Text 5231, 97 rader
Skriven 2007-10-15 15:29:34 av Alan Hess
Ärende: illegal immigration
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As we've said, as long as big business benefits from illegal immigrant workers,
neither party will anger big business by enacting significant immigration
reform, regardless of what the tax-paying citizens want.

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www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.tucker15oct15,0,4262412.story
baltimoresun.com
Back where we started on illegal immigration

Cynthia Tucker

October 15, 2007

ATLANTA

During the fractious, months-long immigration debate, Big Business hid in the
corridors of Congress or ducked behind closed doors, afraid to say in public
what it whispered in private: We need illegal workers. The U.S. Chamber of
Commerce and its allies didn't want to be blasted by conservatives seeking
harsh measures against undocumented immigrants.

The dirty little secret is this: Several important sectors of the economy
depend heavily on low-wage workers, many of whom are in the United States
illegally. And employers in those sectors, which include agriculture,
hospitality and construction, don't really check carefully to learn whether
their workers have proper documents. They know that if they insist on hiring
only legal workers, they won't be able to get crops harvested or houses built
or motel rooms cleaned.

Now, a White House crackdown on illegal immigrants has forced Big Business out
into the open. Joined by the AFL-CIO and the American Civil Liberties Union, a
coalition of business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and
small-business associations, went to court to stop the Bush administration from
implementing an initiative designed to ferret out undocumented laborers and
punish employers who use them. Last week, a federal judge issued an injunction
against the crackdown, warning that it could also harm law-abiding workers and
employers.

So we're right back where we started: Employers can continue to hire and
exploit illegal workers, paying them poverty-level wages while ignoring health
and safety regulations. And those workers still have little hope of becoming
citizens.

This year, a pragmatic congressional compromise on illegal immigration
dissolved in a miasma of political cowardice, jingoism and lackluster
presidential leadership. A bipartisan group of senators worked for months on a
plan that would increase spending on border protection, penalize employers who
hire illegally, and provide a winding route to citizenship for illegal
immigrants who worked hard, learned English and paid fines. But after a
backlash from the right-wing fringe, some of those same senators backed away
from the deal.

Perhaps the compromise legislation could have been salvaged if Big Business had
been willing to mount a highly visible public campaign in support of it. If
poultry processing giants and titans of agriculture had appeared in TV ads
supporting immigration and gone on talk shows to confront the likes of CNN's
Lou Dobbs, the bill might have passed. It was in their interests to do so,
since it would have allowed many undocumented laborers to keep their jobs.

But Big Business, playing the percentages, declined to step up. When you're
making billions off of illegal immigration, what's to reform?

After the immigration bill failed, President Bush promised stronger measures to
patrol the borders and punish employers who hire illegally. In August, Homeland
Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced a new initiative to send letters
warning employers about any worker whose Social Security number didn't match
the agency's records. The employer would have 90 days either to verify the
worker's Social Security number or fire him. Employers flouting the law could
face stiff fines.

But U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer of San Francisco noted that Social
Security's records are full of errors and could unfairly target legal workers.
He also blasted the administration for failing to conduct a survey of the costs
of the new rule to small businesses.

If the records of the Baltimore-based Social Security Administration are that
badly flawed, they need to be fixed - in a hurry. Not only has poor
record-keeping hampered efforts to curb illegal workers, but it will also lead
to false accounting. Those records remain the best way to spot undocumented
laborers.

And penalizing illegal employers remains the best way to curb illegal
immigration. Mexicans, Guatemalans and Koreans come to this country for jobs.
If they learn those jobs aren't available, they'll stop coming.

The worst thing to do is retain the status quo: exploiting illegal workers for
wretched pay while refusing to give them a path to citizenship. That's
un-American.

Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Her column appears Mondays in The Sun. Her e-mail is cynthia@ajc.com.

Copyright + 2007, The Baltimore Sun

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