Exploiting Illegals

Exploiting Illegals

I'm really confused. Is Meg Whitman, candidate for California governor, an evil Republican because she employed an illegal alien, or because she didn't? If I understand correctly what happened, she found a housekeeper through a service and employed her for several years at $23/hour until she discovered that the housekeeper was an illegal alien who had fraudulently been using her sister's Social Security number.

This is what happens when we keep a law on the books that we're not willing to enforce. You're screwed whether you obey the law or not. Public sympathy is against the illegal aliens as an amorphous group but solidly in the court of any individual illegal alien who's not an outright drug trafficker or child molester. This is most true when the illegal alien is thwarted in the sympathetic quest to earn a living. As one irritable commenter to this Daily Beast story put it: "Meg is just honoring the time honored tradition of exploit cheap illegal labor, so coveted by the elite Right." This, in spite of the fact that Whitman only found out that her housekeeper was illegal when the housekeeper asked for help on that very subject, whereupon Whitman fired her. This wasn't someone she hired for slave wages from the local corner pool, knowing she could pay a pittance because the worker couldn't afford to come out of the shadows and complain.

Once Whitman learned the worker was illegal, she had absolutely no tolerable options as a candidate for office. She couldn't continue to employ her, but firing her was callous. She couldn't turn her over to the authorities, the way a stern but caring employer might regretfully turn her in for burglary or drug possession, because the authorities aren't in the business of doing anything about an illegal alien and haven't been for some time. So Whitman cast her housekeeper out into limbo, where she was picked up by political operatives, exposed as unemployable, and used as a prop.

It would have been nice if Whitman had helped her housekeeper when she was asked, but what form would that help take? It's not as though the housekeeper has some kind of legal option to pursue, short of returning to Mexico and applying for citizenship through the ordinary channels, a completely hopeless task. Was the housekeeper asking for help, not in the legal sense, but in the sense of hiding her charade? If Whitman had been caught doing that, she'd have been crucified.

So we're left with this kind of political posturing:

Antonio Gonzalez, president of the non-partisan Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, said he believed that the housekeeper’s story might do some damage to the Whitman campaign. “I think it will hurt Meg Whitman because Latinos are sensitive to this issue,” Gonzalez said. “It’s not about the law, it’s about humanity, respect, and human rights.”

Well, it sure can't be about law. The legal system is broken on this one.