Posted on 06/19/2008 8:58:57 PM PDT by Coffee200am
Postville, Iowa has been turned into a ghost town. Nearly a third of its residents, mostly undocumented workers from Guatemala and Mexico, sit in jail convicted of identity crimes or awaiting deportation. Hundreds more hide in fear. Their children, too scared to go to school, have left the town’s classrooms nearly empty. For this, Postville should thank their local police, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), and a failed immigration policy.
Aided by local law enforcement, ICE arrested 389 workers during the largest single-site immigration raid in U.S. history at the Postville meatpacking plant, the area’s major employer. In an unprecedented move, ICE criminally charged 302 of these workers with aggravated ID theft and/or using false social security numbers. Within days, ICE resolved their fate: 297 men and women pled guilty and were sentenced to prison and subsequent deportation. Only a few await criminal trials or immigration hearings.
Postville is one of the latest in a series of immigration raids that have intensified in the past three years. These raids are leading our nation to a moral, legal and humanitarian crisis.
ICE’s heavy-handed enforcement against undocumented workers in the wake of failed immigration reform is shameful. Under current immigration laws, no more than 10,000 of the backlogged visas for unskilled workers and 66,000 temporary visas for seasonal workers are available each year. In contrast, an estimated 2,000 persons cross the Southwest border into the U.S. daily and an estimated 12 million undocumented persons live in the United States.
Global economic realities push willing workers out of their nations, where they have no means to earn even a subsistence living and pull them into low-wage jobs in the United States, where the lack of labor protection leaves them vulnerable to exploitation. U.S. employers and we as consumers benefit from their cheap labor, but these workers and their families bear the brunt of a broken immigration system.
Few employers face civil and criminal sanctions for violating immigration and labor laws. So far, no one from Postville plant has been charged despite overwhelming evidence that the company helped workers procure false documents, paid substandard wages, failed to pay overtime, and seriously mistreated its workers. All the while, Congress continues to kill proposals granting even temporary legal status to agricultural workers, while doling out large subsidies to U.S. farmers without regard to their effect on future migration of rural workers from developing nations into the United States.
Legally speaking, ICE and federal prosecutors overstepped their powers when they criminally charged the workers. Congress specifically exempted from prosecution workers who use false Social Security numbers to engage in otherwise lawful conduct, such as to procure jobs.
This unprecedented criminalization of undocumented workers also has not been accompanied by a comparable infusion of constitutional guarantees in the handling of these cases. ICE conducted the investigation leading to the Postville raid with easy access to immigration databases and employee documents. ICE then executed the raid with easily-procured administrative, not criminal, warrants.
Thus, the protection of stricter Fourth Amendment search and seizure, Fifth Amendment due process, and Sixth Amendment right to counsel constitutional guarantees available to most criminal defendants were unavailable to these workers. Nearly all waived any rights they might have had under extreme prosecutorial pressure. The uncharacteristic speed and efficiency of the Postville raid left workers without adequate opportunity to consult with defense counsel, and none or few had access to immigration lawyers to learn about the immigration consequences of their pleas.
The involvement of local law enforcement in these raids is also worrisome. Distrust of police keeps many immigrants from reporting crime. This increases their vulnerability as victims. Moreover, the drain on limited resources from these additional responsibilities on local police takes away from their primary duties as community caretakers.
The courts must be vigilant in protecting the rights of workers and their families and insist on stricter constitutional guarantees when criminal charges are involved.
These raids should be halted immediately. The prospect of future raids should certainly create a sense of urgency for the United States to adopt immigration policies that allows employers to hire migrant workers, and include strong labor protections that offer a path to legalization for workers and their families. If workers are legal, we are all better off.
Aldana is a board member of the Society of American Law Teachers and a professor of law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Law.
Unemployment in the USA jumped from 5.0 to 5.5% and this guy advocates to increase the work visa for foreigners. Bottom line is this guy is a racist! He wants only people of “his kind” to have jobs. I say, leave the jobs for Americans who were born here first, since those people have a stake in this country.
JoMa
Joma, quite honestly, most of the jobs these illegals perform are ones that 98% of the people in the 5.5% wouldn’t get off welfare to take. I think the issue here, as it has been for a long time, is to provide a way for these migrant workers, which most of them are, to be able to come to this country legally, work legally, and go home during the down months if they want to. The companies that hire them don’t want this because they would then have to pay them minimum wage. This would increase tax revenue that could be used to further fight illegal immigration and those who facilitate the crime. Remember, the illegal immigrant is not the only guilty party in his or her situation. In almost every case there are many facilitators to their crime. The “coyote” who helped them get here. The immoral unethical bastard of a business owner who hires them, etc.
I could not agree more.
Thousands of employers, corporation owners and their senior management, need to be be prosecuted, jailed and fined.
2nd a 3rd offense..those holding interest in the company, need to have their business assets and interest seized.
I fail to see the validity of this statement. It isn't immoral to arrest people who are in this country illegally. The humanitarian crisis belongs to nations from which these illegals come. The U.S. is not responsible for the welfare of people from other countries.
Failed immigrations policy? By whose definition? Only illegals. self-serving politicians and their cronies would believe that our quotas are insufficient.
Congress specifically exempted from prosecution workers who use false Social Security numbers to engage in otherwise lawful conduct, such as to procure jobs.
Since when has using false Social Security numbers or identity theft not been illegal?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
No failure involved...
Sounds like the policy is working...
ICE is Nice in Postville, IA...
...and go home during the down months if they want to?
I have a problem with that. They should definitely go home during the down months.
Perchance they could reform their ways, so that their own people wouldn't have to run away from them by the tens of millions?
No?
Don't they have any culpability?
Are they compassionate to their own?
No? Why not?
Why are we expected to be more compassionate than they are?
Isn't La Raza superior to us?
No?
Take the deal now, amigos y amigas. There is no better time.
Horseshit!
The only part of that you got right is two words:
"go home"
BP made 1.2 million arrests last year.
It’s a Harvard educated, civil liberties, moonbat.....female. :)
I love the euphemisms here:
“Nearly a third of its residents, mostly undocumented workers from Guatemala and Mexico, sit in jail convicted of identity crimes or awaiting deportation.”
residents=illegal aliens
undocumented workers=illegal aliens
convicted of identity crimes=so they break the law to get into this country and then use false ID to work, again another crime.
I support more legal immigration into this country, but turning a blind eye to illegal immigration cheapens the value of American citizenship for all of us and particularly for those legal immigrants who wait patiently for the confounded bureaucracy to process them.
In business, this is known as protecting our brand.
It’s not MY moral or legal crisis. Scores of ILLEGALS break the laws by coming into this country and then start crime waves after they get here. THEY are the ones with a moral and legal crisis.
Are you capable of understanding the word ILLEGAL???
And Raquel manages to gloss over something quite important here... The fact that these illegal aliens were using identity theft to work in this country illegally.
Has she ever been the victim of identity theft? Has she ever been on the hook for taxes with the IRS for income she didn’t actually earn? Has she ever had to pay for the time of employees or lawyers to straighten out the mess caused by having your SSN used by illegal aliens to work illegally?
Yes, the federal government has made a real mess of things with immigration policy, or more to the point, ignoring illegal immigration for decade after decade. But at some point, you have to say “ENOUGH!”
When you’ve got a burst pipe in your basement, the first thing you have to do is turn off the water, not try to decide what color replacement carpet you’re going to get.
That means stopping the flow of illegal immigrants into the country, and making life (and earning a living) difficult for the illegal aliens already here. “Self deportation” is a good thing, and much cheaper and easier than “rounding up illegal aliens and deporting them.”
Mark
Is this true that congress exempted illegals from prosecution?
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