have had no real contact with this country. These three groups of workers, the green-card commuters, the illegal entrants, and to a lesser extent the American citizens who commute, have been causing a series of adverse effects on the residents in the United States who are also trying to live and work in this area. They crowd the labor market, and there are just too many people available for low skilled jobs along most of the border. San Diego is a little different, but for most of the border the labor markets are too loose. There are too many people involved. It is terribly difficult for our own people to get work.

Although we have been discussing the daily arrival of the greencard commuters, they are not in any sense people who should be criticized. They have a terrible life. They are trying to make a living. They are good people. They just happen to be causing serious inconvenience and serious economic injustice to residents of our own country.

Their presence floods the labor market and makes it more difficult for the resident Americans to get jobs. Further, in some cases there is an active discrimination by American employers against American residents. If you hire somebody who lives in Mexico and who crosses on a green card, you are not so likely to have him complain about. the way you run your factory or your farm. He doesn't know what his rights are. He is very reluctant to express his complaints.

There has been documentation on this in the El Paso garment factories by one scholar, and in the farms of the Imperial Valley by California Rural Legal Assistance, that employers will go out of their way to hire the Mexican resident on the grounds he is less likely to join a union, he is less likely to call up the wage-hour people. He is more likely to be a passive employee.

The same kinds of factors depress wages along the border for everybody. One commentator, Michael Peevey of the California State AFLCIÓ called it the "Further Higher" law. The further away you are from the border the higher your wages. He cited shirt pressers' wages in 1966. In the Imperial Valley they were $1.30; in San Diego, a little less affected by the border and about 15 miles north of it, $1.40 an hour; in Los Angeles, 120 miles further north, $1.50 to $1.75 an hour: and in San Francisco $1.98. You could say the same thing about all sorts of occupations across the border.

Let me cite a few more specifics. Along the Texas part of the United States-Mexico border, which tends to be even more depressed than the California and Arizona border, one can very easily hire a domestic servant for $8 to $10 a week-not a day but a week. In fact the U.S. Employment Service will go find you one for maybe $10 or $12 a week, as part of their day-to-day work.

Generally the economic laws-I am not talking about drug laws, but I am talking about economic laws-are enforced with somewhat less than the enthusiasm that one might expect elsewhere in the country. Early one morning in Brownsville I saw children coming across the border claiming American citizenship, showing the border guard their documents, and he was kind enough to let met see what was going on. The children were showing baptismal certificates, or birth certificates, not to indicate their age, but to prove that they were Ameri

can citizens and, therefore, could cross the border. The birth certificates indicated that they were 13, 14, 15 years old, and so on up. This was a school day. It is against the law for children below 16 to work in agriculture on a school day, but nevertheless these children were crossing the border, with a birth certificate in hand, showing it to an official of the Federal Government, and they were about to, within the next half hour or so, violate the Child Labor Act.

Nothing was done to enforce that law. The man at the border was concerned about this law, which is seeing to it that people enter the country who may do so, and the fact that within sight there was a farm labor shape-up, and these kids were getting jobs on farms for pitiful wages was not his concern. This is another indication of the way that economic laws are not enforced along the border.

Similarly we were speaking about the employers of illegals. I know that the social security people never ask to see a list of the employers who employed illegals, and then find out whether or not social security taxes were paid by those employers of illegals. Now the fact that the man is here illegally is irrelevant as far as social security is concerned. His social security taxes should be paid.

We talked to some 85 illegals through the cooperation of the Immigration Service. Most of them didn't have social security cards, or certainly the ones doing farmwork didn't have social security cards, so their employers could not possibly have paid social security taxes. I have outlined the problem. I know there is another witness. Let me quickly tick off some things I think should be done about it.

I think that as of a stipulated date we should issue no more new visas except to those who will live in this country, so that the amiable fiction will come to an end, at least for the people who arrive, say after July 1, 1971. In that way we will not continue to create, as we are doing now, a class of new "green card" holding commuters. This is a step that will cause a minimum workload. It doesn't affect anybody's equity. It would not affect anybody who now has a card. There is not such a provision in your proposal, Mr. Chairman, but I think it might be added to your proposed legislation.

Secondly, I would advocate the passage of a bill such as the one you introduced, Mr. Feighan, regarding the reissuance of a labor certification or something like it every 6 months to make sure that the incoming "green card" commuters were not working at such depressed rates as to adversely affect American workers on this side of the border. Those regulations should be imposed thoughtfully and slowly and carefully so that they tend to raise the wages along the border, rather than dislocating a lot of people overnight, which is another possibility.

I think the border crossing procedures themselves should be changed and tightened. We have heard questions in the other body, "Why can't you work out a commutation ticket of some kind?” Currently, if the alien is picked up 2 hours later or 10 days later or 3 years later, he can say, "I crossed this morning," and there is nothing that anybody can do about it.

I would suggest that the whole technique for issuing border-crossing cards, which are for tourists, should be tightened, so that the cards cannot be abused, as they are now. Most of the people who are here illegally didn't wade the river, as the term "wetback" implies. They got through the border perfectly legally. What they did wrong was