Election season typically prompts politicians to target scapegoats and dive off the rhetorical deep end with them. Still, it is disheartening, to see so many candidates in state races, mostly Republicans, piling on the issue of illegal immigration as if that were the central source of our economic and social problems — but all the while avoiding discussion of the single most important factor that propels illegal immigration: employers who exploit cheap labor and conveniently ignore verification of job applicants’ legal status.
State Rep. Richard Floyd , R-Chattanooga, and Georgia state Sen. Jeff Mullis, R-Chickamauga, followed this pattern early last week. They blamed immigrants for America’s job problems, exaggerating their use of public benefits, and trumpeted their desire to see more states adopt Arizona’s controversial new immigration law. That law directs police officers to determine the citizenship status of anyone they stop who might be an illegal immigrant, and to arrest those who can’t immediately prove their right to be in this country.
Potential governors?
Gubernatorial candidates Ron Ramsey, Zach Wamp and Bill Haslam waded into the same waters with new television ads, pledging fealty to the concept of the Arizona law and promising to promote their own police crackdown on illegals.
Mr. Ramsey promised in his ad, for example, that as governor he would “require police to check the citizenship of everyone they arrest.” (Warning: Tennesseans prone to drinking and driving would have to carry their passports or birth certificates. In the absence of a bona fide national identify card, many illegal aliens commonly use driver’s licenses and counterfeit Social Security card to “prove” citizenship.)
The politicians mysteriously failed, of course, to mention the role employers play in sustaining illegal immigration, and what they should be required to do to choke off the job magnet that draws so many people to the United States without a legal visa.
Political shell game
If they were truly serious about illegal immigration, this would be their first priority. As news reports have shown for years, the nation’s biggest retail stores, carpet mills and poultry and beef processors have been named in lawsuits and federal charges involving the massive hiring of illegals, sometimes through agents who blatantly deliver van-loads of illegal immigrants to their doors.
If Messrs. Ramsey, Wamp, Haslam, Floyd, Mullis, et al., were truly serious about restraining illegal immigration, they would require all employers to use the federal e-verify data base to confirm the authenticity of a suspect job applicant’s visa or citizenship documentation.
That would merit broad support. This nation cannot otherwise rationally plan legal immigration quotas with respect to our job base and natural resources. State legislatures, of course, would have to support use of a national identity card or adoption at the state level of the potential substitute, the Real ID Act for all drivers’ licenses. But these politicians, like most others who rail against illegal immigration, oppose such measures.
In this void, textile mills, slaughter houses, construction and landscape companies, restaurants, manufacturers, farmers in need of field hands for planting and harvesting, and families in need of house-cleaners can continue to easily avoid the responsibility of verifying the legal status of prospective employees. That apparently suits many of them just fine. Illegal immigrants afraid of being deported aren’t in a good position to require better wages, overtime pay, health insurance or a 401(k) match.
Politicians whose empty-headed, xenophobic rants against illegals, of course, only makes life tougher for legal immigrants, who play by the rules but have to bear the onus of public suspicion.
Legal immigrants tarred
And there are plenty of them here. The Chattanooga Housing Authority, for example, has recently established a list of bilingual translators to aid legal immigrants here in these languages: Arabic, French, Hindi, Burundi, Russian, Spanish, Swahili. That’s in addition to the German and Japanese immigrants whose auto companies have brought them here.
Ranting politicians who would have police target people who speak other languages ignore these complexities. Their deplorable tactics also deny the vast benefit (in goods, services and foodstuffs) that Americans seem perfectly willing to accept from illegal labor, which is often accompanied by demeaning, dangerous and abusive circumstances. They also overlook the benefit to the economy of the taxes that are typically withheld from illegal immigrants paychecks for services are not allowed to receive.
These politicians scape-goating statements, moreover, follow another session in the Tennessee Legislature in which dozens of bills were filed to deny illegal immigrants public services — but not a single bill to actually require that employers confirm applicants’ legal immigration status before hiring them, and not a single bill to make it the actual hiring of illegals a prosecutable crime.
Kowtowing to business
Why? The answer’s simple. That would raise the ire of the business lobbies, and dampen campaign contributions.
Their clear unwillingness to address employers’ hiring of illegal immigrants points to their disinterest in a real solution to the problem of illegal immigration, and their willing use of national anxiety over illegal immigration as simply another wedge issue to be exploited.
It also confirms that the real issue of illegal immigration is not that undocumented aliens are robbing Americans of jobs, as these political, plastic poseurs of propriety would have voters believe. It is that employers themselves are giving jobs to illegal immigrants, very often knowingly, without bothering to verify their legal status.
We can be sure that political posturing and scape-goating of illegal immigration will continue through the November elections. We also can be sure that Republicans will happily block any authentic effort in Washington to pursue genuine immigration reform, all the while deploring the problem to the hilt.