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Chicken or the egg, illegal workers or illegal employers by David Brito-Garcia
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Chicken or the egg, illegal workers or illegal employers by DAVID BRITO-GARCIA
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| Article Posted: 02/05/2012 |
| Article Views: 83 |
| Articles Written: 1 |
| Word Count: 975 |
| Article Votes: 0 |
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Chicken or the egg, illegal workers or illegal employers |
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Business News,Current Affairs,Law
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CHICKEN OR THE EGG: ILLEGAL WORKERS OR ILLEGAL EMPLOYERS David Brito Garcia. 2/1/12 Ask any person on the street what the two biggest problems in Texas are and chances are “illegal workers” will be one of the responses. It is ironic to talk about illegal aliens but never about the employers who hire them. In reality, illegal workers are only a problem because of the seldom discussed basic cause of the problem which is the employers who are illegally hiring undocumented workers because of cheap labor costs: illegal employers. There is no such thing as an “immigrant job.” The reality is that immigrants and natives compete for the same jobs and native workers are increasingly at a disadvantage because employers choose to hire illegal foreign workers who work as cheap labor and are afraid to report any workplace violations because the employer can report them to immigration. Recently, fruit company executives at Zirkle agreed to pay $1.3M to settle out of court a RICO lawsuit alleging that undocumented workers were hired in order to keep wages low. In spite of the harsh penalties facing employers, they continue to break federal laws. In Texas, as everywhere else, the almighty dollar controls enforcement of illegal hiring. In Texas enforcement is lax to say the least. Consequently, illegal employers have very little to worry about as they continue to rake in millions of dollars in profits because of cheap labor costs when they have politicians and illegals on their payroll. Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money in politics said, “"If you want to curry favor with Rick Perry, you may want to give to an organization he chairs.” “Certainly, donors in the know are aware of opportunities to build relationships." This is very much evident in Perry's political appointments of big time donors to important state jobs. Roughly 40 percent of the one million construction workers in Texas are immigrants and a large percentage of these workers do not have work visas. The biggest known illegal hiring violators are in the agricultural and the building trades. Some of them are the large multinational agricultural operations, and most of them are the oil field related, large poultry and state wide construction firms. Governor Rick Perry's biggest political contributors include Houston home builder Bob Perry. The Governor of Texas received over a half-a-million dollars from the construction trades in 2006. Perry Homes, the biggest home builder in Texas who builds thousands of homes per year and is one of the largest employers of immigrant laborers in Texas, some with papers, some without. Bob Perry contributed $2,531,799 directly to Rick Perry from January 2001 to July 2011. Perry Homes also contributed $335,000 to David Dewhurst during the 2006 general election. This makes it evident that the politicians' efforts to enforce illegal employment laws are minimal al the most. It's interesting that Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim who requested for a waiver of federal corn-based ethanol production mandates met with Rick Perry and got the waiver. The East Texas poultry producer six days later gave $100,000 to the Republican Governors Association chaired by Perry. Bo Pilrim's Large poultry empire along with the hundreds of poultry operations throughout the state literally would cease to be without foreign workers. Underlining the importance of foreign workers, Winter Garden Produce in Uvalde lost about $250,000 in crops because they couldn't find enough labor in 2005. In a 2008 survey by the Center for North American studies, 77 percent of the agricultural survey respondents stated they had reduced the size and/or scope of their business due to lack of employees. The jobs are there but the pay is not enough to get the locals to go work in the fields. In the Texas legislature, committee's craft new laws which are introduced into the House or Senate. No important bill is considered without first winning approval from at least one committee, and often several. Those committees are thus enormously important to the industries they oversee. Because of that, expect members of the Agriculture committee to get the biggest contributions from agribusiness interests. The Agricultural Committee chair spent some of his time commemorating the 50th anniversary of Fred's Corner Grille in Vernon and congratulating the Paducah High School boys' basketball team on winning the UIL 1A Division II state championship. The committee vice chair Charles “Doc” Anderson spent the committee's time considering matters like Honoring Bill and Diane Jones of Waco on their 45th wedding anniversary. It doesn't look like much is going to get done as far as stopping the illegal hiring of agricultural workers in Texas. Illegal hiring is also done by local firms in our communities by quick food restaurants like McDonald's, motels, landscape, roofing and construction companies that have predominantly Spanish-speaking employees who may or may not be illegals. Families that can afford it, will generally have a Hispanic maid or gardener who's wages are paid under the table. Commonly known as the I-9 program because of the form that's filled out, a very little used E-Verify is an electronic program through which employers verify the employment eligibility of their employees after hire. The program was authorized by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA). In short, employers submit information taken from a new hire's Form I-9 (Employment Eligibility Verification Form) through E-Verify to the Social Security Administration and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to determine whether the information matches government records and whether the new hire is authorized to work in the United States. E-Verify is administered by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, USCIS, Verification Division, and the Social Security Administration. The USCIS Verification Division provides a program administered by a federal agency to help employer compliance with U.S. immigration law but employers in Texas seldom use it.
Related Articles -
illegal workers, illegal employment, special interest contributions, Rick Perry, Republican Governors Association, political chickanry, wages, undocu,
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