THE best place to witness America’s immigration dilemma is not the US-Mexican border.

Go instead to any suburban school and see the Latino nanny, an illegal immigrant, picking up the children while their middle-class parents are still at work. Or stand outside any office block in the evening, and watch the Mexican janitors go in to scrub out the toilets as the suited workers go home.

Or go to any American meat-packing plant, construction site or tomato field and see the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants employed, at low wages, to do jobs most native-born Americans do not want.

America’s reliance on illegal immigrant labor — to keep the economy buzzing, prices low and the standard of living higher than anywhere else in the world — is the worst-kept secret in the US economy.

Since 1986, it has been illegal to employ workers without the necessary work permits and residency papers, yet the employment of illegal labor is endemic. Everyone knows about it. Publicly, most people deplore it. Privately, everyone does it — often while simultaneously demanding tighter border controls and greater restrictions on immigration. At best, the general American attitude towards employing illegal immigrants involves a strange form of double-think. At worst, it is hypocritical.

The US Government finds itself in the peculiar position of spending huge amounts of money to police a vast border, ineffectively, in order to keep out the cheap labor on which the US economy depends.

Some have compared the immigration issue to that of Prohibition in the 1920s. Public figures loudly condemn the employment of illegal workers, just as they once denounced the demon drink, but trying to persuade them to give it up is another matter.

The illegal nanny has replaced the illicit mistress as the figure most likely to topple a modern American politician.

Zoe Baird, Bill Clinton’s first choice as Attorney-General, was scuppered by her failure to pay taxes for a domestic worker without papers. Kimba Wood, his second nominee, went the same way when it emerged that her baby-sitter was an illegal immigrant.

“Nannygate” rumbles on today. Just 18 months ago, Bernard Kerik, President Bush’s choice for homeland security chief, was dropped when it emerged that he, too, had employed an illegal immigrant as a nanny. In 2000, Linda Chavez, a prominent Latino Republican, wrote a trenchant newspaper column asking: “Wouldn’t it be better to change the immigration laws to allow more people to reside here legally than simply to turn a blind eye to those who are violating the laws now on the books?” A year later, Mr Bush nominated Ms Chavez to be Labor Secretary. But then it was revealed that she had given money to an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who had done her household chores. Her nomination was withdrawn.

American conservatives now want the millions of illegal immigrants in the US classified as felons and a fence built along the Mexican border.

In the meantime, many of those same conservatives, like everyone else, will continue to employ those same immigrants to cut their grass, look after their children and scrub their lavatories.

© Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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