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From today’s Mail Bag:
The Progress Report wrote:
Reining In ICE
Worker at American Apparel
From: The Progress Report [progress@americanprogressaction.org]
Sent: Wednesday, October 07, 2009 8:39 AM
To: Tom
Subject: Reining In ICE
…ICE’s [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]decision to start punishing employers who hire undocumented workers has also been criticized for devastating local businesses and leaving thousands unemployed. Most recently, ICE forced American Apparel — one of the few American-made clothing manufacturers still left — to lay off 1,800 employees. The Los Angeles Times points out that “throwing American Apparel’s undocumented workers out on the street only replaces one problem with another.” That is, the unemployed workers will likely be driven deeper into the “underground economy or into sweatshops, maybe into crime, maybe homelessness.” The news comes just one year after American Apparel took its “Legalize LA” campaign for immigration reform national. Much like the position supported by the collective advocate, faith, and business communities, Legalize LA believes that the best way to fix the nation’s immigration system is through a complete legislative overhaul undertaken by Congress that legalizes the millions of hardworking undocumented workers who are currently being targeted and abused in the various communities that they contribute to. It’s a promising sign that DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is already planning ahead for the possibility of giving legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants.
So don’t throw them out into the street. The whole idea of cracking down on employers who raise profits by hiring illegals is to go after the company heads, or CEOs, who set this policy. Hiring outside the American labor force is practiced in order to undercut minimum wage standards and living wage standards. The factory/farm heads are the ones who should be kicked out into the street, not the workers.
Hiring illegals to work for lower wages and benefits than union workers get, drives down the cost of labor and continues the practices first brought about by Ronald Reagan. The purpose of “trickle-down” economics was to inflate the wealthy and to shrink the middle class. The ones doing the hiring should be kicked under the buss, not the workers.
It would do my heart good to see a CEO dragged out of a factory in handcuffs for hiring illegals. But, deporting the illegal immigrants afterwards would be blaming the victim for the crime.
Instead of forcing a company to lay off workers, as in the case with American Apparel, they should be forced to hire new management. The next step in the corrective process would be freeze hiring, then start an in-house training program to nationalize the workers that have already been hired, and finally start paying them a living wage as if they had hired American citizens to begin with. That is a good progressive approach and it would be a fitting solution for harming our labor force.
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