Many immigrants in the United States find themselves harassed, ticketed and even thrown in jail by the police for trying to make an honest living selling food, small articles of clothing or their own labor. In many areas, day laborers are constantly under siege from local police, the INS, and unscrupulous employers. In California, day labor has been outlawed in over 20 cities. Street vendors in Los Angeles have been struggling for a decade to legalize some sort of status for themselves, while the police continue to arrest them and confiscate their goods. In November, 1997 a snow cone salesman was detained and then charged with resisting arrest when he asked why the police were pouring his syrups down the sewer.

The treatment of day laborers and street vendors fighting to be able to work seems ironic in a political climate in which immigrants are accused of bloating the welfare rolls. Yet immigrant street vendors and day laborers are only the most visible, and vulnerable, tip of a growing informal economy in the industrialized world. Researchers on the phenomenon have defined the informal economy in relation to state regulation. While a variety of activities and arrangements can be categorized as part of the informal economy, they all have in common the production of goods and services in an unregulated manner. We can see the informal economy working all around us: industrial homework; computer programming under the table; non-licensed garment shops; in-home catering services; domestic workers for whom no employment taxes are paid.

The expansion of the informal economy runs counter to traditional ideas about economic growth. Mainstream, and even Marxian, economics predicted that the economy would become progressively more formalized and regulated with ever-larger units of production; thus informal sectors would disappear. However, the last twenty years have shown a systematic reverse in this trend. The new global economy is based on networks of small units of production which lend themselves to informal relationships and practices. The dynamics of global competition also drive employers to cut labor costs to a bare minimum. Informal arrangements often avoid such expenses as workers' compensation insurance, social security taxes, unionized wages and overtime pay.

Moreover, the growing economic and social polarization which we are experiencing under the global economic order also promotes informal economic activities at both ends of the spectrum. Growing numbers of high-wage earning families employ in-home nannies, house-cleaners and gardeners; they consume handmade and homemade goods such as furniture, boutique clothing, and specialty foods; they buy homes in gentrified urban neighborhoods rebuilt by small construction contractors relying on temporary laborers. On the low-end, the ever-growing ranks of poor working-class families must rely on the services of gypsy cabs, family daycare centers, backyard mechanics and street vendors. Much of this work, for both high and low income families, is done by immigrants.

It is important to note that while immigrants do much of the work in the informal economy-often work similar to what they have done in their native countries-they did not create the structures which are driving informalization. The informal economy is not an "import" from the Third World but, in fact, an integral part of the global economy. The experiences, resources and legal and socio-economic position of immigrants may allow them to take advantage of the given opportunities (or be taken advantage of) as laborers as well as entrepreneurs. In her work on the informal economy, researcher Saskia Sassen warns that we must be careful to separate the exploitative arrangements which proliferate in much of the informal economy from the vibrant economic growth that other informal economic activities engender in neighborhoods with scarce opportunities of income or employment.

Jill Esbenshade is a PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Her report "The Politics of Day Labor: Denial and Access to Immigrant Workers," based on surveys and interviews in almost fifty communities, is published and distributed by NNIRR. Copies available for $10 + $3 for shipping.