15 Years on the Bottom Rung

Newspaper article

By: Anthony DePalma

Date: May 26, 2005

Source: DePalma, Anthony. "15 Years on the Bottom Rung." New York Times (May 26, 2005): A1.

About the Author: Anthony DePalma is an international business correspondent for the New York Times. He has written several books including Here: A Biography of the New American Continent.

INTRODUCTION

Horatio Alger (1832–1899), a contemporary of author Mark Twain, wrote more than 130 popular books. While the details varied, Alger's stories inevitably followed the same predictable formula: a young man is born into a poor family and finds himself facing a difficult life. But the hero of the story becomes convinced that his future can be brighter than his parents', and coupling a deep faith in his possibilities with extreme perseverance, the young man inevitably grows up to enjoy the rewards of his hard work. More than a century after his death, the term "Horatio Alger story" is still used to describe a person who climbs from rags to riches.

Alger's stories were appealing for their simplicity and their optimism. In Alger's world, no obstacle was too great to be overcome by persistence and ingenuity, suggesting that even in Alger's day his stories may have represented a somewhat idealized version of reality. Yet, the story of immigrants finding success in America continues to be told. Andy Grove, a co-founder and later President and CEO of Intel Corporation, was born in Hungary and immigrated in 1957. Ironically, the man responsible for perhaps the most American clothing item known, was an immigrant. Levi Strauss, after arriving from Germany, created the heavy-duty work pants known today as blue jeans.

In 1997, Thomas Stanley and William Danko published a book entitled The Millionaire Next Door. The book, summarizing their extensive research on millionaire households in America, was blunt in its assessment of the role immigrants play in fueling wealth in America. First and second generation immigrants are far more likely to amass large personal estates than their later generation descendents. The authors theorize that the values of thrift, hard work, and a willingness to take risks that immigrants often bring with them are the primary determinants of their success, and that these values tend to get lost as following generations become more Americanized.

Beyond the success of immigrant entrepreneurs, immigrants as a whole have also enjoyed economic success in recent years. The U.S. Bureau of the Census reports that from 1994 to 2000, immigrant poverty rates fell more than twice as fast as rates for other Americans. The same report notes that median family incomes among immigrant families climbed substantially faster than incomes of non-immigrant families. These changes, if sustained, suggest that immigrants will soon have poverty rates equal to the general U.S. population.

While immigrant success stories are inspiring, they do not provide the complete story, and some immigrants find far less success in America. Despite the substantial improvements in poverty rates, the Censure Bureau also reported that as of 2000 poverty rates for immigrants hovered near twenty percent, while those for U.S. natives were approximately half as high. This distinction may be partly due to the low educational level of many current immigrants. Immigrants with poor English skills and little formal education generally find it difficult to complete the education they need to improve their situation.

PRIMARY SOURCE

In the dark before dawn, when Madison Avenue was all but deserted and its pricey boutiques were still locked up tight, several Mexicans slipped quietly into 3 Guys, a restaurant that the Zagat guide once called "the most expensive coffee shop in New York."

For the next 10 hours they would fry eggs, grill burgers, pour coffee and wash dishes for a stream of customers from the Upper East Side of Manhattan. By 7:35 a.m., Eliot Spitzer, attorney general of New York, was holding a power breakfast back near the polished granite counter. In the same burgundy booth a few hours later, Michael A. Wiener, co-founder of the multibillion-dollar Infinity Broadcasting, grabbed a bite with his wife, Zena. Just the day before, Uma Thurman slipped in for a quiet lunch with her children, but the paparazzi found her and she left.

More Mexicans filed in to begin their shifts through-out the morning, and by the time John Zannikos, one of the restaurant's three Greek owners, drove in from the North Jersey suburbs to work the lunch crowd, Madison Avenue was buzzing. So was 3 Guys.

"You got to wait a little bit," Mr. Zannikos said to a pride of elegant women who had spent the morning at the Whitney Museum of American Art, across Madison Avenue at 75th Street. For an illiterate immigrant who came to New York years ago with nothing but $100 in his pocket and a willingness to work etched on his heart, could any words have been sweeter to say?

With its wealthy clientele, middle-class owners and low-income work force, 3 Guys is a template of the class divisions in America. But it is also the setting for two starkly different tales about breaching those divides.

The familiar story is Mr. Zannikos's. For him, the restaurant—don't dare call it a diner—with its $20 salads and elegant décor represents the American promise of upward mobility, one that has been fulfilled countless times for generations of hard-working immigrants.

But for Juan Manuel Peralta, a 34-year-old illegal immigrant who worked there for five years until he was fired last May, and for many of the other illegal Mexican immigrants in the back, restaurant work today is more like a dead end. They are finding the American dream of moving up far more elusive than it was for Mr. Zannikos. Despite his efforts to help them, they risk becoming stuck in a permanent underclass of the poor, the unskilled and the uneducated.

That is not to suggest that the nearly five million Mexicans who, like Mr. Peralta, are living in the United States illegally will never emerge from the shadows. Many have, and undoubtedly many more will. But the sheer size of the influx—over 400,000 a year, with no end in sight—creates a problem all its own. It means there is an ever-growing pool of interchangeable workers, many of them shunting from one low-paying job to another. If one moves on, another one—or maybe two or three—is there to take his place.

Although Mr. Peralta arrived in New York almost 40 years after Mr. Zannikos, the two share a remarkably similar beginning. They came at the same age to the same section of New York City, without legal papers or more than a few words of English. Each dreamed of a better life. But monumental changes in the economy and in attitudes toward immigrants have made it far less likely that Mr. Peralta and his children will experience the same upward mobility as Mr. Zannikos and his family.

Of course, there is a chance that Mr. Peralta may yet take his place among the Mexican-Americans who have succeeded here. He realizes that he will probably not do as well as the few who have risen to high office or who were able to buy the vineyards where their grandfathers once picked grapes. But he still dreams that his children will someday join the millions who have lost their accents, gotten good educations and firmly achieved the American dream.

…

… Resentment and race subtly stand in their way, as does a lingering attachment to Mexico, which is so close that many immigrants do not put down deep roots here. They say they plan to stay only long enough to make some money and then go back home. Few ever do.

But the biggest obstacle is their illegal status. With few routes open to become legal, they remain, like Mr. Peralta, without rights, without security and without a clear path to a better future.

…

Little has changed for Mr. Peralta, a cook who has worked at menial jobs in the United States for the last 15 years. Though he makes more than he ever dreamed of in Mexico, his life is anything but middle class and setbacks are routine. Still, he has not given up hope. Querer es poder, he sometimes says: Want something badly enough and you will get it.

…

There is a break in the middle of the day at 3 Guys, after the lunchtime limousines leave and before the private schools let out. That was when Mr. Zannikos asked the Mexican cook who replaced Mr. Peralta to prepare some lunch for him. Then Mr. Zannikos carried the chicken breast on pita to the last table in the restaurant.

"My life story is a good story, a lot of success," he said, his accent still heavy. He was just a teenager when he left the Greek island of Chios, a few miles off the coast of Turkey. World War II had just ended, and Greece was in ruins. "There was only rich and poor, that's it," Mr. Zannikos said. "There was no middle class like you have here." He is 70 now, with short gray hair and soft eyes that can water at a mention of the past.

Because of the war, he said, he never got past the second grade, never learned to read or write. He signed on as a merchant seaman, and in 1953, when he was 19, his ship docked at Norfolk, Va. He went ashore one Saturday with no intention of ever returning to Greece. He left behind everything, including his travel documents. All he had in his pockets was $100 and the address of his mother's cousin in the Jackson Heights-Corona section of Queens.

Almost four decades later, Mr. Peralta underwent a similar rite of passage out of Mexico. He had finished the eighth grade in the poor southern state of Guerrero and saw nothing in his future there but fixing flat tires. His father, Inocencio, had once dreamed of going to the United States, but never had the money. In 1990, he borrowed enough to give his first-born son a chance.

Mr. Peralta was 19 when he boarded a smoky bus that carried him through the deserted hills of Guerrero and kept going until it reached the edge of Mexico. With eight other Mexicans he did not know, he crawled through a sewer tunnel that started in Tijuana and ended on the other side of the border, in what Mexicans call el Norte.

He had carried no documents, no photographs and no money, except what his father gave him to pay his shifty guide and to buy an airline ticket to New York. Deep in a pocket was the address of an uncle in the same section of Queens where Mr. Zannikos had gotten his start. By 1990, the area had gone from largely Greek to mostly Latino.

Starting over in the same working-class neighborhood, Mr. Peralta and Mr. Zannikos quickly learned that New York was full of opportunities and obstacles, often in equal measure.

On his first day there, Mr. Zannikos, scared and feeling lost, found the building he was looking for, but his mother's cousin had moved. He had no idea what to do until a Greek man passed by. Walk five blocks to the Deluxe Diner, the man said. He did.

The diner was full of Greek housepainters, including one who knew Mr. Zannikos's father. On the spot, they offered him a job painting closets, where his mistakes would be hidden. He painted until the weather turned cold. Another Greek hired him as a dishwasher at his coffee shop in the Bronx.

It was not easy, but Mr. Zannikos worked his way up to short-order cook, learning English as he went along. In 1956, immigration officials raided the coffee shop. He was deported, but after a short while he managed to sneak back into the country. Three years later he married a Puerto Rican from the Bronx. The marriage lasted only a year, but it put him on the road to becoming a citizen. Now he could buy his own restaurant, a greasy spoon in the South Bronx that catered to a late-night clientele of prostitutes and undercover police officers.

Since then, he has bought and sold more than a dozen New York diners, but none have been more successful than the original 3 Guys, which opened in 1978. He and his partners own two other restaurants with the same name farther up Madison Avenue, but they have never replicated the high-end appeal of the original.

"When employees come in I teach them, 'Hey, this is a different neighborhood,'" Mr. Zannikos said. What may be standard in some other diners is not tolerated here. There are no Greek flags or tourism posters. There is no television or twirling tower of cakes with cream pompadours. Waiters are forbidden to chew gum. No customer is ever called "Honey."

"They know their place and I know my place," Mr. Zannikos said of his customers. "It's as simple as that."

His place in society now is a far cry from his days in the Bronx. He and his second wife, June, live in Wyckoff, a New Jersey suburb where he pampers fig trees and dutifully looks after a bird feeder shaped like the Parthenon. They own a condominium in Florida. His three children all went far beyond his second-grade education, finishing high school or attending college.

They have all done well, as has Mr. Zannikos, who says he makes about $130,000 a year. He says he is not sensitive to class distinctions, but he admits he was bothered when some people mistook him for the caterer at fund-raising dinners for the local Greek church he helped build.

All in all, he thinks immigrants today have a better chance of moving up the class ladder than he did 50 years ago.

"At that time, no bank would give us any money, but today they give you credit cards in the mail," he said. "New York still gives you more opportunity that any other place. If you want to do things, you will."

He says he has done well, and he is content with his station in life. "I'm in the middle and I'm happy."

…

Mr. Peralta cannot guess what class Mr. Zannikos belongs to. But he is certain that it is much tougher for an immigrant to get ahead today than 50 years ago. And he has no doubt about his own class.

"La pobreza," he says. "Poverty."

It was not what he expected when he boarded the bus to the border, but it did not take long for him to realize that success in the United States required more than hard work. "A lot of it has to do with luck," he said during a lunch break on a stoop around the corner from the Queens diner where he went to work after 3 Guys.

"People come here, and in no more than a year or two they can buy their own house and have a car," Mr. Peralta said. "Me, I've been here 15 years, and if I die tomorrow, there wouldn't even be enough money to bury me."

In 1990, Mr. Peralta was in the vanguard of Mexican immigrants who bypassed the traditional barrios in border states to work in far-flung cities like Denver and New York. The 2000 census counted 186,872 Mexicans in New York, triple the 1990 figure, and there are undoubtedly many more today. The Mexican consulate, which serves the metropolitan region, has issued more than 500,000 ID cards just since 2001.

Fifty years ago, illegal immigration was a minor problem. Now it is a divisive national issue, pitting those who welcome cheap labor against those with concerns about border security and the cost of providing social services. Though newly arrived Mexicans often work in industries that rely on cheap labor, like restaurants and construction, they rarely organize. Most are desperate to stay out of sight.

Mr. Peralta hooked up with his uncle the morning he arrived in New York. He did not work for weeks until the bakery where the uncle worked had an opening, a part-time job making muffins. He took it, though he didn't know muffins from crumb cake. When he saw that he would not make enough to repay his father, he took a second job making night deliveries for a Manhattan diner. By the end of his first day he was so lost he had to spend all his tip money on a cab ride home.

He quit the diner, but working there even briefly opened his eyes to how easy it could be to make money in New York. Diners were everywhere, and so were jobs making deliveries, washing dishes or busing tables. In six months, Mr. Peralta had paid back the money his father gave him. He bounced from job to job and in 1995, eager to show off his newfound success, he went back to Mexico with his pockets full of money, and he married. He was 25 then, the same age at which Mr. Zannikos married. But the similarities end there.

When Mr. Zannikos jumped ship, he left Greece behind for good. Though he himself had no documents, the compatriots he encountered on his first days were here legally, like most other Greek immigrants, and could help him. Greeks had never come to the United States in large numbers—the 2000 census counted only 29,805 New Yorkers born in Greece—but they tended to settle in just a few areas, like the Astoria section of Queens, which became cohesive communities ready to help new arrivals.

Mr. Peralta, like many other Mexicans, is trying to make it on his own and has never severed his emotional or financial ties to home. After five years in New York's Latino community, he spoke little English and owned little more than the clothes on his back. He decided to return to Huamuxtitlàn (pronounced wa-moosh-teet-LAHN), the dusty village beneath a flat-topped mountain where he was born.

"People thought that since I was coming back from el Norte, I would be so rich that I could spread money around," he said. Still, he felt privileged: his New York wages dwarfed the $1,000 a year he might have made in Mexico.

He met a shy, pretty girl named Matilde in Huamuxtitlàn, married her and returned with her to New York, again illegally, all in a matter of weeks. Their first child was born in 1996. Mr. Peralta soon found that supporting a family made it harder to save money. Then, in 1999, he got the job at 3 Guys.

"Barba Yanni helped me learn how to prepare things the way customers like them," Mr. Peralta said, referring to Mr. Zannikos with a Greek title of respect that means Uncle John.

The restaurant became his school. He learned how to sauté a fish so that it looked like a work of art. The three partners lent him money and said they would help him get immigration documents. The pay was good.

But there were tensions with the other workers. Instead of hanging their orders on a rack, the waiters shouted them out, in Greek, Spanish and a kind of fractured English. Sometimes Mr. Peralta did not understand, and they argued. Soon he was known as a hothead.

Still, he worked hard, and every night he returned to his growing family. Matilde, now 27, cleaned houses until the second child, Heidi, was born three years ago. Now she tries to sell Mary Kay products to other mothers at Public School 12, which their son, Antony, 8, attends.

Most weeks, Mr. Peralta could make as much as $600. Over the course of a year that could come to over $30,000, enough to approach the lower middle class. But the life he leads is far from that and uncertainty hovers over everything about his life, starting with his paycheck.

To earn $600, he has to work at least 10 hours a day, six days a week, and that does not happen every week. Sometimes he is paid overtime for the extra hours, sometimes not. And, as he found out in May, he can be fired at any time and bring in nothing, not even unemployment, until he lands another job. In 2004, he made about $24,000.

Because he is here illegally, Mr. Peralta can easily be exploited. He cannot file a complaint against his landlord for charging him $500 a month for a 9-foot-by-9-foot room in a Queens apartment that he shares with nine other Mexicans in three families who pay the remainder of the $2,000-a-month rent. All 13 share one bathroom, and the established pecking order means the Peraltas rarely get to use the kitchen. Eating out can be expensive.

Because they were born in New York, Mr. Peralta's children are United States citizens, and their health care is generally covered by Medicaid. But he has to pay out of his pocket whenever he or his wife sees a doctor. And forget about going to the dentist.

As many other Mexicans do, he wires money home, and it costs him $7 for every $100 he sends. When his uncle, his nephew and his sister asked him for money, he was expected to lend it. No one has paid him back. He has middle-class ornaments, like a cellphone and a DVD player, but no driver's license or Social Security card.

SIGNIFICANCE

In 2006, questions about U.S. immigration policy rose to the forefront of U.S. political debate. Facing increasing numbers of both legal and illegal immigrants from Mexico, Washington began to buzz with competing proposals to address the problem. The issues being debated ranged from securing the country's porous southern border to whether current illegal workers should be granted amnesty or expelled. Complicating the debate were questions about how each of the proposed changes might impact the U.S. economy.

Proponents of allowing illegal residents to remain recommended a guest worker program, which would allow illegal workers to register and remain in the United States with work permits. Such a program would help move illegal workers onto the tax rolls and allow them to continue working at jobs many Americans do not want. Further, such a program would, by definition, reduce the number of illegal aliens living in the United States.

Opponents of this plan argued that allowing illegal immigrants to obtain legal residency amounted to rewarding illegal behavior, potentially encouraging other Mexicans to enter the United States illegally. In response to lax border security, a group calling themselves the Minutemen carried out missions to apprehend illegal immigrants crossing into the United States while simultaneously lobbying for the construction of a massive wall separating the United States and Mexico. Political analysts predicted that the issue would play an important role in the 2008 presidential election.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Bernstein, Jared, et al. Pulling Apart: A State-by-State Analysis of Income Trends. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute and Center on Budget Policy Priorities, 2002.

Mills, Nicolaus. Arguing Immigration: The Controversy and Crisis over the Future of Immigration. New York: Touchstone, 1994.

Williams, Mary E., ed. Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints. Chicago: Greenhaven Press, 2003.

Periodicals

Ley, David. "Explaining Variations in Business Performance Among Immigrant Entrepreneurs in Canada." Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 32 (2006): 743-764.

"90's Boom Had Broad Impact; 2000 Census Cites Income Growth Among Poor, Upper Middle Class." Washington Post (June 5, 2000).

Scott, Janny. "Census Finds Immigrants Lower City's Income." New York Times (August 6, 2002).

Web sites

Carter, Jimmy. "Jimmy Carter Op-Ed: Employers in Quandary over Immigration Bill." The Carter Center. 〈http://www.cartercenter.org/〉 (accessed June 13, 2006).

Chapman, Jeff, and Jared Bernstein. "Immigration and Poverty: How Are They Linked?" U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 〈http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2003/04/art2full.pdf〉 (accessed June 13, 2006).

The White House. "Comprehensive Immigration Reform." 〈http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/immigration/〉 (accessed June 13, 2006).