Immigrants Exploiting Each Other In San Francisco’s Chinatown—And The American Taxpayer Is The Ultimate Victim

Do we need immigrants this dumb? And this evil? Apparently immigrants are exploiting each other. And as the debate rages over skilled and unskilled immigration levels, few are talking about the impact of family based immigration, which makes up 85% of immigration to the United States, and even fewer are dealing with the issue of wage stagnation and the impact of legal and illegal immigration.

However, the impact on wages and government expenditures of legal and illegal immigration is profound. But even less debated is the quality of the immigrants who are coming to the United States. Nothing more describes the problem of low quality immigrants than a lesson from the sanctuary city of San Francisco.

SFGate February 13, 2013 by John Cote

SF Restaurant Pays Back Wages, Fines [1]

(02-13) 14:54 PST San Francisco -- San Francisco officials have secured $525,000 in back wages and penalties from the owners of a Chinatown restaurant accused of forcing employees to work 11-hour days, six days a week for less than $4 an hour, with at least one doing double duty as a maid at the owners' Telegraph Hill home, court documents show.

The settlement with the owners of Dick Lee Pastry Inc. is the single largest payment the city has received as it tries to protect workers from wage theft, a national problem in which employees, often recent immigrants with limited English, are paid below minimum wage and forced to work long hours without overtime...

"We want to make sure that we're sending a message that we're serious about fighting wage theft and policing unfair competition," said City Attorney Dennis Herrera, whose office sued Dick Lee Pastry and its owners, Peter Yu and Ada Chiu, in July 2011 after the couple allegedly tried to thwart enforcement by the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, which oversees compliance with the city's labor laws.

Of course, Yu and Chiu are descendants of immigrants, if not immigrants themselves. They are also Chinese and had no problems with exploiting their fellow Chinese countrymen.

Of course we don't know how Yu and Chiu arrived here, perhaps they were paper [2] sons [3] as well, illegal themselves, anchor babies, we just don't know.

Herrera's office accused Dick Lee Pastry, which operates a restaurant at 716 Jackson St. with an all-you-can-eat buffet, dim sum and pastries, of forcing employees to work between 11 and 14 hours a day, six days a week, for $1,100 a month. That's less than $4 an hour. The city's minimum wage when the case was filed was $9.92 an hour. It's now $10.55 an hour.

And then we have the exploited immigrant:

One employee, who asked to remain anonymous because she feared being "blacklisted" and unable to work at another business in Chinatown, said she knew nothing about minimum wage or overtime laws when she got the job in 2005, shortly after immigrating from the Taishan region in southeast China.

"I did everything; whatever the boss asked me to do," the woman said through a Cantonese interpreter. City officials say she is owed the most from the settlement - $89,000 from about five years of back wages.

"They only gave me three hours on my paycheck, but I worked 9 (a.m.) to 9 (p.m.) - 11 hours because I got an hour for lunch," she said.

The woman said she quit in 2010 after her bosses wouldn't let her take more than two weeks off to deal with a child care issue involving her young son.

She did not know about minimum wage, overtime or just about anything. Even in China there are minimum wage and overtime laws. They aren't much enforced, but there is much social discord [4] because of the corruption and Communist Party control of Chinese labor unions and government officials. But most Chinese aren't stupid. They know about it.

Then how did this woman fail to learn anything since moving here in 2005? Obviously she could not be bothered to learn English. But she apparently missed all the pro-labor propaganda distributed by the U.S. Department of Labor, the State of California, and the City and County of San Francisco, all in Chinese [5], as well.

Is this woman one of the so-called entrepreneur class that Marco Rubio [6] and Walter Russell Mead [7] want? More likely the unskilled immigration that both want to increase as well. We don't know though how this woman got here. Legal or illegal, we don't know. However it is much more likely she came here legally as part of our family oriented immigration system. A system supported by the slave power because it brings in low IQ immigrants like our nearly too stupid to survive example.

In the end she quit, but note the lack of mention of husband, but mention of a child. And you know who paid for all that medical care and food stamps...Legal or illegal, she gets free healthcare [8], advertised in Chinese, and, since she has an anchor baby she gets the rest of the welfare system as well, WIC, food stamps, section 8.

But what need does this country have of someone so stupid she basically worked as a slave voluntarily for 5 years. Remember her explanation for the horrid situation: "I did everything; whatever the boss asked me to do..."

And this Scrooge like employer did not stop with exploiting one immigrant:

Another employee, who said she bused tables, handed out leaflets to solicit customers and was a house cleaner at the owners' home at night, said through an interpreter that she was fired the day city labor inspectors came to the restaurant.

Another immigrant who is going to build a new business where Americans can't [9] according to the Wall Street Journal [10]? I don't think so [11]. 

Even worse though is that immigration has also brought the citizens and taxpayers of the City and County of San Francisco another expense. The expense of chasing after all the immigrants who are exploiting other immigrants.

All these investigations by the City Attorney and the Department of Labor Standards Enforcement [12] are not free. The taxpayers spend mucho dinero on protecting immigrants from their kith and kin.

San Francisco is among the leaders in cracking down on the practice, collecting $7 million in back pay and interest for workers and $456,000 in penalties and costs since the city's minimum-wage law took effect in 2004, not including cases referred to state investigators or private attorneys.

The enforcements (sic) have come against businesses ranging from a car wash that had a city contract, to a pizza joint, as well as restaurants in Chinatown.

Hhhmmm, methinks I know that car wash...but one digresses. 

In the end, immigration is a burden, whether it is low IQ immigrants dependent on welfare or exploited by other more entrepreneurial immigrants who want to recreate the virtual slave labor of China right here in America. Neither group is contributing to this country, but burdening Americans with dealing with the problems their mere presence creates, as well as the more direct costs of maintaining their lifestyles with free medical care or food stamps.