Letter – Immigration reform needs a restart button
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A false image depicts undocumented immigrants as criminals because they entered the United States illegally and received many government benefits. Wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq created labor shortages.
Some industrial complexes and corporate agriculture used growing numbers of undocumented laborers to whom they paid less than minimum wages and pocketed the Workmen’s Compensation, Social Security and income taxes.
Illegal employers were just as guilty as the workers for the worker importation scheme, which was fantastically profitable for illegal employers, but cheated honest taxpayers who paid for all the government services especially education and health care (the most expensive type).
Thirty million workers came from many countries.
It was most convenient to use Mexicans for the tax evasion scheme because they could be easily transported overland to work seasonally and gotten rid of for the rest of the year.
They would never become documented and could not be traced. That is why the majority of undocumented laborers are Mexican.
Other nationalities were permitted to integrate. There was an accumulation of undocumented workers who made their only residence in the United States.
As of 1997, E-Verify laws would have stopped illegal employment. The employers, openly, defied the law.
There is no census figure for undocumented immigrants, but, the political estimate is 11 million. A guesstimate is that 8 million are married. If there is an average of three children per family it means 40 million undocumented immigrants. We need a special census.
President Obama’s initiative proposes undocumented workers should be punished by fines and penalties.
Their illegal employers are not even considered.
The employers have engineered a complete cover-up using the illegality of their undocumented workers as a smoke screen to hide their own criminality.
Employers are guilty to a greater extent than the workers and must also be punished for tax evasion.
The biggest irony is that undocumented immigrants are no longer asking for citizenship nor are they seeking the right to vote. They are willing to wait without even a path to citizenship.
All they want is forgiveness for the crime of crossing the border illegally and conditional residency with the right to own their home and educate their children.
They are all sincerely interested in paying substantial taxes on their continuing income to pay for access to equal pay, health care and education.
We must make illegal employers pay back taxes.