There are two main components driving the nation’s illegal immigrant problem – the illegal immigrants themselves and the companies that employ them.
Up until now, the two remedies available to the federal government have been the deportation of illegal aliens from the country and fining the companies caught employing them.
As everyone knows, President Barack Obama has gutted the Border Patrol and tied the hands of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to find, detain and deport illegal immigrants through a nice sounding policy called “deferred deportation’.
Now President Obama has dropped the other shoe. Effective immediately – and by Executive Order – the federal government will suspend enforcement actions against companies that hire illegal immigrants. That means no administrative actions, no fines, no criminal charges – nothing to take the profit out of illegal immigrant labor.
While this is a boom to the Chambers of Commerce and other business organizations it is is a knife in the heart of out-of-work Americans hoping for employment from companies offering jobs “Americans won’t do” – especially those in the construction, farming, landscaping and domestic service industries.
According to “happy talk” coming out of the politicized Bureau of Labor Statistics:
“In May, both the unemployment rate (5.5 percent) and the number of unemployed persons (8.7 million) were essentially unchanged. Both measures have shown little movement since February.
Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (5.0 percent), adult women (5.0 percent), teenagers (17.9 percent), whites (4.7 percent), blacks (10.2 percent), Asians (4.1 percent), and Hispanics (6.7 percent) showed little or no change in May.”
But these numbers don’t include people who have given up looking for work including millions of Americans who have exhausted their unemployment benefits. If you add in Americans who have lost hope, the overall unemployment rate is closer to 11% and almost 25% for black Americans.
Against this backdrop, the Obama Administration has virtually suspended “worksite audits” in addition to other immigration enforcement measures according to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), tumbling along with the rest of immigration enforcement.
Sharply fewer business owners are being arrested, fewer fines are being levied and fewer fines are being collected to make it easier for companies to higher millions of illegal immigrants living in the United States under the president’s amnesty order. According to Jessica Vaughan, CIS policy studies director:
“Employers now face very little risk in hiring illegal workers and have little incentive to abide by the law…”
Mr. Obama’s administration early on stopped the Bush administration practice of workplace raids, which rounded up illegal immigrants – and which advocacy groups deemed too traumatic for the immigrants and their families.
Instead, the Obama administration began what became known as “virtual raids” – audits of paperwork, to figure out if a business was hiring illegal workers. Done right, it can be effective and it produced results at the beginning of Mr. Obama’s tenure.”
