LAST FALL, the owners of a Newport News fishing company were charged with hiring more than 100 illegal immigrants. The owners pleaded guilty and agreed to pay fines of nearly $7 million. That's fair enough. They broke the rules and they were punished.
This spring, small businesses are preparing for crab harvests, tourist season and construction projects. They need workers to package seafood, operate hotels, lay bricks. Many rely on immigrants in this country on temporary work visas.
The immigrant workers and their employers are following the rules. But they're being punished, too. Federal law allows a maximum of 66,000 seasonal workers to receive visas each year. Congress permitted an extra 37,000 in the program in 2006, but that loophole expired last fall. In order to qualify, employers had to prove that they had tried to fill the jobs with American workers.
Because these jobs are low-paying, the businesses often have trouble finding takers. Now some are facing financial ruin because they can't import employees.
Rep. Thelma Drake is seeking an extension so that businesses can continue to legally hire foreign workers, but the legislation has become mired in the larger debate over immigration reform.
Leaders in Congress are reluctant to approve a patch for the temporary visa program when they are trying to wrestle together a compromise on immigration policy, as divisive an issue as any in America.
There are real problems with the worker-visa program, which can create captive employees who can and are abused by unethical business owners, and which provides few incentives to follow the rules. Still, it's far better than the alternative of hiring undocumented workers.
As it stands, without a program to permit legal seasonal workers, companies face an impossible choice: risk criminal penalties and hire illegals, or fight through a bureaucratic morass to hire temporary immigrants with precious permits. Either way, a business stands a good chance of going bankrupt.
The nation will continue to face such economic and legal dilemmas until it reaches a political consensus on broader reforms, and adopts clear and humane rules for immigration, with a fair system of carrots and sticks.
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We don't need carrots and sticks...
All we need is for the illegals to be deported and stop wasting our precious taxpayer funded resources. The jobs will be filled by americans as long as the employers are willing to pay a little more for them to do the job. Better yet, the americans will spend their money in the US and not send it all to a third world country.
Cry me a river
I call BS on this. I know far too many people looking for jobs to believe even for a minute that foreignors are needed to fill these positions.
The alleged inability to fill these positions is just so much smoke and mirrors. I was at a "cattle call" interview session a couple weeks ago. Of the 30 or so people waiting for an interview, less than half of us spoke English as our first language. I will give the company credit though, they were checking employment eligibility on the spot and quite a large number of people were out of there within a matter of minutes.
Sorry about their luck.
They shouldn't have based their business on cheap labor. IF they can't pay a living wage, move the business elsewhere. These businesses are trying to make American workers poor like the rest of the world.