So why do illegal immigrants come here? Simple – because they can get jobs and numerous companies won’t worry about checking their legal status. So for people who really think illegal immigration is a bad thing, consider these employers as drug dealers supplying to their junkies.
What is interesting is how the situation has gained attention. I know it is political and so do most people, but for those that don’t think it is, here is something to think about. This appears in today’s Washington Post:
The Bush administration, which is vowing to crack down on U.S. companies that hire illegal workers, virtually abandoned such employer sanctions before it began pushing to overhaul U.S. immigration laws last year, government statistics show.
Between 1999 and 2003, work-site enforcement operations were scaled back 95 percent by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which subsequently was merged into the Homeland Security Department. The number of employers prosecuted for unlawfully employing immigrants dropped from 182 in 1999 to four in 2003, and fines collected declined from $3.6 million to $212,000, according to federal statistics.
So the number of illegal immigrants coming into the country is increasing while actual enforcement is in decline, or should I say, at a damn near halt. Of course people will look at that and blame Clinton because it started in 1999, but look at the next paragraph:
In 1999, the United States initiated fines against 417 companies. In 2004, it issued fine notices to three.
This massive decrease is under Bush. His third year in office only netted fine “notices” to three companies!
So who else is their to blame for this. Now this is interesting:
The government’s steady retreat from workplace enforcement in the 20 years since it became illegal to hire undocumented workers is the result of fierce political pressure from business lobbies, immigrant rights groups and members of Congress, according to law enforcement veterans. Punishing employers also was de-emphasized as the government recognized that it lacks the tools to do the job well, and as the Department of Homeland Security shifted resources to combat terrorism.
Here we go again. Greedy politicians being influenced by lobbyists are the key ingredient to disaster. We also now see another government agency that has been severely crippled by Bush’s Department of Homeland Security (hmm can anyone say FEMA).
So what is the administration doing to fix this problem? Remember, Bush said “our borders are broken” in his oval office speech. But who broke them:
The administration says it is learning from past failures, and switching to a strategy of building more criminal cases, instead of relying on ineffective administrative fines or pinprick raids against individual businesses by outnumbered agents.
It is seeking more resources to sanction employers, toughen penalties and finally set up a reliable system — first proposed in 1981 — to verify the eligibility of workers. That would allow the government to hold employers accountable for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants.
Oh it is another one of Bush’s mia culpas. Gee, how many of these does he get? He screwed up Fema, Iraq, the intelligence community, and countless other items, but here he is again wanting another one! Now here we are, the tax payers, being forced to sit back and pay for another one of his mistakes. Wow, we should all start feeling like daddy Bush at this point.
I also wonder why we are now looking into a law proposed in 1981 to combat this problem. I don’t know if Bush would like that, I mean FISA is from 1978 and that is an “old law”.
Ok now let’s get off of Bush for a minute and look at some others who are to blame. The article talks about a 1998 raid in Georgia and this is interesting:
The Georgia raids netted 4,034 illegal immigrants, prompting other unauthorized workers to stay home. As the $90 million onion crop sat in the field, farmers “started screaming to their local representatives,” said Bart Szafnicki, INS assistant district director for investigations in Atlanta from 1991 to 2001.
Georgia’s two senators and three of its House members, led by then-Sen. Paul Coverdell (R) and Rep. Jack Kingston (R), complained in a letter to Washington that the INS did not understand the needs of America’s farmers. The raids stopped.
Rep. Jack Kingston – hmm he has been somewhat in the spot light of this debate. What is interesting is that a group called the Americans for Better Immigration scores law makers on what they have done to fight illegal immigration and they give Kingston an almost perfect score of 94%. I guess they didn’t know that Kingston actually played a major roll in contributing to the problem.
So what we have here is a new state of hate in our country that is being fueled by Republicans that are afraid of losing their seats this November. We got a President who is helping them out because he is afraid of his party losing control in November. We, as taxpayers, are paying for this because Bush has choose to ignore the issue and is now blaming it on his “past mistakes”. To rub a little more salt in that wound, we are paying for this because businesses did not want to. They lobbied to have laws not enforced and got it. Not only is our legislation for sale but so is our justice. This article really opened my eyes, and I hope yours, to the problem that has been created by politicians and greedy business.