Posted on 04/09/2006 5:56:29 AM PDT by madprof98
If they really wanted to, your representatives in Washington could dry up illegal immigration almost before you could say, "Tom Tancredo is a tiresome demagogue." All they would have to do is require U.S. employers to check the legal status of all employees and impose stiff sanctions — including multimillion-dollar fines and prison time — on employers who flout the law.
After a few executives had done the perp walk, others would get the message. Illegal hiring would drop precipitously. Since the vast majority of illegal immigrants come to this country to work, many of them would leave if they couldn't get hired.
And they'd take the message back home to La Paz and Villa Juarez and San Gerardo: Without legal papers, you can't get a job in the United States.
So why haven't Congress and the White House fixed a broken immigration system? Because it works for so many — illegal workers, business interests and middle-class Americans alike. Industries such as construction and agriculture get a cheap and docile work force, poorly educated men and women who'll work Sundays and holidays and never report their employees for labor violations. Middle-class Americans get the benefit of cheaper products and services, everything from lawn care and domestic work to homegrown fruits and vegetables. And houses. Since home sales are keeping the economy afloat, politicians don't want to do anything to interfere with the massive housing-construction-and-sales complex.
Fringe politicians benefit from the presence of illegal workers, too. Without them, would you ever have heard of a minor-league congressman named Tancredo? A Republican from Colorado, he is now considering a run for the White House, fueled by the name recognition he's won with his nativist rants against the undocumented workers pouring in across our southern borders.
That's not to say illegal immigration is without its costs. In towns and cities that have seen a rapid influx, there is rising frustration over schools having to accommodate non-English-speakers, hospitals overwhelmed by uninsured patients, and higher rates of gang-related crime. (But those taxpayers benefit, too, from lower prices for ditches dug and chickens filleted.) An even higher cost is borne by Americans at the bottom of the wage scale, especially poorly educated black men, who lose out when forced to compete with illegal immigrants for jobs.
But poorly educated black men don't have oily platoons of lobbyists looking after their interests. Big Business does, and it wants to keep those borders open. Overwhelmed taxpayers, meanwhile, are easily placated by election-year rhetoric promising higher walls, stouter fences and more border guards than rattlesnakes along the Rio Grande. Let's call this campaign-season spectacle "Wag the Mexican."
Indeed, the steady flow of workers across our borders became a tsunami in the 1990s because of pressure from business interests. After agents from the old Immigration and Naturalization service raided one of Georgia's Vidalia onion fields in 1998, members of Georgia's congressional delegation — Republicans and Democrats alike — denounced the raid. In response, the INS practically shut down workplace enforcement. By 2000, according to INS figures, the estimated number of illegal immigrants had risen to 7 million, from 3.5 million in 1990.
To understand the inherent and willful contradictions in the laws that govern workers and their legal status, consider this: The Social Security Administration is able to identify companies that routinely employ large numbers of workers using fake numbers. But by law, Social Security is forbidden from forwarding the names of those companies to Homeland Security. That law could be changed in a heartbeat, but Congress hasn't done it.
Congress could also appropriate money for a nationwide computer system that would allow all employers to get instant verification of a worker's Social Security number and then require all employers to use it. If Bloomingdale's can give me approval for a credit card in three minutes — while I'm still trying samples at the perfume counter — then the feds can create a system for instantaneous verification. Congress hasn't set aside money for that, either.
That's because it doesn't want to solve the problem. Your political leaders like to rant about the broken immigration system, but they have no intention of fixing it.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
Who could possibly argue with that.
A rare moment of sanity from Ms Tucker.
Now if we could just get our Republican leaders to admit this.
These must be the end times...I've agreed with Cynthia Tucker twice in one week.
And how do you suggest that we do that? The only sure way is to have all American citizens finger printed and check the prints of all potential hires against a data base.
Anything else is going to have holes big enough to drive a truck through just like it does now.
You make the requirements too onerous and you are going to dry up the summer help jobs for teens even worse then you have already.
I'm afraid that while she actually does make sense here, her proposals are still colored by fatal naivete. If all you need to work here are legal papers, all that will do is get a lot of counterfeit papers made.
It would do almost as much good, if the journalists would move past generalities and document specific corps and their abuses. Someone caught Walmart using illegal cleaning contractors, and you can bet that is over. It looks to me as if this is mostly penny anti, small scale, off the books stuff. However, local journalists could embarass those people, too, if they wanted to. Take a camera crew to the Home Depot and photograph the illegals and their employers. Bad PR is every bit as effective as an official, government sanction. This situation only persists amidst what appears to be general apathy. Take the apathy away and watch the perps dance.
She's 100% right on this one. This problem would be self correcting if the government would simply put teeth into the laws. No employer wants to lose his business no matter how cheap illegal labor is. Without willing employers, illegals would have no incentive to come to the US, unless they really wanted to accept the values and ideals of this country.
Congress could also appropriate money for a nationwide computer system that would allow all employers to get instant verification of a worker's Social Security number and then require all employers to use it.How is this so "onerous" that it will end summer jobs for teens?
My best recollection; feel free to add/correct if you have access to the transcript:
On Rush, a week or so ago, a guy called in and said he was a neighbor of Rush (i.e. Palm Beach, multi-million dollar mansion, sort of "Hey Rush, I'm rich too!", etc.). Then he proceeds to tell how the loss of cheap migrant labor would hurt his business. A short time later another Rush caller refers to the "rich" caller and suggests that maybe, if the rich guy paid a little more for his labor, he might not have the Palm Beach mansion, but the rich guy not having a mansion wasn't sufficient rationale for our migrant policies.
��5{��������y educated black men don't have oily platoons of lobbyists looking after their interests.</i>
Oily? Al Sharpton. Platoon? Louis Farrakhan. And I'm sure Jesse's up in there, somewhere. But they're oddly silent. I suspect they're rather pleased at the "revolutionary" aspect of having tens of millions of people who'll eventually be able to vote, and vote Democrat.
The point is that U.S. employers are ADDICTED to and HOOKED on cheap labor to the detriment of our Country and 298 million Americans!
Hmmm. It looked right in the preview. Back to the HTML sandbox, lol.
Cynthia seems to make sense when she writes about a problem that affects her directly and she can speak from experience. The other 95% of the time she's just talking out her @ss.
And everybody's going to fall for this recycled opportunistic agit-prop.
soon
Lot of illegals on your payroll?
and their little RAT friends too.
So on our own dime many employers are starting to do background checks on prospective employees. That catches more but depending if you want a statewide or a nation side search the charge is going to be between $200 and $500. That is onerous. And it is ending summer jobs. When it costs you $300.00 a pop to just weed out the bad apples you are not going to do it for someone that will be gone in three months.
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