Undermining Immigration Enforcement
Posted by DickH on 07 Jul 2008 at 07:55 am | Tagged as: Federal
In response to public demand that employers be held accountable for hiring illegal immigrants, the Federal government has become much more aggressive in conducting work-place raids and other enforcement actions. The same is true in many states where legislative frustration with Federal inertia caused state-specific laws that would penalize employers to be enacted. Well, all of these enforcement efforts are being severely undermined by that pillar of the liberal establishment - the business community. That’s right, as the New York Times reported in a front page story yesterday, corporate America is fully mobilizing to not only neutralize the new laws but to curtail the enforcement of old ones. Why? Because these businesses do not pay a high enough wage or provide sufficient benefits to attract workers who are here legally. We’re not talking about picking lettuce, either, but all manner of employment, especially in the electronics industry. And we all know that when the business community sets its mind to something, it also devotes its collective checkbook to the same cause. Once the campaign contributions start flowing in, even the most rabid anti-immigrant legislator will clam up and the status quo will persist.
Here in Massachusetts we’re fortunate because we know where our elected leaders stand on this issue. Most (at the state and Federal level, at least) are moderates and none of them are demagogues who play to people’s worst instincts in public but do nothing in the relative privacy of the legislative chamber so as not to offend their campaign contributors whose businesses rely on illegal labor.
Try 6 Flags or Canaby Lake Park or a restaurant on the Cape and you’ll find a majority of the employees are immigrants on 40B visas. Instead of paying the market rate to hire locally, 6 Flags (for example) finds it cheaper to employ teens from all over the world, even including the cost of their flights and housing.
The net result is that to save us a few dollars on a roller coaster, we’re giving up good jobs for our families and money circulating in our local economy.
To save a few dollars on software, we’re exporting our engineering expertise.
The discussion over illegal immigrants should really be about how to create good paying jobs HERE. What’s good for business isn’t automatically good for us or our country.
You’re absolutely correct, Mike. So many want to demonize the immigrants, but they’re just looking for work. It’s the people who hire them that are the problem but because those employers know how to game the public policy system, nothing gets accomplished.
It’s pretty clear that our federal “free” trade policies have been driven by corportations, and the workers are mere pawns in that game.
Trade used to be “we’ve got wheat and you got rice”, so let’s trade and we will each have some of both.
Now it appears to be “we have lower cost workers, so come to our country to build your factories, and we will send their products back to you free of tariffs”. And for those jobs that are not easily exported, let’s see how we can reduce our costs by importing the labor.
It seems that the only real solution to these problems would be dependent on politicians on both sides of the borders to respect the workers, paying equivalent salaries and providing essential benefits. Would prices increase? Likely, but so would the standard of living of the workers of the world.