FW: [Vision2020] Dear President Bush

[Andreas Schou]

> But why...oh why.....do so many liberals defend illegal aliens' "right" to
> work in the U.S. (illegaly, mind you), yet condemn businesses for hiring
> them?

Simple: when American businesses hire illegal immigrants, they do so
because they don't want to pay minimum wage to an American. They do so
because if the immigrants try to organize, they can call Homeland
Security and send htem back home. And they know that they won't get
punished for wage and safety violations, because they can punish their
immigrant laborers for reporting them. Letting employers who employ
undocumented immigrants off the hook creates perverse incentives, the
effects of which ripple throughout our entire economy.

There is nothing more American than immigration: people coming to this
country because they want the opportunity to do better for themselves
and their families; because they want to become Americans themselves.
Hell, I wouldn't be here if it weren't for my Irish illegal immigrant
great-great-grandfather, who stole the silverware from his master's
house and hocked it to book passage to the United States. Because an
American is something you can become, unlike a Frenchman or a Briton
or a German, I'm an American today -- and I don't believe that now
that I've got mine, we should lock down the borders.

I don't believe the American dream -- the idea that success should be
determined by ambition and hard work -- has failed entirely. But I do
believe that there is nothing more antithetical to that ideal than
allowing the rich to steal all the benefits of the poor's hard work.
Nowhere is this more the case than amongst exploitative employers of
immigrant labor.

There's no contradiction there. All I want is for people -- Americans,
foreigners, and foreigners who want to become Americans -- to reap the
benefits of their own hard work.

-- ACS