Thread: SC considering denying workers comp to illegals

Illegal and injured
Bill could create an incentive to hire illegal immigrants

Published: Sunday, February 22, 2009 at 3:15 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, February 20, 2009 at 8:43 p.m.
Lawmakers are considering a proposal in the General Assembly that would deny workers' compensation benefits to illegal immigrant workers when they are injured or disabled on the job.

Proponents of this idea think they are justified in denying benefits to these workers because they are in this country illegally, but they haven't thought through the implications of their plan.

It is illegal for employers to hire illegal aliens. Lawmakers want to strengthen that law. But this proposal would undermine it, creating an incentive to hire illegal immigrants.

Employers pay workers' compensation policy rates based largely on the frequency with which their workers file claims and the cost of those claims. Companies with poor safety records, whose employees are often and expensively injured, pay higher rates.

If the workers' compensation claims of illegal immigrants are not covered, the rates of the employers who hire them would likely not go up when they are injured. This law could actually encourage hiring of illegal immigrants, and create unsafe working conditions for them.

Other lawmakers are calling for illegal immigrants to have no access to the courts. That would give unethical employers another incentive to hire illegal workers. Such an employer would be tempted knowing that no matter what happened to the employee or how he was treated, he could not take his employer to court.

A law in place bans hiring illegal immigrants. If this law is properly enforced, the debate about whether illegal immigrants injured on the job should receive worker's compensation will be moot.

But once hired, if injured, such employees must have their needs provided for via the workers' compensation system. To do otherwise means that South Carolina is willing to exploit illegal immigrants. This proposal not only signifies the state's resentment of these people for coming to this nation illegally. It declares the state's willingness to punish them by denying them compensation when they are injured in our service.

That isn't the statement South Carolina wants to make. If we benefit from the labor of illegal immigrants, we should compensate them when they are injured providing that labor. We are not the kind of state that turns its back on injured and disabled people, regardless of their immigration status.

This is a poorly considered proposal that would give those who would exploit poor immigrants a license to abuse them. It's unworthy of this state.

http://www.goupstate.com/article/200902 ... nd-injured

The employer should be severly fined for hiring illegals. And the illegals don't deserve ANYTHING but a good swift kick back to Mexico.