It is harder then you think.
Winners of AID the Best Student group in Kansas City
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.
" Every 79 seconds, a thief steals someone's identity, opens accounts in the victim's name and goes on a buying spree."
-CBSnews.com, 1/25/2001
Oh yeah the credit card thing works out real well.
Cynthia Tucker tells the unorthodox truth, and then covers herself with her Liberal Democratic friends by repeatedly smearing Congressman Tom Tancredo. These are the compromises you must make to remain an MSM wh-re with an urge to tell the truth
Well, that's not "big business," is it?
It is harder then you think.
Winners of AID the Best Student group in Kansas City
Cynthia's right about big business, but Tom Tancredo's anything but a minor league congressman.
Amazing, isn't it? Imagine if there was no process, whatsoever, to confirm whether a given transaction was valid or not. Then what kind of mess would there be? And how does this support the current situation? It doesn't.
THANK YOU! Just one tiny example: Here in Georgia, supposedly a great leader in state efforts to crack down on the problem, illegal immigrants are building our state highways and other massive state projects. How is that possible? Answer: Contractors.
No doubt you giggled as you typed that.
"Big business" keeps things at arms length via temp agencies, in my understanding.
The feds had a problem with Puerto Ricans, among others, scamming Social Security and disability. They'd rent P.O. boxes in various towns and have monthly entitlement checks sent to five or six or dozen...all with phony documents. (That went on for years.)
Bingo! Temp agencies (the woman in the office or on the phone is Hispanic, speaks English with a heavy accent), tell ordinary American citizens: 'you're overqualified, we have no jobs. Go away. Don't call us. We'll call you.'
peace be with you.
The CC companies aren't being threatened with jail for being scammed. And it happens on a regular basis.
But if I hire someone with fraudulent papers well then "off with my head"!
If that is what I am being threatened with that then I want a system that works a little bit better then the CC system.
I can follow all the rules but there are still holes. And if we ever go to the "Fair Tax" system then the tiny net I have is going to be gone.
How is this so "onerous" that it will end summer jobs for teens?
Have you not heard of identity theft?
An employer in Dallas wrote in a letter to the editor to the Dallas Morning News that he can check SS numbers now. He got suspicious when he saw the same faces appearing, every day, with different SS numbers.
All the numbers were valid.
I heard this exchange. It was great and right on.
I was cheering from my van!!!!!! Yes!
Overnight Republicans hate business and farmers more than the Rats do. This has become an amazing transformation to a Party that has always been for capitalism and now only cares about rounding up and deporting cheap labor. FR is now in total agreement with an avowed Marxist over this issue. Unbelievable.
Sorry, cheap labor is a necessity to our economy.
Pray for W and Our Freedom Fighters
And the federal government are the ones who supply the documents in the first place.
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