Our Illegal Employer Problem

When I was home over break I was listening to Thom Hartmann on the radio. Hartmann was discussing the immigration raids and ways to solve the immigration problem. He had a caller who sold peaches. The caller said that she offered her workers good pay at $10 an hour and food and housing on site to pick peaches and still had a hard time finding workers. Hartmann suggested offering $20 an hour. The woman emphatically said that people still wouldn't pick peaches for $20 an hour or $800 a week. Hartmann disagreed with this and so do I. When the call was over Hartmann started saying that we have an illegal employer problem and not an illegal immigration problem in the country.

Here is an article Hartmann wrote back in July discussing our illegal employer problem...

The fact is that we had an open border with Mexico for several centuries, and "illegal immigration" was never a serious problem. Before Reagan's presidency, an estimated million or so people a year came into the US from Mexico - and the same number, more or less, left the US for Mexico at the end of the agricultural harvest season. Very few stayed, because there weren't jobs for them.

Non-citizens didn't have access to the non-agricultural US job market, in large part because of the power of US labor unions (before Reagan 25% of the workforce was unionized; today the private workforce is about 7% unionized), and because companies were unwilling to risk having non-tax-deductible labor expenses on their books by hiring undocumented workers without valid Social Security numbers.

But Reagan put an end to that. His 1986 amnesty program, combined with his aggressive war on organized labor (begun in 1981), in effect told both employers and non-citizens that there would be few penalties and many rewards to increasing the US labor pool (and thus driving down wages) with undocumented immigrants. A million people a year continued to come across our southern border, but they stopped returning to Latin America every fall because instead of seasonal work they were able to find permanent jobs.

The magnet drawing them? Illegal Employers.

Our illegal employer problem won't be solved unless the companies that hire illegal immigrants face consequences. More than 1,200 illegal immigrants were arrested in the immigration raids that took place in December. The company that employed them was not charged with anything yet.