www.jdnews.com

September 04,2005

Immigrants aren't the only 'illegals'

Illegal immigrants are not coming to North Carolina to vacation at the Outer Banks or to climb Mount Mitchell. The state is swamped with illegal immigrants because they are able to find work here.

It follows that someone is employing people who are not authorized to work in the United States. Those "someones" are all around us.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say at least half of the 330,000 illegal immigrants in the Carolinas - the heads of household and older children, presumably - are able to find jobs here.

So half the scandal of people being in the country illegally is that employers are illegally employing them.

There oughta be a law.

But, of course, there is. It is against the law to employ an undocumented alien.

People hire them anyway for a variety of reasons. The illegal employees will work menial jobs. They will work cheap.

They don't complain when safety and health benefits are minimized.

It is true that employers are reluctant to challenge an immigrant's legality because it can open them up to an Equal Employment Opportunity lawsuit.

That said, there also is a tendency among employers to turn a blind eye to such matters.

A problem exists on the enforcement side, too, however. A report last week out of Charlotte showed that not a single North Carolina employer was fined in the last two years for employing illegal immigrants. That seems to be the rule across the nation.

U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick has had enough of this lax enforcement. She recommends that Congress raise the employer fine to $10,000 from $250, with the money going to beef up the staff of immigration authorities.

If that seems like overkill, well, it probably is. After all, we are talking about people who only want to harvest their vegetable crop or serve their hamburgers or clean their motel rooms, nothing more nefarious than that.

Yet in hiring people whose credentials are suspect, these employers undercut the pay scales of rival employers. They also encourage the very immigration that needs discouraging.

Most relevant of all is that they increase the furtive traffic across our borders in which people of more murderous intent - terrorists - can easily enter our country. For love of profits, our security is compromised.

When you look at it that way, $10,000 might be too low a fine.