Treating illegal employers like organized crime

NY Times:

The apprehension on Wednesday of more than 1,100 illegal immigrants employed by a pallet supply company based in Houston, as well as the arrest of seven of its managers, represented the start of a more aggressive federal crackdown on employers, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Thursday.

Describing the hiring of millions of illegal workers, in some cases, as a form of organized crime, Mr. Chertoff said the government would try to combat the practice with techniques similar to those used to shut down the mob.

"We target those organizations, we use intelligence to define the scope of the organization, and then we use all of the tools we have — whether it's criminal enforcement or the immigration laws — to make sure we come down as hard as possible and break the back of those organizations," Mr. Chertoff said at a news conference.

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As part of the campaign against illegal hiring, Mr. Chertoff and Julie L. Myers, assistant secretary at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, plan to hire 171 more work-site enforcement agents. There are now the equivalent of 325. They have also asked Congress for legal authority to get routine access to Social Security records in order to identify companies in which large numbers of new employees submit fake numbers.

Separately, the department is adding 17 special teams of investigators, for a total of 52, to search for some of the 590,000 immigrants in the country who have ignored orders to leave. The department is also working with state and local officials to try to identify and, if possible, deport many of an estimated 630,000 foreign-born individuals who are arrested on criminal charges and put into jail.

Nationally, there were 127 criminal convictions last year — up from 46 the year before — against employers who knowingly hired illegal immigrants, the department said.

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Democrats like Harry Reid continue to show their lack of seriousness in enforcing immigration law by criticizing the crackdown. When it comes to the rule of law, these Democrats are unwilling to apply it to immigration law. Reid continues to obstruct the senate bill on immigration becuase he would rather have a political issue. Again he shows a lack of seriousness in dealing with the problem. There is also the droning figure of John Kerry seen on Fox News talking about illegal immigrants "who play by the rules." Really? How about the rule that says how you are suppose to immigrate to this country. These people are not serious about the rule of law. As the Washington Times reports about Howard Dean's recent faux toughness on immigration:

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Conservatives on Capitol Hill were skeptical of Mr. Dean's surprising shift toward support for stricter enforcement of the nation's immigration laws.
"It's kind of like Barry Bonds lecturing the rest of the world about steroid use," said Rep. Jack Kingston, Georgia Republican. "With Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid leading the Democrats, we haven't been able to get anything done on immigration reform."

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Meanwhile, the Houston Chronicle reports that the firm that was the subject of yesterday's crackdown had been padding its profits by using the illegal labor.

When Houston-based IFCO Systems North America Inc. reported record profits last year, others in the unglamorous business of recycling wooden pallets couldn't help but wonder how the company did it.

"We were all very curious about this," said Chaille Brindley, assistant publisher of the trade magazine Pallet Enterprise. "They were able to do things that other companies just couldn't do."

Federal investigators think a significant portion of those profits came on the backs of illegal immigrant workers recruited in Houston and bused to at least 26 plants across the country, where they reassembled worn pallets for substandard wages.

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Since the company's competitors were using legal labor, it cuts against the argument that the ilegals were doing work that Americans would not do.