- Illustration by S. Kelly
Hometown News, the local paper I receive in North Brevard County reported recently that “Brevard County state legislators strongly favor creating a law in Florida similar to the Arizona law that would authorize police to verify the status of anyone who might be in the country illegally.” The following is my Letter the the Editor I submitted in response:
In regards to Brevard County state legislators desire to introduce a bill to create an immigration law reminiscent of the one passed in Arizona, I’d like to offer up the following points to the discussion.
Of the 18,537,969 Floridians responding in the last census, 21% are hispanic. That’s 3,892,974 legal citizens of these United States. The most recent estimates of the state’s illegal alien population put it just under 1 million. So for every illegal immigrant this law is meant to catch and remove from the country, 4 US citizens will have their civil rights trampled, being forced to carry a level of identification above and beyond what those of non-hispanic races would. Keep in mind that a driver’s license is no indication or proof of immigration or legal status. What we are talking about is carrying around birth certificates and passports in your home state, which is not only offensive for a free citizen of the United States of America, but puts people at incredibly increased risk of identity theft. Identity theft is an over 50 billion dollar problem in the US annually and can destroy the lives of it’s victims. It is common advice that things like social security cards, passports and birth certificates should be kept locked up and secured until you absolutely need them.
We should also take into account the percentage of the over 80 million visitors we see annually that are hispanic. Let’s give the economic impact of illegal immigrants figure of $3.7 billion the benefit of the doubt. Let’s also keep in mind this number is 2.2% of ALL Florida state and local expenditures in 2009 ($169 billion), not a large amount of where our tax dollars go at all. If the affect on our tourism is to turn away just 5.5 percent of the $68 billion tourism brought in during 2009 with these proposed laws, then we have already lost more than illegal immigration is purported to be costing our state in the first place.
I completely agree that illegal immigration is a violation of law and should be addressed, but mirroring the terrible approach Arizona has taken in Florida is the wrong solution. So what is the solution? Let’s take a step back and understand the problem first. A novel thought, I know, but stick with me.
The types of documentation we are wanting illegal immigrants to hold is H-2A visas, for temporary agricultural workers, or H-2B visas, for non-agricultural workers (hospitality, tourism, construction…) Only 66,000 H-2B visas are even allowed to be given out each year, it should be noted. These visas are actually the responsibility of the employer to pay for and obtain, not the worker. The process by which the system was designed to work is the employer would put out a call for workers anticipating a shortfall of labor for an upcoming season. The employer must show that they have made an attempt to hire U.S. workers first and provide favor to hiring them over immigrant labor (this must be proven via documented advertising.) Only then can they apply for visas 45 days in advance for the foreign workers they have recruited. It is not the case that a worker from Mexico goes to some immigration office, pays a fee and then comes in to go looking for work.
What is happening is that employers are not obeying the laws and not following these procedures. They have instead created a situation where the immigrant labor must risk their life and risk imprisonment so that the employers can save themselves the cost and hassle of doing things the legal way. They do not recruit the labor in Mexico and then work out the paperwork to get them here as they are supposed to. For every illegal immigrant working in this country, there is an employer who has committed several crimes, including immigration violations, tax evasion and violations of wage and workers’ compensation laws. In other words, for every illegal they employ an employer has committed multiple federal crimes. We are talking about organizations that are responsible for a laundry list of multiple violations… yet we are more concerned with a single visa violation by an individual. This is the area we feel we need to focus legislative action, not the employers committing serial violations on a massive scale, but the victims of their crimes. Given this I have to question either the motivations or the intelligence of those wishing to place the immigrant, not the employer, in the primary responsible party role.
If you truly believe in tackling our immigration issues you will put 100% of your efforts, that is every last bit of it, on forcing employers to comply with the law. Punishing the victims of their actions is ignorant and cruel. And if you believe in the fundamentals of citizenship in a free and just country governed by the rule of law, you cannot support the sacrifice of the civil rights and security of legal citizens based on their appearance. And finally, if you have any sense of economic reason you cannot justify taking actions that will needlessly damage the financial well being of our state in an already precarious time.
I think what disturbs me most about our legislators contemplating such a dangerous and ill conceived notion as these immigration laws is that I, just a common working man seems to have put a heck of a lot more thought into the issue from multiple angles than they have. I wasn’t elected to spend my entire day researching and developing legislation that makes sense and serves the better interests of Floridians, they were. With all due respect, in that light they are extraordinarily horrible at their jobs.
