Pelosi Needs to Choose Between Jobs and Illegal Immigration
Monday, November 3, 2003
By: Dan Stein

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Jobs have been on Nancy Pelosi's mind quite a bit lately. In the space of just a few days, the House Minority Leader managed to criticize both the Bush Administration's failure to create lots of new jobs despite robust economic expansion, and also the Administration's effort to make existing jobs available to American workers when it busted Wal-Mart for hiring illegal aliens.

In reaction to the October 23rd raids of more than 60 Wal-Mart stores, which netted more than 300 suspected illegal aliens, Pelosi, while in Mexico, called the government action "terrorizing" to immigrants. She urged that the government should instead place greater emphasis on punishing employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Pelosi's call for more vigorous enforcement of employer sanctions laws was rather disingenuous, given her record. On October 28, 2003, she voted against a measure to continue a highly successful pilot program that allows employers to verify the work eligibility of job applicants.

Pelosi has been roundly criticized for her injudicious choice of words, which drew an invidious comparison between the government's treatment of people who violated our immigration laws and the savage terrorist acts of murder and mayhem that have taken thousands of innocent lives here and abroad over the past several years. Perhaps because her accusation that the Bureau of Customs and Immigration Enforcement was terrorizing immigrants by actually doing its job was so outrageous, she got a free ride on her absurdly inconsistent position against employment verification of eligibility to work in the U.S.

Pelosi, like so many liberals, advocates wildly irreconcilable positions when it comes to illegal immigration and the labor market. Their first wish is that employers create good-paying jobs that include a nice package of benefits. On the other hand they seek to welcome and protect however many illegal immigrants can manage to get into the labor market, as though the law of supply and demand has no impact on wish number one. These liberals, in the name of compassion, are also perpetually prepared to have the government step in to provide for the needs of illegal aliens, thereby relieving the employers of the responsibility. Compounding this cognitive dissonance, they extol the virtues of illegal immigrants by noting that they work cheaply, thereby keeping costs down for the rest of us. (Many conservatives, it should be noted, are just as venal, but less hypocritical, on the subject of illegal alien labor.)

Despite the assertions of Pelosi and many others on both sides of the political aisle, calls for crackdowns against employers who are hire illegal workers are nothing but empty rhetoric. Enforcement of employer sanctions laws was abandoned under the Clinton Administration and that policy of non-enforcement has continued under the present administration. In 2002 the government prosecuted a grand total of 13 employer sanctions cases, meaning that an employer actually had a better chance of winning the state lottery than being fined for hiring illegal aliens.

If there was the slightest desire on the part of the leadership of either political party to do what Pelosi suggests, it would have been done long ago. We have not gone after the employers who hire illegal immigrants because neither party has the political will to do so. Pelosi's party is too busy pandering to ethnic interest groups that are trying to enlarge their constituencies, while the Republican leadership panders to the business interests that benefit from undercutting the wages of American workers.

If our government officials wanted to force employers to comply with the law, we would long ago have implemented a secure employment eligibility verification system. There is no technological barrier to creating a work authorization document that can be verified as easily, efficiently and securely as credit cards or ATM cards. What is lacking is the political will.

We are experiencing a jobless recovery, bemoaned by Pelosi and others, because our economy is exporting the jobs that can be moved and importing workers to fill those that cannot. Ironically, when the government moved to "create" some 300 new jobs at Wal-Mart that could be filled by American workers at higher wages, the response from the House Minority Leader was to publicly condemn the effort as "terrorizing" to the people who broke the law.