Immigration Officials Stage “Show” Raid
by Jeff Davis
There is one thing to be said about the illegal immigration issue: it can’t be swept under the rug. When ordinary Americans can’t walk into a grocery store or Wal-Mart without being deluged with the chatter of Spanish, when low-riders roar by on the street outside or hang in the parking lot swigging Corona beer with their salsa music blasting, when a trip to the emergency room means a four-hour wait to see a doctor because the place is clogged with Mexicans using it for their primary care center (and you’re bleeding on the floor and haggling with some black admin nurse about your insurance)–then it’s pretty hard to conceal the fact that America has an illegal alien problem. Americans SEE illegal immigration every day and public clamoring for something to be done about it increases every day.
Of course, the government has no intention whatsoever of doing anything about illegal immigration. Capitalism isn’t going to cut off its own cheap labor source. But things have gotten to the point where the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which seems to have replaced the old INS) is being compelled to stage a few well-publicized raids for show. According to a recent news article “Federal authorities on Friday raided a construction company accused of hiring illegal immigrants, detaining eight undocumented workers and arresting several other employees. Scores of agents fanned out in Douglas, along the Mexico border, and in Sierra Vista, about 50 miles northwest, in the raid on Sun Dry Wall & Stucco Inc.’s offices, a foreman’s home, the home of a suspected counterfeiter and eight work sites.”
A construction site in Arizona, and they only got eight illegals? That doesn’t sound right to me, since it’s estimated that ten percent of Arizona’s total work force is now comprised of illegals, but I do have to commend the ICE for one startling innovation, one I haven’t seen before. the news article notes “Company president Ivan Hardt, 44; the firm’s human resources manager, Carol Hill, 42; and four other employees were taken into custody on federal counts of conspiring to knowingly hire illegal workers and harboring illegal workers, said Lauren Mack, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement….Three other people were charged in state court with supplying workers with counterfeit work documents, officials said.”
Aha! After forty years of Third World immigration flooding this country with illegal aliens, someone FINALLY seems to have gotten wise to the fact that it’s THE EMPLOYERS who are the problem! If no one would HIRE these illegals in the first place, then they would have no incentive to come here. I am just cynical enough to wonder if the reason this guy Hardt got busted is that he wouldn’t play ball with the Big Boys or somebody didn’t appreciate his competition–the fact that only eight illegals were arrested indicates to me that his was a small-time operation. Now it gets silly again. The article goes on to say, “Federal authorities in Arizona set up a hot line to help families inquire about relatives who may have been arrested.” Uh…okay. If any family members do call, will they themselves be arrested? Has the government ever set up a “hotline” for the relatives of other types of criminals?
The capitalist backlash against these drop-in-the-bucket raids is already beginning. According to the article “The arrests came three days after federal agents raided a leather factory in Massachusetts and detained more than 300 illegal workers. Those arrests drew criticism over the children left behind at schools and day-care centers after parents were detained. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick called it a humanitarian crisis.” The fact that these people’s presence in our country was a criminal act to begin with seems to have escaped His Honor the governor’s notice.