Under guidelines to be issued Thursday to Immigration and Customs Enforcement field offices, agents will be instructed to take aim at employers and supervisors for
prosecution “through the use of carefully planned criminal investigations.”Senior officials of the Homeland Security Department said Wednesday that illegal workers would continue to be detained in raids on workplaces. But the officials said they hoped to mark an abrupt departure from past practices by making those arrests as part of an effort to build criminal and civil cases against employers.
I have never understood the GOP reluctance to chase down and prosecute employers who flout immigration laws and staff themselves to the gills with illegal workers. For one thing, it gives the law-breakers an unfair competitive advantage over the ones trying to follow the rules. I would say that, in CA at least, an employer with illegal alien employees can operate with near-impunity, which only harms the employers trying to hire Americans and immigrants who are actually authorized to be here. Is it any wonder people think there's something fundamentally wrong with the system?
Worse than that, illegal immigrants are an exploited class. You think an employer willing to break immigration laws is going to pay his employees a fair wage (if they are paid at all), or follow wage and hour rules? Do you think his will be a safe workplace? And, I am all in favor of the free market, but there's something about, say, the sight of a factory that employs hundreds of cheap illegals while neighborhood Americans are struggling to find work that offends the senses.
Business people are often the ones who are the loudest flag wavers, and say they need relaxed immigration enforcement to compete in a global economy. OK. But you also live here, and I would say creating an exploited peasant class at the expense of American workers gives opportunistic jingoism a bad name.
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