American Workers Hurt by Failure to Curb Illegal Immigration
Mike Cutler

An article in New Jersey’s Star Ledger addresses a major issue where illegal aliens are concerned: the practice of hiring illegal aliens willing to do the work Americans should be doing but are unable to do because the illegal alien workforce is willing to accept substandard wages, no benefits, and often dangerous conditions that in and of themselves are illegal.

The Carpenter's Union is suing the D. R. Horton Construction Company for hiring illegals and subsequently laying off union workers. The allegations are all too familiar: the illegal aliens are working for substandard wages and for no benefits. My heart goes out to the laid-off employees. I support the tactic of their union in suing the Horton Company of Fort Worth, Texas. This is a strategy that I hope will be used throughout the United States to combat unscrupulous employers.

My dad was a construction worker and a plumber. During the Second World War he was deemed to be "4-F" due to flat feet and a double hernia and was rejected by the military, although he made a number of attempts to enlist. Driven by his profound patriotism for America, he decided that his best opportunity to support our nation's war efforts would come by working in the naval shipyards, repairing the various warships that had suffered damage in the war. He worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and traveled to other such shipyards around the country during the Second World War.

Dad passed away from lung cancer while I was a college student, but I recall many evenings seeing him come home, upset because he had been laid off from work. I witnessed the look of concern etched in both his and my mother's eyes. As a construction worker, he was only paid for the hours he worked and being laid off meant that he would receive no paycheck. My memories of those moments make me understand something that those elitist politicians can’t: the way that Blue Collar Americans, the backbone of this nation, are getting clobbered by the hiring practices of unprincipled employers who know that they have virtually nothing to fear where the hiring of illegal aliens is concerned. When President Bush declares that "illegal aliens do the work Americans aren't doing," he conveniently leaves out the other half of that statement – that they cannot afford to take those jobs any longer because the wages have been slashed.

How many workers today are coming home with that same look of despair because they have lost their jobs to illegal aliens?

How many homeowners are paying hefty fees for jobs that are substandard at best? Day laborers do not have the skill or experience of tradesmen. It is not even a contest where quality of work is concerned. The greedy employers get to pocket lots of extra money, their customers get substandard work, and American workers are losing their jobs and their ability to provide for their families.

Part of Homer Hickam’s eulogy for the miners of the Sago Mine disaster just over two years ago in West Virginia is appropriate here: "There is no sweat holier than the sweat off a man's brow!" The autobiography of his life as a coal miner's son in West Virginia in the 1950s, Rocket Boys, became a movie, October Sky. It is a movie all children should see at least once. Hickam wasn't much of an athlete and had no desire to follow his dad's career in the coal mines. Back then, the only way out of the small mining town in which he grew up was to get a football scholarship. While in high school, the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik. This sparked a flame in his heart that caused him to build model rockets. Ultimately he won a scholarship by winning a science fair and went on to become an engineer for NASA and work on the Space Shuttle.

Today there are still Americans who trudge off to work in coal mines and steel foundries. There are Americans who drive garbage trucks and, like my dad, work on constructions sites. These Americans do back-breaking, dirty and dangerous jobs each and every day. Americans will still do any job provided that their paychecks can support them and their families. Americans are not lazy or soft. The politicians who exhibit such contempt for those hard working Americans should hang their heads in shame. And, any politicians who refuse to support the American worker should be in need of new jobs themselves!

Yet there is another issue that needs to be addressed, and that is the way unions have made some really terrible decisions where illegal immigration is concerned. When labor unions allow illegal aliens to join the unions and then lobby the legislatures on behalf of those illegal aliens, they encourage more illegal immigration and undercut their long-time members. The labor unions must get back to basics and adopt a policy that prohibits illegal aliens from joining the unions and then getting representation. The leaders of too many unions only care about how many members they have and how much union dues they receive. This short-sighted perspective is not in the best interest of those hard working people who have the lawful right to work in the United States. Union leaders cannot have it both ways!

Members of various unions must stand united in the demand that only those individuals who are entitled to work in the United States should be permitted to join labor unions. Each and every union must then respect the picket lines of all other unions. Then, when politicians claim they are opposed to NAFTA and other such treaties and trade agreements claim they want to bring jobs back to the United States from overseas, all citizens should demand to know who they want to have do those jobs. Simply bringing jobs back to the United States to have illegal aliens take them is a worthless endeavor.

But the problem is much more complicated than just a loss of jobs.

The illegal aliens who work in our country not only displace American workers, but send money out of the country, enriching the economies of their native countries while doing serious harm to ours. Last year an estimated 45 billion dollars was wired from the United States to Latin America and the Caribbean. Many billions more were wired to other countries around the world. Additionally, money was smuggled out of the United States by illegal aliens.

Hospitals were forced to close because illegal aliens were using the emergency rooms as their primary health care providers. These hospitals are no longer available to care for patients in their communities. Patients who suffer heart attacks and strokes, become injured in accidents or become the victims of violent crime, are having to be driven greater distances and often find themselves in overcrowded waiting rooms once they finally get to the hospital. A recent news article stated that often heart attack victims are waiting nearly an hour after they arrive at the hospital because of a lack of doctors and nurses.

There are now more gang members in the United States than sworn police officers. Many of these gang members are illegal aliens.

The presence of 20 million illegal and undocumented aliens represents a huge threat to national security. The true identities of these aliens are unknown and unknowable. Our government is uncertain as to their nationalities, their criminal histories or their affiliations with criminal terrorist or criminal organizations – at a time of war against terrorists who have repeatedly demonstrated contempt for human lives- our human lives!

Additionally, the neighborhoods in which illegal aliens live create huge "haystacks" in which the criminals and terrorists hide. The various businesses that spring up in support of that illegal population is helpful for the dishwasher or day laborer who wants to send money home, make a phone call to his family in his home country or do other such routine chores. For a criminal or a terrorist, those facilities are absolutely essential.

Organizations that purport to be "pro-Immigrant" are, in reality, just the opposite! It is an established fact that the reason that illegal aliens can be exploited is because they are vulnerable. They are terribly mistreated and those who mistreat and exploit them know that they can get away with it. Yet you don’t any "pro-immigrant" organization protesting the dehumanizing conditions under which illegal aliens live and work! You don’t see these "pro-immigrant" organizations speak out against the crimes committed criminal aliens against true immigrants. The real outrage is that often decent people legally immigrate to the United States, having done whatever the law requires, and then they find to their horror that the same criminals they feared back home have joined them in their communities here in the United States. This applies to virtually every immigrant community irrespective of ethnicity or nationality. Where are the "pro-immigrant" organizations when this happens?

The issue of illegal immigration is not a conservative or liberal Issue: illegal immigration is an American issue that should be of great concern to all Americans irrespective of political party affiliation.
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