Representative Sue Myrick, in her new, very chic, stop-those-illegals phase, has proposed two bills she hopes will pass through Congress.
The first one, called the Scott Gardner Bill, in memory of the Gaston School teacher who died in a car wreck with an illegal drunk driver, would make it mandatory for any illegal immigrant convicted of DWI to be deported.
I hope it passes. I totally agree with the concept. In a perfect world, every illegal convicted of DWI should be put back on a plane to where he came from. For that matter, every illegal immigrant should be deported, period. Unfortunately, that is not possible due to very complex reasons that would take more than this column to explain.
I also believe the people who have the power to do so should enforce stricter DWI sanctions, so that incidents like Scott Gardner’s and all other tragedies due to drunk drivers, legal or illegal, are reduced.
Myrick’s other bill scares me a little bit, starting with the name: “The 10K Run for the Border Act.” It sounds like something out of a late-80s Taco Bell promo, which makes me believe I know the age of Myrick’s PR staff and what they ate in college. The 10K Run for the Border Act would raise the penalties businesses face for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants. Currently, the fine is $250 per illegal; this bill raises it to $10,000 and gives an 80-percent cut of the fine to the local law enforcement agency assisting in the arrest — to be used to increase efforts to curb illegal immigration.
Sounds great, right? That way we can help seal the borders, because if you can’t hire illegals there will be no jobs — hence, reasons — to come here in the first place. On paper, it looks pretty good for those people who have seen the “dangers” of all that illegal labor coming in and speaking in strange tongues — a group Myrick has chosen as an easy target to get frightened voters on her side.
Unfortunately, I don’t see how stopping the use of illegals is a good solution for all those legitimate business owners struggling to pay local workers. It’s globalization, not illegal labor, that is killing small businesses and leaving American citizens jobless. Remember that big market called the world?
If you phone the formerly North Carolina-based US Airways customer service line, a friendly voice will assist you in all your travel needs. That voice is sitting in a chair in a Mexico City office, getting paid half of what that same worker would be paid here, whether legal or illegal.
All across Mexico, and specially on the Mexico-US border, there are maquiladoras, assembly plants offering foreign companies huge tax breaks, cheap (or cost efficient) labor and other great benefits. There’s a Sara Lee hosiery plant, among other very American names there.
Sure, it’s illegal to hire undocumented workers, and it’s wrong to take away jobs that Americans should have, but undocumented workers are just pebbles in the shoe of a damaged, badly managed American economy. If Myrick really cares, maybe she should worry a little bit more about how the big companies in this state — and across the nation — are moving their operations elsewhere. Maybe she should make a bill that offers a plan to keep those jobs here. It seems to me that would be saner — even at the risk of keeping those illegals around here instead of making them run back to the border.
Hernan Mena, a native of Mexico, is the associate editor of the regional Hispanic weekly newspaper, Que Pasa.
This article appears in Oct 19-25, 2005.
