Thread: Libidiot Alert! - Pushing Back on Immigration

Pushing Back on Immigration
New York Times Editorial
Published: July 21, 2008



There is nothing good about the country’s ever more merciless campaign of immigration enforcement. But at least there are emerging signs of resistance, from one of the most important, yet curiously disengaged, players in the debate: employers.

States and cities complain about the broken immigration system, but they can’t create the intricate web of policies needed to fix it — that’s up to Congress. All they can do is try to crack down locally on illegal immigrants and the businesses that hire them. The result has been haphazard enforcement without reform, which only makes the problem worse.

States have passed overly punitive laws to revoke the licenses of businesses caught hiring the undocumented and to force employers to participate in E-Verify, the deeply flawed federal system for checking workers’ documents. More than 175 bills relating to immigrant employment have been introduced by states this year.

As Julia Preston reported in The Times, business has begun pushing back. In Arizona, home to some of the most rabidly anti-immigrant politicians and advocates, a business group had huge success gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that would soften some of the most stringent employer punishments enacted last year.

In other states, business groups have helped to kill tough immigration bills. They argue that they need workers, that it is too hard to avoid hiring undocumented ones, and that ill-conceived laws go overboard in punishing well-meaning companies and their legal employees. They are also pushing measures to bring in more legal workers and to fix the error-plagued federal system for verifying documents of new employees.

Workplace raids by federal agents have vividly exposed the widespread hiring of illegal workers, but many employers counter that they are not all scofflaws. Antidiscrimination laws bar them from looking too closely at employees’ identity papers, or checking their immigration status after they are hired. “The system is just as broken for employers as it is for immigrants,â€

The corrupt employers are the whole root of the illegal alien problem of course they are going to be against any meaningful enforcement. If you ask the big Latino organizations as to why the 1986 laws fail they tell you it was not them, it was the big business groups managing to take the teeth right out of burden proof and punshment for their employers. What matters should really be the competition and economic burden put on Americans not crooked employers and large ethnic political organizations.

Typical illogical, downright silly New York Times editorial on illegal immigration. These writers don't seem qualified to opine for a high school newspaper, much less a major daily. Examples:

There is nothing good about the country’s ever more merciless campaign of immigration enforcement.

Reality check: the belated, very modest enforcement measures that are going on now.

As Julia Preston reported in The Times, business has begun pushing back

Reality check: it's the American people who have finally begun to push back, starting with the defeat of the hideous mass amnesty bill in June 2007. Business (at least the sleazy ones) on the other hand, has had their flow of cheap labor and amnesties for decades.