Race, Immigration and Employment
Recently, my husband was in the hospital for a long period. Day after day, I stared into the hundreds of faces going back and forth down the hospital hallways. What struck me as I watched the many, many employees come and go was how stratified the culture of that big city hospital seems. It looks as though there is a rigid hierarchy based on class and race. People from the same groups staff the positions in the different areas of work. I’m not naïve. I know this happens in other settings not just the workplace. But at the hospital, it seems so rigid as to underscore the institutional nature of it.

 I guess I was prompted to think about it by a column I had just read in Teaching Tolerance titled “Why Do They Always Do Outside Work?” (Teaching Tolerance magazine, number 32, Fall 2007) In it African American author Dana Williams talks about her son’s perception of Hispanic immigrants. He thought they all worked outside. She explained to him that the job market for people with language barriers and minimum education is often made up of manual labor positions, i.e. “outside work.” That also explains in part what is going on at the hospital. I might not have thought anything else about it except that then I read another column, this one in The Boston Globe. It was by business columnist Steve Bailey and was called “Immigration and race“(Boston Globe/Business, 2/8/08).  He was talking about “the negative economic consequences of immigration on the employment rate and wages in the African-American community.” He argued that Hillary Clinton was telling “difficult truths” when she said, “I believe…that in many parts of our country, because of employers who exploit undocumented workers and drive down wages, there are job losses.”  He intimated that Barack Obama was being less truthful when he said, I think to suggest somehow that the problem we’re seeing in inner-city unemployment…is attributable to immigrants…is a case of scapegoating…”

To me both statements are true and that is what I was seeing at the hospital. The institutionalized exploitation of both American born people of color and immigrants through wage manipulation and unequal educational opportunities. And I think that this is the point that white people ignore when they give the “American dream”, access to all speech.    

So I wonder if it looks the same way in other hospitals in the country or is it unique to Boston where I live. (This place has a problem with the polarization of groups in general) I’d like to know what people in other parts of the country observe especially folks who work in hospitals.