A few days ago, I pointed out how the feds had delayed raiding the Postville, Iowa slaughterhouse for employing illegal immigrants from 2000 to 2008 because of a worry that the owners might be friends of Sen. Joe Lieberman. But, as I noted, that’s hardly unique to Friends of Joe. The 1986 immigration compromise was effectively gutted by employers (typically in the food business, broadly defined) calling their favorite members of Congress about getting the feds to back off enforcing the law.
Now, here’s a new Washington Post column making the same claim about some new Republican congressman. Obviously, Dana Milbank is engaged in concern-trolling the Tea Party, but, so what?[VDARE.com note: Concern trolling has been defined as "offering a poisoned apple in the form of advice to political opponents that, if taken, would harm the recipient". ]
By Dana Milbank, Published: August 10
Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia, a Tea Party favorite and president of the House Republicans’ freshman class, got off to a slow start as a legislator but finally introduced his first bill last week.
His draftsmanship should please the people who chant “read the bill” at political rallies, because H.R. 2774 is only one sentence long. In its entirety: “Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the Legal Services Corporation Act is repealed.”
This one sentence says a great deal about Scott, because it is a transparent attempt by the young lawmaker to defend a company in his district that discriminates against U.S. citizens in favor of Mexican migrant workers. Scott introduced the bill abolishing Legal Services exactly three days after it became public that Legal Services had won a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission determination that Georgia’s Hamilton Growers “engages in a pattern or practice of regularly denying work hours and assigning less favorable assignments to U.S. workers, in favor of H2-A guestworkers.” Hamilton also “engages in a pattern or practice of discharging U.S. workers and replacing them with H-2A guestworkers,” the EEOC determined.
In a broader sense, Scott’s bill gets at what has long troubled me about the Tea Party movement: It is fueled by populist anger, but it has been hijacked by plutocrats. Well-intentioned Tea Party foot soldiers demand that power be returned to the people, but then their clout is used to support tax cuts for millionaires. They rally for tougher immigration laws, but then their guy in Washington helps corporations to fire U.S. workers and hire foreign nationals.
During his successful campaign to unseat moderate Democrat Jim Marshall, Scott ran a tough-on-immigration message. …
Legal Services took their case (one of three active cases it has against big growers in Scott’s district), and on July 29, it put out a news release announcing victory. (Settlement negotiations are underway.)
On Aug. 1, Scott introduced his bill.
If Scott were true to his Tea Party roots, he would have told the growers to get lost. He would have trumpeted the case as evidence that Americans are willing to do the dirty jobs that businesses claim only foreigners will do. As one of the American plaintiffs put it: “We worked hard at our jobs and really wanted the work, but Hamilton didn’t want Americans to work in their fields.”
For some background on the H-2A program, here’s Stand with Arizona. Growers in Georgia have been claiming that the state’s new anti-illegal immigration law means we’re all doomed to starvation.
Milbank’s accusation against the Congressman sound perfectly plausible to me in a post hoc ergo propter hoc way, although in a half hour of dredging around the web, I can’t find much of anything at all on this case, just an August 5, 2011 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article.
The AJC article says: “An EEOC spokesman in Washington declined to comment on the case, citing federal privacy laws.” I can’t find anything original on this case posted by the EEOC, Georgia Legal Services, or the Legal Services Corp. In particular, I can’t find online the original source for the quotes in the AJC article.
It’s almost as if you weren’t supposed to know about this unless somebody figured out how to put some appropriate partisan spin on it.
