The LA Times had an article this morning which illustrates the precarious situation we have enforcing immigration laws. If you go back a number of years, during the Clinton and Bush transition days, a number of officials vying for posts in the administration were disqualified for hiring illegal people to work as nannies. It was dubbed, as all things in Washington are, with the stupid term Nannygate.

The controversy illustrated the hypocrisy we have in immigration laws, because here were people we were hiring to enforce laws, or at least to uphold the principle of the law, and they were ignoring them. I think in some way, while many Americans who are against immigration reform might have been angry about this flagrant flaunting of the law, our culture kind of accepts the illegal immigrant working in the home. The scene plays out so many times in our popular culture but just to illustrate this from one popular movie, I remember the scene in the first Die Hard movie when the reporter goes to John McClane’s wife’s house to interview the kids, and the person who greets them at the door is the mid/nanny. She refuses, at first, to let him in but when he threatens to call immigration (implying she’s illegal in the country) she lets him in.

We have this feeling that the rich will find a way around the law, so while there may be some legitimate reason for immigration reform, it’s comes up against our very American need to save a buck, no matter what. The well off, being the well off, tend to be able not only to bend the rules, but can escape the wrath of those rules when they get caught.

In the case of those early appointees, other than national ridicule the most they had to do was pay a fine, something they could afford. Yes, they lost an appointment, but have one of us regular people break the law and we would be in a world of hurt.

That brings us to the article I read.

Since 9/11 we have tried to be vigilant about immigration reform; the better to protect ourselves from evil terrorist. Every election, on some level, immigration reform becomes a hot button issue. And, just to put this on a realistic level, when we’re talking illegal immigration, as much as the supporters of tough laws talk about protecting all our borders, the focus of their wrath is the brown invasion from the South. They worry the America they know is becoming a darker hue because of the Spanish coming through Mexico. That means that a lot of the enforcement of immigration laws, such as making sure employers have validated records of employees, are going to hit businesses for lower skilled labor that of higher skilled ones. You always hear of raids from ICE going to meat packing plants, farms, but hardly ever at law firms, hospitals and universities.

So you get owners like James Reid, the person in the article, who was fined a lot of money because he had hired some illegal immigrants. Now, it has to be said that ICE found them out even after they had done initial checks and the employees passed the background checks. So you have a small business employer who hired people that passed the background checks, but it wasn’t until some time later, after ICE initially saw them as clean, that the workers came up as illegal.

This would have probably would have been a two paragraph story if it hadn’t been for one thing that puts into question enforcement and the whole screening process. James Reid has a cleaning business and one of his clients is Michael Chertoff. Yes, the nation’s top immigration official, the Homeland Security Secretary, hired a company to clean his home that had illegal immigrants working for them.

Think about it. As the article mentioned, every few weeks almost four years the Secret Service screened the IDs of workers before entering the home of Chertoff. According to the article there were crews who cleaned his home who were illegal. So, just to make this perfectly clear, we have a system in place that is supposed to verify the legal status of people working. The cleaning company had people that went through the standard background checks a lot of other companies used, but this company had the extra shield of having the Secret Service screening employees going into the home of the Homeland Security Secretary, yet with all this illegal workers were able to get into his home.

Just like Reid says in the article, if you can’t protect your own home how are you going to protect the border?

Reid has been fined $22,000 because of the violations he had, because the government said there was some bit of information he didn’t check when verifying the legal status of some of his workers. Nothing is mentioned in the article about what might happen to the agents who didn’t screen out those same people, and there is nothing about Chertoff and how this looks inept considering his responsibilities. The system failed from 2 ends, the initial screening that the employer needs to do and the screening the government failed at until much too late, yet the owner and the workers are the ones who will pay. See, obviously the illegal workers have gone, never arrested, and Reid has to pay a fine which, in his estimation, is excessive because of the embarrassment. He can’t pay it, which probably means he’ll have to fire some workers to pay the bill or close of shop which will fire everyone.

All of this happened because he have laws we can’t enforce based on economic fears.

<< PREVIOUS
NEXT >>

Copyright © Chaotic Fringe LLC. All rights reserved.

If You Can't Protect Your Own Home, How Can You Protect the Country? - Dec 11, 2008
Home | News | Entertainment | Blog | Podcast | IMVN | Everquest 2 | Links | Photos | V-Blog