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Updated: 1 September 2012 | 11:53 am in Letters to the Editor
Penalize job moving, hiring of illegals
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What would our unemployment be in this country if people would stop hiring illegal immigrants or illegal immigrants? Or if companies quit moving jobs outside of the country to boost profits to ridiculous extremes?
I think heavy fines should be imposed on anyone hiring illegal immigrants, and that companies moving jobs outside the country should be in a higher tax bracket. If there were penalties to offset the gains, much less of this might happen.
Leon Schindler
Cedar Rapids
Rules of Engagement
Penalize job moving, hiring of illegals
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Those are fair questions, and because they are so logical, they probably will never be addressed head-on.
Here’s America’s dirty little secret – Many businesses want illegal immigrants to do our dirty work as cheaply as possible. Georgia recently passed a very aggressive anti-illegal immigrant law. Now, they have a severe shortage of labor to pick their crops.
http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2011/06/17/gas-farm-labor-crisis-playing-out-as-planned/
There is pleanty of American labor sitting on welfare rolls doing nothing.
And here is America’s biggest “dirty little secret”.
http://www.fairus.org/publications/president-obama-s-record-of-dismantling-immigration-enforcement
“Many businesses want illegal immigrants to do our dirty work as cheaply as possible.”
Business will take cheap labor and Democrats court illegal votes – seems pretty much the same behavior.
”
Georgia recently passed a very aggressive anti-illegal immigrant law. Now, they have a severe shortage of labor to pick their crops.”
The Obama administration is suing states to prevent laws limiting illegal immigration – isn’t the GOP trying to keep illegals in the work force. Eventually business has to raise the hourly wage if they want to hire someone.
Care to provide some credible documentation for your assertions?
Nunn,
What we have in Ellis’s post is a classic example of political cliches off tracking.
Ellis first gives us a mixed on the one hand on the other hand message: on the one hand business [presumably Republican] wants cheap [illegal] labor; on the other hand Democrats want ineligible people voting [presumably for them].
We can cite evidence for the former. There’s plenty out there. But the last time Democrats were winning by courting immigrants who weren’t citizens was back when Tammany Hall ran New York City.
Pointing to Georgia as an object lesson in what happens to your labor force when the government cracks down on illegals is accurate. That did happen and is still a problem.
The last paragraph is sort of right and sort of wrong. DOJ is suing over “papers please” but deportations are much higher now than they were under Bush. And then there’s the Dream Act. Which Republicans first blocked and are now throwing a hissy fit over
And another “dirty little secret”: NAFTA (signed by politicians from BOTH parties, and even by those who make a lot of political hay off railing about “…those durn illegals…”) is a big reason for the influx of illegal immigrants. Thanks to cheap (helped by subsidies and OUR tax dollars) American corn flooding Mexico and Central America, farmers/workers in those parts of the world were driven off the land. And where do you suppose many of them ended up? Hmm. We reap what we sow.
One big problem with illegal immigrant labor is that it is extremely regional- mostly confined to the Big Ag sections of California and the produce-growing regions of the South. Yes, there are Iowa companies that have gotten in trouble for the use of illegals- the Postville meatpacking operation and, on a onesie-twosie basis, restaurants across the state. However, making illegal workers vanish would do little to help “the unemployed” since most such people do not reside near where the land-based work exists, and the subsistance wages that these jobs typically offer do not make it feasible for folks to pack up and move.
If the supply of cheap illegal labor were truly pinched off, the price of labor MIGHT rise to the point where it might be economically sound for native citizens to take the jobs. However, this would entail the ag producers making less profits and consumers paying more for their fruits, vegetables, and meats. Sorry for the pun, but there is no Free Lunch here.
Lorenz,
There’s another twist to this. Farm work requires a certain skill set that Mexican and Central American displaced farmers have and almost all long term unenployed Americans do not have.
Ag employers are not only not willing to pay decent wages, they are also not willing to train. There’ve been a few instances of employers trying to fill those picking chopping detassle walking beans types of jobs with out of state homeless bussed in and from what I understand those attempts were unmitigated disasters. I dimly remember the Postville meat packing plant busing in homeless from Texas only to have these people washout within hours. The plant refused to pay their way home so Iowa ended up stuck with them
“There’s another twist to this. Farm work requires a certain skill set that Mexican and Central American displaced farmers have and almost all long term unenployed Americans do not have.”
Illegal aliens have one extraodinary skill that Liberal Americans will never have. They are hard workers. They are not lazy. They have determination.
On the other hand American workers have one extraodinary trait that Illegal workers don’t have (most of them). Americans have an escapte clause to work called welfare. Why work when everything is free?
Ahart,
If illegals are such hard workers, why do you want them all deported?
And by the way, that immigration reform group you cited (above), Federation for American Immigration Reform, has been designated as a hate group.
“FAIR: Crossing the Rubicon of Hate” Hatewatch, Southern Poverty Law Center, December 11, 2007
Roberta: I would gladly exchange every hard core Liberal Democrat for a hard working illegal immigrant. Our nation would prosper again.
The Southern Povery Law Center is nothing but a Soros backed collection of extreme liberal left wack jobs. Nuff said.
“I would gladly exchange every hard core Liberal Democrat for a hard working illegal immigrant. Our nation would prosper again.”
Can you spell naive?
When we hear politicians talking about how to increase the supply of customers with plenty of money to spend, America will be on the way to an economic recovery. Those customers are the very same American workers who had their jobs moved to other countries or illegal aliens were brought in to do their jobs here.
There is no shortage of American workers with talent, ambition, and education and a willingness to do hard work but there is one heck of a shortage of customers with good paying jobs. Further inflation of the labor supply just makes life harder for all workers.
Bunch,
Exactly right.
When I listen to Republicans what I hear is a bunch of people trying to conviince me that we’d be ever so much better off if we could just go back to the way things were in the second half of the 19th century.
Republicans are trying to roll back all the gains made by ordinary people over the course of the last hundred years. 14th Amendment let’s get rid of that, Voting Rights Act let’s get rid of that, fair pay let’s get rid of that, workplace safety, clean air, clean water, access to health care, education. We don’t need any of that.
What we really need is lower taxes on the filthy rich and more money spent on war.
Allen: Can you spell stupid?