Immigration Policy - Rewarding The Law Breakers

Way too many people are heaping scorn on undocumented immigrants by calling them lawbreakers. The House wants to make felons of more than 11 million immigrants in one fell swoop, and felons of the millions of American relatives, care providers, and friends of these immigrants.

But there is a simple solution. Check it out on the flip.

The truth of who these "lawbreakers" are is more likely to look like this. Yet we fail to see who the real law breakers are. Big Business. In a great article by Carlos Guerra, a columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, it is noted that all of 3 employers were cited for hiring undocumented workers in all of 2004. Three in one year! This is down from 419 citations in 1999, and 100 in 2001.

It's not so much that I fault the government for not coming down hard on employers (except where employers exploit workers by paying them less than the minimum wage, or don't pay them at all). These workers are either doing jobs that Americans won't do for minimum wage, or doing their jobs better and more productively than their US counterparts. However, too many of us find it easy to dump on the most vulnerable members of society, undocumented immigrants, without pointing the finger at those who are indeed being rewarded for breaking the law -- Big Business.

The solution is easy guys. Increase the number of immigrant visas from 400,000 a year, to say, 4,000,000 a year, and streamline the visa processing process. Voila, Big Business gets its workers. Increase the minimum wage to a living wage, and voila, workers don't get exploited.

There's a rub to this simple resolution to a problem that does not have to be complex, and does not have to make felons of immigrants and businesses -- too many Mexicans for the racists in DC and throughout this country. But guess what -- we're getting them anyway. We're just wasting a lot of money on a problem that has a simple solution. There's another rub -- Big Business abhors paying a living wage. Yet they get rewarded for breaking the law.