Letters to the Editor
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Republicans are Awesome!
This is the moral and spiritual leadership we need in this country. Go Romney!
By the way, I'm being facetious.
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I am relieved.
Now that he has fired the company, he has demonstrated morals and character appropriate for the highest office in the land.
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I wonder if any of you shop at a store with illegal employees?
You should really do something about that. Personally. See the point is, to hire companies or contractors so that they can't sue you personally. You maintain an arms' length relationship. Or - if you think everyone you've ever hired to do anything you should have a right to pry into their lives to determine their status - then say that.
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Romney is right
He shouldn't be in charge of checking up on the status of other people's employees.
However, he also shouldn't fabricate meetings and interview questions out of whole cloth, as he appears to be doing with both this incident and the Christian Science Monitor ordeal. Perhaps he has a bit of an honesty issue? I am shocked. Shocked!
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Okay, I'll be serious.
The illegal immigration debate punishes the IMMIGRANTS while not removing any incentive for them to come over. Companies still offer cheap jobs to illegal immigrants, and they still come over, and then we just deport them again, and the void is filled with more workers.
For all of Romney's tough talk on immigration, he really did the only thing that's ever going to make a difference: By firing the landscaping firm, he hurt the BUSINESS employing the illegal immigrants. That sends a message that he won't do business with a company that employs people illegally. A real kick in the pants would be some kind of federal statute saying the company must be fined the daily minimum wage salary of a documented worker for every day the company has employed illegal labor. That would send a pretty clear message that the US will not tolerate illegal immigration, and it removes the incentive for business to hire illegal immigrants.
Put up all the fences you want, but until you make it more costly for business to employ illegals than it is for them to employ documented workers, there will never be a solution to the problem. But hey, imposing regulations on business isn't being a good republican. So let's get the Army and Blackwater to round em up and send em back.
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Horse. Barn door.
Such a freakin' hypocrite.
The central issue, other than the principle that a nation's citizens and only citizens have the right to decide against policies which are greatly to their disadvantage, is that our current system privatizes the benefits and socializes the costs of out-of-control immigration.
'But what it means in practice is that the Americans, who are displaced in their professional and manufacturing jobs by offshoring and work visas for foreigners, also cannot find work in the unskilled and semi-skilled jobs taken over by illegal immigrants. A free market policy that gives the bird to American labor is not going to win acceptance by the population. Such a policy serves only the owners of capital and its senior managers.'
' The free market economists ignore that a country that offshores its production also offshores its jobs. It becomes dependent on goods and services made in foreign countries, but lacks sufficient export earnings with which to pay for them. A country whose workforce is being reallocated, under pressure of offshoring, to domestic services has nothing to trade for its imports. That is why the US trade deficit has exploded to over $800 billion annually.'
'Free Trade, Open Immigration Dogmas Must Be Rethought' - By Paul Craig Roberts
http://www.vdare.org/roberts/070816_china.htm
'"Employers are very quick to raise the specter of a labor shortage, but often it's another way of saying they can't find the workers they want at the price they're paying.They are unwilling to meet the price signal the market is sending, so they seek help in the form of a spigot like immigration." - " Jared Bernstein, senior economist for the Economic Policy Institute
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uh
It seems to me that it is not Romney's responsibility to ensure that the service he utilizes employs legal residents. Regardless of whether he did or didn't insist that the company check their workers' documentation, that is an obligation that should not be placed on the shoulder of the customer. If I hire a service to clean my house or my yard, it's not my responsbility to make sure the people they send are legal US residents. Should I also verify with my attorney that her paralegals are fully documented? Should I ask my doctor if I can see the nurse's proof of residence? Shall I insist that the Holiday Inn I stay at prove to me that the woman changing my sheets isn't an illegal immigrant?
On the bright side, at least he didn't call the workers dirty Guatemalans like a certain former Montana senator.
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PS
Would it make it better or worse if I only demanded proof of residence when the people looked Mexican? If the manual labor is dark-skinned, should I "know better" than to assume they're here legally?
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He just fired them?
Did he turn the illegals in to the proper enforcement division? Did he turn the owner in for hiring illegals?
Seems if republicans are serious about their rheteric, they'll ask these questions of Mr. Romney.
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Verifying Labor
One of the comments made a point about it not being our responsibility to verify that someone is using illegal labor. But why not? Isn't it in our interests when a company is dumping chemicals illegally? and wouldn't you boycott that company if you knew?
If we're serious about the problem (and frankly, I could care less either way), then we need to be serious about addressing the problem. And addressing the problem means going after the businesses who create the jobs.
Or it could be a problem we're "serious" about addressing every four years when there's an election, in which case then yeah, let's talk about really expensive solutions that won't help and never get passed.
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Romney is running for president
That's the big difference, and he's running for the nomination of a party that has made it clear that they detest brown people being here illegally. Romney has already gone to the trouble of changing just about every belief he had to appeal to the extra chromosome wing of the party that votes in the primaries, so why not take the extra step of checking the backgrounds of the brown taking care of his mansion.
No, it wasn't his responsibility to, but since he's running for president, and is whoring for votes from people that hate brown skinned illegals, it sure was stupid of him not to.