Crush Liberalism

Bush–You Asked for It, Yahoos! Is the recently announced Bush crackdown on employers of illegal immigrants

1) a desperate, Lindsey Graham-like make-up call to placate conservatives by enforcing existing laws (a possible trust-building precondition to winning some of them over to legalization of currently-illegal residents) or

2) a Leninesque attempt to heighten the contradictions and create pressure for legalization by demonstrating to business and the media that actually enforcing the existing immigration laws is intolerable?

Day In/Day Out wonders too. … If it’s option 2, of course, then Homeland Security might intentionally choose to enforce the law in as clumsy, heartless, and lawsuit-inspiring a fashion as possible, in order to create the maximum number of negative headlines. … Certainly the case for the paranoid option (2) was enhanced by the LAT ‘s report on the crackdown, featuring bitter you-asked-for-it-now-you’re-going-to-get-it quotes from Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff:

Chertoff acknowledged. “There will be some unhappy consequences for the economy out of doing this,” he said in an interview with The Times.

Chertoff said he had little sympathy for businesses that hire illegal workers, saying they should have seen the crackdown coming after the Senate failed to pass immigration reform. “We have been crystal clear about what the consequences would be,” he said. …[snip]

Chertoff suggested that once the provisions had been in force for a while, Congress would see immigration reform in a different light.

“Everybody who criticized comprehensive immigration reform for being too complex, maybe now they’re going to realize it’s complex because there are a lot of interconnected pieces to this and when you try to deal with only one corner of it, you wind up with a huge impact on something else,” he said. [E.A.]

Bush Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez is also quoted saying, in effect, that the effort he just launched will lead to disaster. (“We do not have the workers our economy needs … Ultimately congress will have to pass comprehensive immigration reform.”)

Do you trust these men to implement the plan skillfully when they have an explicit interest in causing pain? For example, wouldn’t it be better to focus enforcement on new hires whose Social Security numbers don’t match, rather than disruptively forcing the firing of existing workers who may have been here for decades? But of course, if it’s strategy #2 Bush is pursuing, then destroying the lives of decades-long residents exactly what Chertoff should be focusing on, because that’s what will generate the horror stories that might fuel a new push for amnesty. … It’s a new twist on the old Washington Monthly “Firemen First” Principle, in which agencies defend their budgets by making cuts in the most disruptive manner possible, typically by firing firemen and cops. …

I’m paranoid. I don’t trust Chertoff–he seems personally embittered by his “comprehensive” humiliation. I’d focus on new hires, not existing workers. But so far the anti-comprehensive camp–including, for example, Mark Krikorian, Polipundit and Terry Jeffrey–thinks highly of the Bush crackdown. Will they wake up in a few months and realize they’ve been snookered, or Lenined? …

Border Patrol agents have directed my attention to a letter their union, the National Border Patrol Council, sent to the City of Newark:

August 10th 2007
Dear City of Newark

If your city officials had reported Mr. Carranza as an illegal alien to DHS while he was in your jail for raping children, the three young people murdered by Mr. Carranza would be alive. Other sanctuary cities pay heed, because it is only a matter of time until it happens to someone in your town.

Several promising lives snuffed out in an instant by Jose Carranza. All might have been prevented. Very tragic.

Time for another open-borders editorial tucked behind the WSJ subscriber firewall. They’re getting better; this time they’re not complaining about their unmowed suburban lawns. They’ve dialed back the condescension a bit, too.

Which leaves Federal Reserve economist Pia Orennius to lay it out clearly. She’s concerned about the government’s new “No Match” regulations. Right now, if a business submits more than 10 SSN’s that match up to bogus names or other people’s names, that business gets a “No Match” letter and…nothing else. What’s changing is that

…the new rules will change that by offering a “safe harbor” from prosecution only to employers who act on no-match letters by firing workers who cannot present valid Social Security numbers. This is striking fear into the hearts of many employers and their workers.

And Wall Street, apparently. Why? Because, she says, it will work:

The new no-match program may not catch everybody, but it has the potential to impact the employment of three to four million undocumented workers. (They just can’t bring themselves to say “illegal immigrant”, can they? – Ed.) With such workers concentrated in just a few big states — California, Texas, Florida, New York, Arizona and Illinois — the regional impact of the program could be substantial.

Border enforcement keeps some immigrants out, but since it does nothing to remove the jobs magnet pulling workers here, it actually raises the rewards for those who make it in, encouraging more illegal immigration. Fears of no-match letters reflect a simple reality — this could work.

Can’t have that, now can we?

Interior enforcement strikes at the heart of why immigrants come to the U.S. — jobs. This approach can be effective without harming the U.S. economy when used to deter illegal inflows. When directed at the current stock of illegal immigrant workers, however, interior enforcement may do more harm than good.

The main effects will be to drive undocumented workers underground where they will work off the books for lower wages, under worse conditions and subject to more abuses. In recent work, Madeline Zavodny of Agnes Scott College and I found that the no-match letters and other post-9/11 enforcement measures, such as the Real ID Act, have eroded the demand for undocumented (sic) labor relative to other low-skilled workers, causing the relative wages and employment rates of undocumented workers (sic) to decline.

Subject to more abuses. Illegals are already nearly in indentured servitude, subject to extortion by the threat of informing La Migra about them. But this unsavory status quo doesn’t seem to be a big concern to the amnesty advocates. Given that, they need to explain why these lower wages (which would increase overall efficiency, fight inflation, and lower the price of those all-important heads of lettuce we keep hearing about) would be such a bad thing. If cheap labor is OK, why isn’t even cheaper labor better?
…
It’s not a fence, and it’s not going to shut people like me up, but as a part of a broader strategy it makes sense. And the WSJ is scared of it, so there might be something to it.

Two immigrant advocacy groups are suing the federal government over the recent New Haven raids, in which more than 30 suspected illegal immigrants were arrested.


Junta for Progressive Action and Unidad Latina en Accion filed suit Friday in U.S. District Court against the Department of Homeland Security.


They want that agency to release records on how its Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents coordinated the raids which happened back in June.

City leaders and the immigrant-rights groups have questioned whether it was retaliation for New Haven’s new ID card program. Federal officials have said the sweeps were planned weeks in advance. They say it had no connection to the new ID program, which is open to all New Haven residents including illegal immigrants.

Both groups have also raised money to help free the detainees on bond.