It will be difficult for undocumented immigrants to escape poverty if they are legalized

It will be difficult for undocumented immigrants to escape poverty if they are legalized. Supporters of immigration reform have repeatedly claimed that naturalizing 11 million undocumented immigrants will free them from the economic shadow. …

It will be difficult for undocumented immigrants to escape poverty if they are legalized. Supporters of immigration reform have repeatedly claimed that naturalizing the 11 million undocumented immigrants will free them from the economic shadow. They believe these immigrants can move up the economic ladder once they obtain legal status. But in reality, naturalization does not provide a path to good-paying jobs. The New York Times believes that, as in Los Angeles and other cities, even if immigrants receive full citizenship, many continue to survive in the shadows of the economy and continue to earn cash compensation in low-wage positions. Millions of workers across the United States—sewing clothes, mowing lawns, taking care of children, building houses, cleaning offices, and working in restaurants—all rely entirely on a cash economy. For undocumented immigrants, earning cash is the surest way to earn income while avoiding government attention. Supporters of the immigration bill use economic mobility as the main reason to legalize millions of immigrants in the United States. The Congressional Budget Office reported last month that the Senate bill would expand the workforce, boost productivity and have broad, long-term impacts. Business groups continued to pressure House Republicans last week to consider the same bill. According to the New York Times, naturalization alone provides little path to good-paying jobs. Victor Narro, program director at the University of California, Los Angeles, Labor Center, said legal status can eliminate threats to people, but other aspects are difficult to work with. Experts point out that unless the government intervenes, the economic status of new immigrants will not change even if the immigration reform law is passed. The UCLA Labor Center studied employer violations of labor laws in 2009 and found that foreign-born workers were more likely to be paid less than the minimum wage than U.S.-born workers, and undocumented immigrants, especially women, were even worse off. The study also found that even as legal residents, about twice as many foreign-born workers were paid less than the base wage as U.S.-born workers. "Unless the government steps in and actually enforces labor protection laws, even if the immigration reform law is passed, new immigrants will face the same situation, and employers will not automatically change the status quo," Nallo said. Countless workers earning low wages receive cash, regardless of whether their status is legal or not. Some people want to avoid taxes because their income is already low enough, while others are stuck in a dilemma - they need cash, otherwise they will have no work to do. Many workers work in informal corporate settings, such as temporary workers waiting for jobs on street corners, nannies found through social networks, and household owners who do not consider themselves employers and are unwilling to file taxes or suffer the hassle of paperwork. Some work in companies with only a few dozen people, who rely on cash wages to keep costs down. Edgar L. Feige, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin, pointed out that unreported income amounts to approximately $2 trillion each year, and cash wages only account for a portion of this estimate. He noted that the cash economy is particularly important in California, which has more undocumented immigrants than other states. Ruth Milkman, a professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said that the scale of the immigrant workforce and the immigrant economy have allowed business owners to establish a set of unreasonable standards that would be unimaginable in other places and in other eras. He said: "These employers are accustomed to their own way of doing business. They have no incentive to change, and no one is forcing them to change. The immigration reform bill obviously cannot change the practices of these employers who follow the other way around."