Claire McCaskill has made putting the heat on employers for their hiring of illegal workers a focal point of her candidacy for U. S. Senate, and logically, who could argue with that position?
Unfortunately, the devil is in the details, as Diane Carman's column in today's Denver Post makes clear. A Colorado proposal to crack down on employers who hire illegal workers could end up causing considerable headaches for people who want to hire one or two workers for lawn work, one-time manual labor needs, or other minor situations.
You might think that the government would concentrate on the big companies that hire dozens, maybe even hundreds or thousands of illegal workers, but the exact opposite is also a possibility. It would be far easier to crack down on people who are not making campaign contributions or who cannot afford to hire lobbyists to represent their interests.
You also run into the same problems with documentation that are making Missourians' lives more difficult. In Missouri, we had laws passed that force people who have lived here their entire lives to prove they are here legally. Instead of taking a common-sense approach, the General Assembly passed a law requiring Missourians to provide their official birth certificates and other documentation, then made a big deal out of relieving senior citizens of those responsibilities.
There is every reason to believe that by the time Congress is through with any proposed legislation to crack down on companies that hire illegal workers, the people who will end up paying will be the people who have lived here their entire lives and suddenly have to go through the demeaning process of having to prove they are Americans.
That is not what Claire McCaskill has in mind, I am sure, but since there is money to be made with national identification cards and the like, by the time Congress gets through with any type of legislation, that would probably be what we would end up with.
4 comments:
There is nothing wrong with making the lawn guys, the pool man and the housekeeper prove their citizenship and it is no real hardship to make every person show documentation for a job or a driver's license. It is time for the underground economy to be exposed to the light of the law.
Spoken like a man who only has to haul around a birth certificate to prove who he is.
Women, due to name changes through marriage, also sometimes divorce, and remarriage, are not that lucky. Everything considered, I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that I'd rather live in sin than remarry and have to add another piece of paper to keep track of to make the government happy.
How about a post Randy on the current state of JoplinDaily? With a page one story on traveling to northwest Arkansas today and a look back at the past decade a few weeks ago, what happened to the Daily's motto? .....all Joplin all the time? I don't think so...
anon 2: Another option is to simply keep your birth name, as my wife did. No name change with marriage, no need to produce an extra document.
Side note: moving to Missouri we encountered a number of people who seemed to believe it was illegal for a woman not to take her husband's name. Made me carefully consider taking hers.
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