Thread: GOP Immigration Meltdown

WARNING: Mega Dose of Bleeding Heart and Pro-Illegal Business Alert!!!
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GOP Immigration Meltdown
August 22, 2007; Page A14
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1187750 ... lenews_wsj

Are Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani competing for the Republican Presidential nomination, or for the job of vacation replacement for Lou Dobbs? It's hard to tell these days as the candidates attempt to one-up each other's anti-immigration rhetoric.

Mr. Romney has faulted the former New York City mayor for not directing the local police to harass illegal-alien janitors, cooks and bus boys, thus making the Big Apple a so-called "sanctuary city" for the undocumented. Mr. Romney apparently doesn't think the NYPD has anything better to do with its time, though given the record drop in violent crime during the Giuliani years, which coincided with an increase in immigrants to the city, he might reconsider that notion.

Mr. Giuliani has responded by slouching toward Tom Tancredo, unveiling plans to tackle the immigration problem with ID cards, physical barriers and patrols along the Mexican border. But Mr. Giuliani's previous support for these newcomers, who've helped to revitalize New York over the past two decades, makes his more recent rhetoric seem like a gambit to neutralize Mr. Romney's appeals to the restrictionist right. At least Mr. Giuliani still stresses his interest in giving foreigners more opportunities to enter the U.S. lawfully.

Both candidates, however, ignore the reality that more security measures will have limited effect if not paired with a guest worker program that gives foreign nationals more legal ways to access job offers in the U.S. The same goes for the Bush Administration's recently announced plans to step-up "interior" enforcement. Taking U.S. employers to the woodshed won't fix the illegal immigration problem, and it could do real economic harm.

Under the new rules, scheduled to take effect next month, businesses with workers whose Social Security numbers don't match their names could face criminal charges and heftier fines. It's hard to understand the rationale of a policy that holds employers responsible for the inability of the federal government to produce secure Social Security numbers.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was careful to note that business operators who make an honest attempt to play by the rules have nothing to fear. "If they follow the process in good faith, they have a safe harbor," Mr. Chertoff told us in an interview. Yet the feds have repeatedly conducted high-profile investigations and raids on businesses that hired consenting adults with the appropriate paperwork.

The Justice Department in 2001 obtained a 36-count indictment against Tyson Foods, alleging that the food-processing concern had hired 136 illegal aliens to work among thousands of other employees at plants in six states. In November 2006 federal immigration authorities raided Smithfield Foods, the world's largest hog slaughterhouse, alleging that 541 of its 5,000 employees had Social Security numbers that didn't match government records. And last December, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided Swift & Co., a beef and pork processor, rounding up 1,300 of the company's 15,000 employees in six different facilities.

It made no difference to the feds that all three companies had voluntarily participated in employment-verification programs set up by the government to vet new hires. Smithfield, Swift and Tyson, which was acquitted on all counts, were not spared the bad publicity and millions of dollars in lost profits due to work stoppages. Some "safe harbor."

The industry expected to be hardest hit by more worksite enforcement is agriculture, where it's an open secret that at least half of the work force may be illegal. Because Americans have better options than working as seasonal strawberry pickers in Arizona, growers will have to decide whether to shut down, move operations somewhere with a steady supply of legal workers, or pay illegals off the books and hope they're not raided. If acute labor shortages ensue, leading to job cuts among native workers -- and higher prices at the supermarket -- the voting public will know where to assign blame.

Mr. Chertoff says his hands are tied because Congress has refused to put in place a guest-worker program that would give U.S. employers legal access to enough foreign labor. "The right way to do this is comprehensively, where you address the economic needs simultaneously with the enforcement," says the Secretary. Agreed, but he and the Administration still have the discretion not to pile more unreasonable and unworkable enforcement policies on top of the existing ones.

None of these worksite raids has turned up a jihadist to our knowledge, despite being conducted in the name of "homeland security." Given that resources are not unlimited, you'd think that DHS officials, like New York's Finest, could find more productive work than chasing down landscapers and treating honest businessowners as if they were criminals.

I stopped reading as soon as I saw WSJ

Wall Street Journal

Invasion Central Publications.

WSJ never met an illegal alien or open border they did not like.

W

As I said in another thread, the CEO's of these greedy and unprincipled corporations can cry in their martinis at the country club as much as they want; I really don't care, and neither do most ordinary Americans, who aren't pulling down seven or eight figure salaries, (plus incentives) for fattening their corporate bottom line by hiring cheap illegal labor! The discomfort of these elitists is so touching......it makes me want to puke! Cry me a river, you corporate scofflaws!

Someone should picket the Wall Street Journal with a sign saying "Rupert Murdoch fire Paul Gigot".