Anti-illegal push to get interesting

State's effort includes officers, following paper trail.

This is gonna be a good one to watch.
Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt has been sued by the owner of a janitorial firm the state hired to clean state office buildings in Jefferson City, Columbia and Kansas City. Blunt's office maintains that Sam's Janitorial Service hired employees and failed to document their legal statuses. The federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, ICE, collaborated with Blunt on the case.

Blunt, on a media tour, held a press conference Tuesday in Springfield to explain his new ideas for dealing with illegal immigration in Missouri. Frankly, he's had it with federal efforts to stop the process, which would be mediocre to nada.

"I will not stand by while Washington fails to act," he said. If the federal government were acting, he says, there would be a comprehensive immigration policy and a secure border.



But Blunt is doing what he can to beef up policing of illegal immigrants in Missouri. He has asked for 287-G authorization from the 1996 Immigration and Nationality Act. The act authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security to train and allow designated regional officers to enforce immigration laws. Blunt says Missouri officers will have training much like ICE officers have, although not as extensive.

Blunt has also authorized officers to check documents when any person arrested has committed a crime "serious enough that you would go to jail." In a span of two months, he says, these checks have netted 74 illegal immigrants in the state.

Blunt also says this is not a form of racial profiling, because all people stopped for possible law-breaking will undergo the same treatment: "Regardless of what language they speak, what they look like," he says, everyone's ID will be checked.

The owner of Sam's Janitorial says he did not hire illegals. Still, of the 25 of the Sam's Janitorial employees arrested, four have already pleaded guilty, according to the Associated Press.

What's going to be so interesting to watch is the paper trail in this case. What I expect to see is just how slipshod the safeguards have been, again. Here are just a few of the cases we've had uncovered here recently, and I'm convinced it's just a blip on the immigration crime screen. Here's a few cases we've seen in southwest Missouri:

- Seven George's Inc. employees were federally indicted by a grand jury after a May 22 raid of a Butterfield plant. They are charged with harboring illegal aliens for commercial gain and encouraging the workers to come here illegally, according to the Associated Press. They all had driver's licenses and Social Security numbers, not theirs, that they purchased fraudulently.

- Former owners of Springfield's Great Wall restaurant were ordered by a federal judge to pay a $10,000 fine for hiring and harboring illegal aliens from Mexico and China.

- A Mexican national pleaded guilty in a Springfield court this year to transporting illegal immigrants.

Blunt has been outspoken on illegal immigrants statewide. He's tightened oversight of state-financed construction projects, required contractors to provide paperwork proving their workers are employed legally and asked the Missouri Department of Economic Development to randomly audit that paperwork. Workers are required to produce their documents when sites are visited.

Numerous studies document the whack our medical and social services budgets take to care for illegal aliens' needs, and every time another group of undocumented workers is uncovered it shows how long we've turned our heads, looked the other way and sacrificed our economic health for the sake of greedy businesspeople.

I believe most of us who support borders that turn back illegal aliens, laws that find them and send them back and harsh penalties for employers who sneak them in don't have any ill will toward the illegals — at least the people I know don't. It's simple math, and it's simple law: We can't afford them, and there are laws that establish citizenship.

Cut and dried.

Simple.

I am stunned enforcement of illegal immigration continues to be something we've dragged our feet on so long, to the point of planting our feet and bowing our backs. It's a matter of black-and-white economics, it's a matter of right and wrong, it's the law.
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