skews13
Diamond Member
- Mar 18, 2017
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It started in 1986, when Ronald Reagan decided to stop enforcing the laws against wealthy white employers hiring undocumented people.
It wasn’t that Reagan had suddenly discovered he liked nonwhite people. He’d opposed both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1966, running for California governor, he supported a ballot initiative to end “Fair Housing” laws in the state, saying:
But by 1986 President Reagan was deep into a campaign to de-fund the Democratic Party, and the Democrats’ main donor was organized labor. What better way to crush unions than to replace their members with non-union workers who were legally invisible?
For example, prior to the Reagan administration two of the most heavily unionized industries in America were construction and meatpacking. These were tough jobs, but in both cases provided people who just had a high school education with a solid entry card into the American Dream.
They were well-paid jobs that allowed construction and meatpacking workers to buy a home, take vacations, raise their kids and live a good, middle-class life with a pension for retirement. The meat packers in Wisconsin were doing so well that they sponsored what became the only non-billionaire-owned NFL football team — the Green Bay Packers — from day one.
Reagan and his Republican allies — with unionized companies across the country making healthy “donations” legalized by the 1978 Bellotti Supreme Court decision — wrote the 1986 Immigration Reform Act in a way that made it harder to prosecute employers who invited undocumented workers into their workplaces.
They abandoned systems like I had to engage so I could work in Germany and Australia in 1986/87 and the early 2000s, or like Canada and other developed countries have had in place for decades.
Instead, under Reagan’s new law, employers could easily avoid sanctions by simply having undocumented immigrants give them paperwork (often supplied by the employers themselves) that met the new requirement that it “reasonably appears on its face to be genuine.”
Further reducing the “burden” on employers, an amendment to the law under the guise of preventing discrimination “penalized employers for conducting overly aggressive scrutiny of workers’ legal status on the basis of their nationality or national origin.”
The law also held companies harmless if they simply fired all their unionized American workers and replaced them with undocumented immigrants who were employed by a subcontractor.
This led to an explosion of fly-by-night and immigration-law-skirting subcontractors providing cheap undocumented labor for everything from construction to fieldwork to cleaning factories (like the most recent charge of child labor violations in Nebraska).
www.rawstory.com
It wasn’t that Reagan had suddenly discovered he liked nonwhite people. He’d opposed both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1966, running for California governor, he supported a ballot initiative to end “Fair Housing” laws in the state, saying:
Similarly, when running for president in 1980, Reagan’s biographer Lou Cannon notes on page 520 of his book that Reagan called the 1965 Voting Rights Act “a humiliation of the South.”
But by 1986 President Reagan was deep into a campaign to de-fund the Democratic Party, and the Democrats’ main donor was organized labor. What better way to crush unions than to replace their members with non-union workers who were legally invisible?
For example, prior to the Reagan administration two of the most heavily unionized industries in America were construction and meatpacking. These were tough jobs, but in both cases provided people who just had a high school education with a solid entry card into the American Dream.
They were well-paid jobs that allowed construction and meatpacking workers to buy a home, take vacations, raise their kids and live a good, middle-class life with a pension for retirement. The meat packers in Wisconsin were doing so well that they sponsored what became the only non-billionaire-owned NFL football team — the Green Bay Packers — from day one.
Reagan and his Republican allies — with unionized companies across the country making healthy “donations” legalized by the 1978 Bellotti Supreme Court decision — wrote the 1986 Immigration Reform Act in a way that made it harder to prosecute employers who invited undocumented workers into their workplaces.
They abandoned systems like I had to engage so I could work in Germany and Australia in 1986/87 and the early 2000s, or like Canada and other developed countries have had in place for decades.
Instead, under Reagan’s new law, employers could easily avoid sanctions by simply having undocumented immigrants give them paperwork (often supplied by the employers themselves) that met the new requirement that it “reasonably appears on its face to be genuine.”
Further reducing the “burden” on employers, an amendment to the law under the guise of preventing discrimination “penalized employers for conducting overly aggressive scrutiny of workers’ legal status on the basis of their nationality or national origin.”
The law also held companies harmless if they simply fired all their unionized American workers and replaced them with undocumented immigrants who were employed by a subcontractor.
This led to an explosion of fly-by-night and immigration-law-skirting subcontractors providing cheap undocumented labor for everything from construction to fieldwork to cleaning factories (like the most recent charge of child labor violations in Nebraska).
The GOP's grand con job
Kevin McCarthy just came back from a press trip to our southern border, full of talk about how bad the Biden administration is doing with asylum and immigration. Later, another group of House Republicans “held a hearing” at the Mexican border. If you watch Fox “News” you know all about...
www.rawstory.com
