The new illegal alien law
Moms View Message Board: The Kitchen Table (Debating Board): The new illegal alien law
Well, what do you all think of the president's new law giving amnesty to illegals?
They are here working anyway...maybe this way they will have to get a social security number and actually have to pay taxes; which they don't do now.
Well, actually they do have social security numbers, OTHER people's social security numbers!
I'm all for the proposed law - I think. I've worked at lots of places where their employment was crucial. Course I'm in Dallas where Hispanics run the fast food places, serve the food, bus the tables, maintain the golf course, cut your lawn, babysit your babies, clean your houses, make your hotel beds, clean your pools, work on your house, build your house, build your roads, put on your new roof, install your sprinkler systems, cut down your trees, etc. etc.
I think there might be some long-term implications that won't be good. Why only take in the low skilled, low wage immigrants? Sure they will take the jobs Americans don't want, but what about skilled immigrants who won't be allowed in bec Americans are willing to work in their line of work?
I have a HUGE problem with this. I have no problem with people who follow the rules and immigrate here legally. These people broke the law to get in here and now we are just going to say "it's ok, you can stay?" This at a time when we are photographing and fingerprinting visitors from other countries? So now what is the incentive to immigrate here legally rather than just sneak over the wide open borders?
Well, all the illegals I know would come here legally if they could. It's just practically impossible and complicated and there is a LONG wait. Meanwhile, they make $15/month working in Mexico on their 4th grade education when they could be making $10/hour mowing a golf course in Dallas. Then they send money home to their families in Mexico until they can get here (if they want to come). The golf course employers love them bec they are reliable and hard workers and no one else will apply for the jobs.
I understand conditions are horrid in Mexico. They are horrid in lots of places around the world. That doesnt make it ok to break the law. Why shouldn't they have to follow our immigration laws?
I think they would if they could. But it's not that simple or easy. USA only takes so many from each country each year. The wait is long, many years, almost hopeless. Many illegals can't read or write, much less understand immigration laws. The illegals I know are not trying to get away with breaking the law. They are not criminally-minded. They just want to work and they learn what they need to do in order to work - sneak in, come in on a holiday visa and stay, buy social security numbers, climb trees to hide when INS shows up, get paid in cash, move around a lot, live 10 to an apartment, etc.
USA needs their labor. I think that's why we, as a govt., look the other way so much when they come in.
Well, the laws are there for a reason. We can't just go around letting everyone come in without doing background checks etc. The laws are there to protect us. How does this help America?
as far as needing the labor, there are plenty of people here already that could do the work. People who shouldn't have the option of saying that type of work is beneath them....prison work release programs (for non violent criminals) for example.
Employers are not rejecting applications from certified Americans in order to hire illegals. Legal Americans will not do the work they are doing. In some cases, like the fast food places, I think the illegals are taking the jobs of teenagers perhaps, but the teens are not as reliable or dependable or available as the illegals.
When hiring, this is what the employer does (this was my duty at my last job)... Once the applicant is hired, I call the Social Security Administration to verify the SS# number. You are not allowed to verify the SS# of an applicant, only those of current employees. When the SS# clerk tells me, "Not a good number" (and that's all they can say) then I know we just hired an illegal. Being illegal is not grounds for termination, legally. So, here we are with our new illegal employee that we can't fire bec he's illegal, but thank goodness they are here, bec no one else wants to work in housekeeping or on the golf course or where ever.
Then, yearly, the SSA sends us a list of our illegal employees and we say, Yup, there they are. But you can't fire them bec they are illegal and we don't want to anyway. Sometimes SSA will call and say, "Your employee Jose Gomez is using a 2-year-old's SS#. We need a new number for him." So I tell Jose that - in Spanish - and the next day he hands me a scrap of paper with a new number on it and tells me his name is now Juan Ortiz. Hi Juan. Whatever.
I think these laws are set up this way so that the employers can hire who they need to hire, skirt the existing laws.
I think some of the laws we have in this country are only there for selective enforcement. If the govt needs to use it bec something is getting out of control then they have the law there to selectively enforce it. Otherwise they ignore the law for whatever reason. It's silly, stupid, unenforceable, etc.
Why can't you fire them if they are illegal?
I believe it is bec they are protected under EEOC. Anti-discrimination extends to undocumented workers. Also, when hiring you can only hand them an I-9 but can make no specific request for certain documents (to prove to yourself they are legal) nor can you question the validity of the docs if they "appear" right. Employers also can't threaten employers by saying they are going to call INS if they don't do what they say (ie work overtime when they don't want to). Employers can't *knowingly hire illegals though.
An excerpt from a labor website:
The federal discrimination laws protect all employees in the United States, regardless of their citizenship or work eligibility. Employers may no more discriminate against unauthorized workers than they may discriminate against any other employees.(11) EEOC will therefore assure that in its enforcement of the laws, unauthorized workers are protected to the same degree as all other workers.
That is just ridiculous. I had no idea.
I haven't commented in this thread because, to be honest, I don't know enough about the proposal. Here, however, is Molly Ivins' take on it. Ivins has a 20+ year history of writing about Texas politics, and does good research as well as always providing the sources for her citations to statistics or information.
Molly Ivins: Proposal hurts American workers
By Molly Ivins - (Published January 13, 2004)
AUSTIN, Texas -- In Texas, where the border is a constant presence in our lives, no one is mistaking President Bush's immigration proposal for a brilliant new departure in immigration policy, or even for a ploy to get Hispanic political support. What we have here is the old bracero program, a guest worker program, and it primarily benefits one group and one group only -- big business. And that would be OK, if other parts of the program totaled up to a net improvement in the current situation. That's what we need to look at and weigh.
Even by normal standards of partisan journalism, there has been an awful lot of knee-jerk commentary on this proposal by people who don't seem to know how the underground economy works. Some liberals are dismissing the Bush proposal as nothing but politics, a way to get brownie points with Hispanics when it has no chance of going anywhere in Congress. Seems to me we owe Bush the benefit of the doubt on this, and it may not even be smart politically: The program would grant temporary legal status to about 8 million immigrants, but it's not going to make the 9 million Americans who are out of work happy, and some of them vote.
The proposal has merit as a way to deal with future immigrants, said Eliseo Medina, executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union. "If I'm sitting in Mexico thinking about coming north for a job, this makes sense to me. But if I'm already here, it makes no sense. This is a way to deal with future flows of immigration, but it means the (8 million to) 11 million already here are never going to be legalized. These are people who have been here 15, 20 years, paying taxes, having children part of the community. They're talking about apples and oranges."
Longtime workers would not automatically be put on the path to obtaining citizenship or even permanent resident status. They would further logjam a system that already takes up to 10 years. Bush, who proposes to cut domestic spending again this year, made no mention of how to pay for the new program.
Realistically, the bureaucratic hassles of getting 8 million to 11 million people biometric cards and then reviewing them in three years makes the whole idea silly. Try a cost estimate on that. From the undocumented worker's point of view, the proposal actually makes things worse by making their legal status dependent on their employers: If the temporary worker quits or gets fired, he is subject to deportation. This makes the workers incredibly vulnerable to exploitation, effectively indentured servants, as Susan Martin, an immigration expert at Georgetown University, put it. The possibilities for abuse in that situation are horrifying. Plus, the temporary cards offer no way to a more regular status.
But a positive initiative in the proposal would allow guest workers to take the payments they have made to Social Security and IRAs back to Mexico with them. This would fix, at least for the guest workers, the ugly situation we have now where undocumented workers pay into Social Security but never get any benefits from it. That really is just theft, since Social Security payments are taken from pay they have earned. That situation could also be fixed by a totalization agreement, which we have with other countries around the world and need with Mexico. If a Mexican citizen has earned enough here to qualify for Social Security benefits, they should be sent to him in Mexico.
Another obvious flaw in the program is that companies seeking guest workers have to "prove" that the jobs they offer will not be taken by American citizens. Think about what that would actually take. The Bush proposal is that the jobs be put on a government website -- if there are no takers here, you get to import a Mexican worker. You really have to wonder who Bush thinks is on the Internet.
The most moving part of Bush's speech was this passage: "We see millions of hardworking men and women condemned to fear and insecurity in a massive undocumented economy. ... Decent, hardworking people will now be protected by labor laws with the right to change jobs, earn fair wages and enjoy the same working conditions that the law requires for American workers."
It's always hard to know if Bush doesn't know or he doesn't care, but under his administration, Americans themselves are less and less protected by labor laws, including fair wage laws and working conditions, because Bush keeps cutting the enforcement staff at the Department of Labor and OSHA.
Bush also said in the future enforcement would be stepped up against companies that hire illegal workers. This old song has played too many times. The way it works, as in the recent case with Wal-Mart, is the feds sweep in, arrest the minimum wage workers, put them in jail and threaten them with deportation. Executives of Wal-Mart do not get arrested.
As for firing or not firing an "illegal", it's done all the time, EEOC not withstanding. Except in a few states, an employer can fire someone for any reason or no reason, as long as the employer is not firing the person for reasons related to race, religion, age, gender or other "protected" category. Happens all the time. One of the partners in our office represents people who think they have been discriminated against, and turns down probably 90% of the callers because there is no "smoking gun". The employer just says, you're fired - no reason or some reason not related to one of the protected categories, and unless the employer says something discriminatory in front of witnesses or in writing, there is really no case.
What happens more often with illegals is that the employer hints at calling the INS as a means of keeping the "illegal" employee in line or causing the employee to just disappear. Here in Pennsylvania, with the mushroom farms and the vegetable farming in New Jersey, it is not uncommon to have employers call the INS and have a roundup of their illegal employees occur the day before payday, especially if payday is once every two weeks or once a month. California farmers used to use the threat of the INS to discourage people from becoming involved in the Farmworkers Union.
I am inclined to agree with the article by Molly Ivins I posted above. I really don't think the administration is making these proposals out of sympathy for the poor over-worked and under-paid "illegal" workers. I think it will benefit big business and may improve our relations with Mexico and Central and South American nations at a time when our relations with other nations is at a low point. I certainly don't think it is going to do much about or for the tens of thousands of illegals already here and working.
Molly Ivins is a liberal writer who makes a living off making fun of George Bush and other conservative Republicans. She's also very very funny and I like her a lot. When she talks about anything Bush related you have to know where she's coming from to put it in perspective.
I think she has a lot of good points in that current illegals are not going to fall for this temporary worker thing. Illegals don't have a tendency to bring attention to themselves by doing things like enrolling in the company health plan even though it's free to them. They stay out of the system as much as possible. To sign up for a 3 year stay would alert the govt that they are here and then what happens at the end of 3 years? THEN they leave? Not likely. They will stay anonymous, thank you very much.
Since Bush and Cheney are both Texans (even though the Prez and VP are supposed to be from different states, but I digress) I understand Bush's desire to do something about making the illegals legal. He just can't say, Okay everyone here now is now legal bec the public would scream about rewarding illegal behavior and more illegals would show up and work quietly until some other president down the line says, Okay the current crop of illegals are now legal.
But as Texans (and those in California and Florida and certain other areas) many of us know that illegals are a part of the economy. Employers LIKE to have illegals on staff. They are not going to turn them into INS, they are going to help them hide. And again if there were legal Americans to hire, employers would. They are just not there.
Case in point - we are having a plumbing problem in a sewer pipe under our pier and beam house. We don't have basements here. We need to have it fixed. "Real" plumbers, legal ones and who work for real plumbing businesses will not go under our house. They don't like to, there are spiders under there, it's hard and dirty work, their plumber is too big to fit, whatever, they won't do it, call somebody else. So who do we have fixing our pipe? An illegal alien. Really, we would much prefer to have a bondable plumbing company working on our house, but they are too good for the dirty work.
Oh, I know Molly is a liberal - it's amazing how well she agrees with me.
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