I read an article on Slate.com today about the Mississippi plant recently raided by ICE, which took into custody some 680 workers. We’ve all heard about the callous indifference displayed by ICE toward the families of those workers—in many cases, children were left unattended as their parents were hauled off. But two things in particular struck me. One was the comment by a local business woman:
“If they removed every illegal in town, we’d be in big trouble,” Martha Rogers, the 76-year-old CEO of the Bank of Morton, told me earlier in the day, as she contemplated what might result from last week’s raids. “I’m for limiting who can come into this country. But people who are already here, who have jobs and are contributing? There should be some avenue for them to be legal.”
The second notable event was that an additional 100 workers were fired because they were undocumented. In other words, the company knew they were employing a workforce which consisted largely of undocumented workers, and they did it anyway. Will they be punished for knowingly hiring undocumented workers, in direct violation of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986?
Put these two things together. The employer knew it was hiring illegals, and the CEO of the local bank understands that this is necessary for the local economy. But who got punished? The workers and their families, not the employer.
Which brings me to the larger point. In my practice, I deal with businesses which depend on immigrants, legal and illegal. Here in Texas, you couldn’t run a restaurant, a construction company, a landscaping company, a roofing company, etc. without immigrant labor. Trust me, if you see a roofing crew here, they are virtually certain to be Hispanic. No one else will be found on steep roofs when it’s 100+ degrees, mopping on hot tar.
And it’s not just Texas, of course. I remember reading somewhere, maybe Wine Spectator, that some 80% of the grapes harvested in Napa are harvested by illegals. The consequences of deporting them—i.e., no wine from Napa—are too horrible to contemplate.
So every conservative business owner in these and many other industries knows they depend on immigrants, legal, illegal, or on visas, like H-2A, H-2B, and others. They may have voted for Trump, but they don’t want to be left without a workforce. They might have to do something desperate, like pay US workers decent wages to do the shitty jobs immigrants do.
The acid test is E-verify. Although the system has flaws, it’s very accurate. When businesses submit info on applicants to the E-verify system, they know immediately whether those applicants are authorized to work in the US. So Congress could dramatically reduce the employment of illegals simply by making E-verify mandatory. But so far they haven’t, and it’s not just because we liberals support immigration. Businesses need it. They could surprise me, but I think it will be a cold day in hell when those businesses who hire illegals support mandatory E-verify. Hypocrisy abounds.
I think the Morton, MS banker got it right; “people who are already here, who have jobs and are contributing? There should be some avenue for them to be legal.” On the one hand we have companies which need workers. On the other, we have hard-working immigrants who want jobs. How hard can it be to match these things up? All we have to do is get past the hatred, the racism, the xenophobia, and the pleasure ICE and too many conservatives take in cruelty….