Do you know the way to San Antonio?

With enough work for all, including illegal immigrants, the booming Texas city is the future face of the American workforce.

By Cary Cardwell

Read more: Politics, Labor, News, Immigration

Photo by G Ferniz/San Antonio Express-News/ZUMA Press

Thousands gathered at a rally on immigration reform on April 10, 2006, in San Antonio.

May 2, 2006 | SAN ANTONIO -- It's lunch hour and workers at the Rim -- San Antonio's busiest commercial work site -- are hiding from heat that's already hit the mid-90s. That's not "in the shade." There is none of that on this wound of raw land, once a cement quarry, located on the northwest side of this booming metropolis of 1.6 million. Driven by San Antonio's hot economy, the Rim is destined to become the city's newest "lifestyle center." That means more than a million square feet of high-end shops like Neiman-Marcus and Bass Pro Shops, served by clusters of restricted residential housing, and a half-billion dollars in annual revenues.

It also means a labor market with jobs for just about every man and woman who wants one: residents, legal immigrants and migrants without papers who paid a "coyote" $300 to swim them across the Rio Grande and hide them in the back of a truck for the three-hour drive north. San Antonio is a city that has reached an accommodation with its laborers and the legal status of its workers, and it's a family secret of sorts -- not one that's well kept. Undocumented laborers are a vital component of the city's workforce.

At the Rim, workers sit in pickup trucks, engines running $3 a gallon gas to power the air conditioning for a half-hour respite. Pete Infante, 31, an apprentice electrician, moved to San Antonio eight months ago from Chicago and has experienced both sides of the endless debate about America's undocumented workers. His father was an undocumented immigrant from Guanajuato, Mexico, who brought the family to Illinois, where Pete was born, thus becoming a U.S. citizen. The family was reared in Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas, amid the thriving winter fruit orchards that required migrant labor to flourish.

"It's all about opportunity," Infante says of undocumented workers. "Like my father, they come here to make a better living for their families. They don't come to just sit around. You start off as a day laborer. That's where a lot of the undocumenteds work at first. Then maybe you've got a family that's in the trades. They're already working. And they ease you in."

Opportunity is what brought Infante to Texas. With its open shop laws that allow most employers to hire non-union workers, Infante could earn his journeyman's license quicker and without coming up through the union ranks. He makes $15 an hour even as he works toward that license.

Infante points out that in Chicago, where he worked at a hydraulics manufacturing plant, the factory was run by Polish-Americans, who looked out for new relatives arriving from Europe "to ease 'em into the job market" and help them obtain work permits. "It's the same everywhere," he says. Asked about undocumented workers at the Rim, Infante says you see them doing drywall and cleanup, making little more than minimum wage. Do they take jobs that American workers want? Infante shakes his head. "Would you do a laborer's job in this heat for minimum wage?"

Whatever one's position on the immigration debate -- whether you favor open borders or a 700-mile fence -- it would pay to examine San Antonio. It's the future. "Look at San Antonio, and you're seeing the diversification that's coming," says Steve Murdock, the Texas state demographer and a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Of the 1.6 million residents of San Antonio's metropolitan area, almost 900,000 are Hispanic, most of them Mexican-Americans. It's impossible to know exactly how many are "illegal'' or in the city without proper documents from the U.S. government. Eleven million illegal workers is a widely accepted national figure commonly used in the ongoing debate.

But what makes San Antonio different from other major Texas cities is that Latinos here are more likely to be second, third or fourth generation. "I find more Hispanics in San Antonio who don't know Spanish than I find in Houston or Dallas," Murdock says. The last census reported that two-thirds of the Latinos who migrated to Texas between 1995 and 2000 came from another country such as Mexico, while only one-third of the Hispanic immigrants in San Antonio came from outside the U.S. "In San Antonio, one is used to having multiple cultural groups in harmony," Murdock says.

Murdock believes the diversity of San Antonio is as necessary to the economic health of the city, as it will be in the future to Texas and the U.S. "Immigration in general is the difference between the U.S. and what you see in Western Europe," he says. There, the population of whites, along with people of working age, has been declining for some time, and the aging population is putting ever increasing burdens on medical care and pension care. Only immigration is replenishing the West European workforce, and the same will become increasingly true for America. Economic self-interest demands that America accommodate these new workers.

And contrary to a widely held belief, illegal immigrants are not a negative drain on the social services network. "Most [undocumented] immigrants do pay taxes; most do have Social Security taken from them, and they won't be collecting Social Security when they get old," Murdock says. "And they're not eligible for most welfare plans."

While San Antonio has not grown rich off its immigrants -- it continues to be regarded as a low-wage, low-skill workforce -- it has experienced low unemployment and rapid growth for almost two decades. The Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce reports that the city added 12,000 new jobs in the last quarter of 2005. The unemployment rate stood at just 4.3 percent. Applications for new single-family residences increased 49 percent from the last quarter of 2004 compared to the last quarter of 2005.

"The San Antonio market is growing exponentially," says Tami Munson, a project manager for a large commercial painting contractor, and a board member of Associated General Contractors. "There's enough work to go around for everybody."

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