Stopping Flood of Illegal Immigrants

Ugly exploitation of illegal immigrants by California growers had been going on for decades before I first saw it myself 40 years ago when I began writing for a small newspaper in El Centro near the Mexican border.

The exploitation of illegal immigrants who take jobs from domestic workers continues today in agriculture and has spread to many other industries. Yet a campaign has started to wreck a 1986 law that was designed to stop the abuse and slow the flood of foreign workers pouring into this country.

Because I came from South Carolina, I should not have been shocked by the mistreatment of illegal immigrants. After all, exploitation of blacks, who also worked cheap and hard, was rampant in the South. But I wasn’t prepared for the depth of the workers’ poverty on the generally prosperous Imperial Valley farms.

I saw paymasters tossing a few coins a day--and at times only some food and soft drinks--to the illegal immigrants who worked uncounted hours to plant and harvest the valley’s bountiful crops. They slept on tattered blankets in the fields or in tin or cardboard shacks.

Much, but far from all, of the most blatant abuse of workers has stopped. Nonetheless, serious abuse of illegal immigrants continues. It is less glaringly conspicuous, but it is far more costly to taxpayers.

I found then, as I do today, strange bedfellows were involved in the argument raging about foreign workers.

Those who want to sharply curb illegal immigration include conservatives, liberals and most unions. Their just cause is badly damaged because their ranks also include disgusting racists.

On the other side is, as it was then, an equally odd combination of groups that usually fight one another: liberals, militant Latinos, conservatives, a few unions and, of course, employers who love the cheap labor of illegal immigrants.

For instance, a bill that actually encourages more illegal immigration is co-sponsored by the liberal senator from Massachusetts, Edward M. Kennedy, and conservative Utah Republican Orrin G. Hatch.

Practically nothing was done about illegal immigration until passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. By then, illegal immigrants made up a majority of farm workers in Southwestern states and in garment industry sweatshops, as well as a large proportion of the workers in hotels, restaurants and other low-wage jobs. They had also moved into far more skilled jobs, such as construction and electronics.

Congress wisely granted amnesty to nearly 3 million illegal immigrants, and, as part of a compromise, included in the new law a weapon aimed rather inaccurately at the massive economic and social problems that the illegal immigrants pose for this country.

For the first time ever, U.S. exploiters who knowingly hired illegal immigrants could be punished by heavy fines. Until then, only the poor workers were punished--when caught--by sending them back to their home countries at our expense.

Now the same odd assortment of usually feuding forces that battled over the 1986 immigration reform act are fighting again as one side campaigns to remove all penalties against the exploiters and the other wants to help make it enforceable.

The law is being eviscerated by employers and by illegal immigrants who pay criminals to help them evade the law and dodge our overworked Border Patrol officers.

They are making a mockery of the law by turning out massive quantities of counterfeit and forged documents such as Social Security cards to help employers “prove” that they didn’t knowingly hire illegal immigrants.

These crimes can be dramatically reduced without violating anyone’s civil liberties or risking discrimination by requiring that all workers seeking jobs have counterfeit-proof work authorization cards that can be verified as easily as credit cards.

Everyone must have a Social Security card to get employment. A similar card can be made at least as counterfeit-proof as those holographic credit cards that are secure enough to allow the companies issuing them to make hundreds of millions of dollars with relatively little fraud.

If employers are not allowed to get away with hiring illegal immigrants who show phony documents, foreign workers will be much less tempted to come here illegally because there will be fewer jobs for them.

We must also stop enticing them with valuable services that cost us billions of dollars. These enticements include free schooling for their children, free medical care for mothers when their babies are born here, welfare payments for children and government help in finding jobs.

The children of illegal immigrants can even become citizens automatically despite the fact that nearly 3 million other foreigners around the world are waiting for visas as they go through the slow process of coming here legally.

Better enforcement of our immigration laws would cost a fraction of those costs of the enticements. Alan C. Nelson, former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, sensibly suggests that a $1 fee for crossing the U.S. border would generate hundreds of millions of dollars each year to pay for work authorization cards and enforcement of immigration laws.

It is speciously argued that illegal immigrants only take jobs that those here legally will never do. The truth is, employers hungering for really cheap labor hunt out the foreign workers.

Also, those here legally who reject tough jobs--and not many do--are turned off by the lousy wages and working conditions that are nearly intolerable, except to the truly desperate who rarely complain for fear of being deported.

With unemployment frighteningly high, we don’t need more workers. When we do, let them in legally. Let’s stop tempting illegal immigration and use counterfeit-proof work authorization cards to make the landmark 1986 immigration reform law succeed.