Texas has long been a hotbed of controversy on immigration issues. And a proposed immigration bill in the Texas state House is sure to raise more than a few eyebrows. The bill would make hiring an “unauthorized alien” a crime punishable by up to two years in prison and a $10,000 fine, unless that is, they are hired to do household chores.
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The Ancient Randonneur (formerly known as The Grand Panjandrum)
Landscapers, roofers and restauranteurs aren’t going to like that law much.
Zifnab
If you think the punishment is a bit wonky, wait till you see the enforcement. Immigration Reform is the new Protection Racket.
Comrade Javamanphil
They are just pining for their ancestors and the right they had to own slaves.
Radon Chong
They should make it a crime to be poor, punishable by indefinite indentured servitude to the rich. That would solve somany problems.
kindness
The parody reminds me of the recurring South Park meme:
“They’re takin’ my jobs!” Except wrt the republicans in charge, it sadly isn’t a parody at all.
David Koch
They can pry Maria from my cold dead hands.
RSA
I was thinking about that, and if I were running such a business, I might have all of my workers come over to my house once a week and spend a few minutes straightening up my garage. Just in case.
BR
@Comrade Javamanphil:
This.
dr. bloor
I would assume they justify the “household chores” bit to protect folks who inadvertently hire a handyman or such who turns out to be undocumented, but that’s the weirdest fucking law I’ve ever seen.
Chris
“We just want to say we’re mad as hell about this illegal immigration thing, and we’re not going to take it anymore. So we’re going to crack down hard on the parts of the economy that hire illegal immigrants. Well, except for that part of the economy that hires the most of them. That part we’ll leave in place.
Also, we believe that the government can’t do anything efficiently and that free market solutions are always better. But we’d rather have the state round up the Mexicans that, you know, simply organize a boycott of Mexican labor that would prevent them from coming here in the first place.*
And it’s not that we’re not rugged individualists, it’s just that good help is just so hard to find, y’know?”
– Sincerely, Texas Rugged Individualists, Inc.
* It’s a popular fad on the right to say that segregation could have been ended without government intervention: all people had to do was organize a boycott of segregated bars/restaurants/etc, instead of having the state order them to desegregate. Seems to me they have an opportunity to test that theory here. Free market solutions: just stop hiring Mexicans and boycott the companies who do! What do you mean, it won’t work? I have strict assurances that it would have ended segregation!
dr. bloor
@David Koch:
This is some serious win.
Jonny Scrum-half
It’s not a hard law to understand; it punishes employers who have to verify an employee’s right to work through the I-9 process, and doesn’t require homeowners who use a cleaning lady to go through the same process. I realize that it can be spun into the type of talking point in the main blog post, but that’s really not a fair characterization.
Violet
This isn’t really accurate. Of course Texas has immigration issues, but hotbed? Not nearly as much as Arizona or California. In fact, Texas Republicans have been able to walk the line between sounding tough on immigration and not alienating all the Latinos in the state. There have been several articles and analyses of how Latinos in Texas are more Republican than in other states and how Democrats can’t count on that growing Latino segment of the population to vote for them.
That aside, this bill just might be a step in the wrong direction for Texas Republicans. On the one hand it’s good for some undocumented workers because if you clean houses or work in yards, you won’t be in danger of being deported. But, sheesh, it’s so demeaning. “We only want you for your physical labor in our homes, otherwise, gtfo.” What kind of message does that send the Latino population as a whole?
piratedan
they don’t need any illegals to work in construction… they already have their mansions
they don’t require a cheap breakfast burrito, they already have a cook and staff on the grounds
they could care less about the harvesting of crops because their food is flown in daily on the gulfstream
see, we gotta keep those illegals from even coming here because they’re stealing good payin’ jobs from good Amurricans!
geg6
Jeebus fucking Keerist. That’s it. We are now officially Chile during the Pinochet years.
NonyNony
@Chris:
I mean – it’s just so blatant. “We’ll make it illegal for you to hire an immigrant – oh, except for my cleaning lady, cook and gardener. I need those guys and it would cost me an arm and a leg to pay someone minimum wage to do that shit!”
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@Violet:
I don’t think so. I think the worker can still be deported, but the hirer is not prosecuted.
Once again, the brown guy goes to jail, the white guy goes home.
Violet
@NonyNony:
That’s why they’re going after minimum wage next. Bust the unions, then take away the minimum wage. Child labor laws are on the table too. “Everyone who wants to work gets to work. And for a fair wage!”
NonyNony
@Jonny Scrum-half:
I’d argue that anyone who can afford to hire a cleaning lady can afford to file the paperwork to check to see if she’s illegal or not.
If they’re contracting with a cleaning company, those folks can afford to check it.
If illegal immigration is just that goddamn important, then people can do without their cleaning ladies. if it isn’t then people should shut the fuck up about what a problem it is.
Ash Can
@David Koch:
You say that now — just wait till she throws your I-Pad into the wash machine.
General Stuck
A little off topic
But spot on, imo, in describing what is motivating wingnuts in general, not only at the national level, but state level , not to mention the perennial air port restroom level.
It is a race to see what group of voters the wingers can piss off the most.
Chased by a Tiger. No shit. A tiger holding an Obama witch doctor sign in one hand, and a Glock in the other.
All together now. Everybody say JUMP GOP
Violet
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko:
Hmmm…yeah, you’re probably right. Although there is less chance you’ll be turned in for being in the country illegally if you’re doing one of those jobs rather than a job that isn’t on the list, like being a roofer or kitchen worker.
Roger Moore
@Jonny Scrum-half:
Actually not. It exempts household help specifically because it’s so common that it would turn too much of Texas into criminals otherwise. That’s not what we’re saying. That’s what the bill’s sponsor is saying. Now maybe you don’t want to take her word for it, but the person who wrote the thing is at least worth listening to.
Ash Can
@dr. bloor: They’re making this exemption for their own benefit, because you can imagine how many undocumented workers they themselves have in their own homes, performing various household chores. It’s not weird at all within context, and it’s the blatant, in-your-face hypocrisy that characterizes
RepublicansConfederates these days.Citizen_X
@Jonny Scrum-half: I don’t see why it’s an unfair characterization; if you want to “git tuff” on illegal immigration, then git tuff. If State Senator Red Kneck (R-Flower Mound) wants to create an exception for his help, then he pretty much exposes himself as a complete hypocrite.
Which is pretty much what I think of all Tejas Rethugs who scream about deporting teh illegals. (Yes, Governor Goodhair, that includes YOU.) If such an impossibility ever actually happened, it would crater the Texas economy in an instant.
Chris
@NonyNony:
THIS.
CoffeeTim
@Jonny Scrum
If you’re trying to stop illegal immigration because it’s wrong, it makes no sense to be carving out special exceptions to rules that are supposed to be curtailing it. Filling out an I-9 is not a difficult process.
If the goal here is to cut off income to illegals so they’ll go home then the only logical conclusion I can reach is that this exception is intended to avoid the political backlash from those who would end up having to pay more for a housekeeper or gardener when employing Juan or Maria became too risky.
Gee, I wonder what political party these over-burdened home owners would likely belong to?
Mnemosyne
@Jonny Scrum-half:
So it’s perfectly okay for people to break the law if it would inconvenience them?
Chris
@NonyNony:
Fixxed. It wasn’t just written to spare lawmakers, it was written, according to the lawmakers, to protect the humongous part of the Texan population that hires illegals.
Like Violet said, that just proves minimum wages are what’s wrong with the economy, and we should just lower it or do away with it. Child labor laws can go too, then we can hire our children to do things.
In fact, why don’t we just mirror Vietnamese labor practices in every detail? That’ll make us competitive, and hey, it builds character.
13th Generation
PurpleGirl
@geg6: That’s it. We are now officially Chile during the Pinochet years.
You say that as if it’s a bad thing. For the Wingnuts, it’s a feature not a bug. They loved Pinochet.
wenchacha
We want Maria to keep doing our cleaning and cooking, but if she is living here with Juan, she might have an anchor baby.
So send Juan home to Mexico. Maria can see him and her children when we give her a week off. Unpaid, of course.
dr. bloor
@Ash Can:
Oh, I know why they’re really doing it, I’m just kind of stunned by the artlessness involved. I suppose I shouldn’t be.
dr. bloor
@wenchacha:
Just out of curiosity, how are we classifying the babies that Maria has because the Lord of the Manor has been schtupping her?
Jonny Scrum-half
Roger Moore — I don’t see how what you wrote is different from what I wrote.
Citizen X, CoffeeTim and Mnemosyne — I’m not saying that this is a good law, but it does subject corporations to penalties and exempts individual employers from those same penalties. That’s not an unreasonable distinction to make, as far as I’m concerned.
Mike in NC
@dr. bloor:
We could ask Strom Thurmond, but he’s still dead.
gene108
I think the law’s a step in the right direction. Too much of the anti-illegal immigration push has been on border control and other measures, which punish the illegals.
Not enough has been done to push down on the employers, who allow them to work here.
I know there’s a knee-jerk reaction to bash all things Republican, but Bush, Jr. was on the right path with immigration reform. Texas Republicans have managed not to alienate Latinos, which is why they won in 2010, so I think this may not be as toxic as other “get tough” on illegal immigration laws have been in other states. Texas Republicans know they need 30%-40% of the Latino vote, in order to stay in power.
I don’t think the immigrant population would mind, if John Smith was hammered with fines. They’d prefer that to trying to through Juan into jail for not having his papers on him.
Judas Escargot (aka ninja fetus with a taste for bruschetta)
@geg6:
That’s it. We are now officially Chile during the Pinochet years
Who do they want to start tossing out of airplanes over the sea first? Teachers? Muslims? Mexicans?
aimai
@NonyNony:
I don’t disagree but I’m not sure what “filing papers” has to do with it. I hired a brazilian immigrant to do some babysitting for my daughters when they were younger. I had to go through a ton of paperwork in order to pay taxes on her and I presume (though I can’t now remember) that that paperwork required her to produce a green card (she wasn’t yet a citizen) and some kind of ID. But absent that, if I’d hired her on a weekly basis like my cleaning ladies, I’d have had no way of knowing what her immigration status was. The cleaning ladies are considered independent contractors and I don’t, in fact, have any way of checking their immigration status. Nor do I want to. Not because I’m underpaying them but because that is taking on a government enforcement role that I don’t want.
I admit that this law seems designed to keep some people out of trouble but its a step in the right direction in that it forces large corporations to start backing up their workers or stop hiring illegal immigrants as a form of union busting/undercutting US citizens. Anything that penalizes large corporations for preferentially hiring undocumented workers is a good idea, in my book. Not because I’m anti undocumented workers but because I’m anti large corporations refusing to pay taxes on the workers they do hire, refusing benefits and refusing humane conditions.
aimai
aimai
@Mike in NC:
How do we handle a problem like Maria?
aimai
Ash Can
@gene108:
I agree. It was one of the few decent things he did, or tried to do. Too bad his “deciderer” shtick didn’t work for shit with it.
The Republic of Stupidness
@Radon Chong:
Two words for…
Debtors prisons, baby…
Foxhunter
@wenchacha:
Or, a terrorist baby, according to the author of the bill, Debbie Riddle.
Think Progress linky.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@Mnemosyne: Pot heads have been doing that for decades.
arguingwithsignposts
Like they’re ever going to actually enforce this law if it passes. As soon as “Big Construction Co. X” gets banged, they’ll get a slap on the wrist and the workers will be back on the job next week.
Or they’ll pay off the local enforcement folks.
Ash Can
Cyber-cookies and a hearty “atta boy/girl” to anyone who can tell me what in my comment @ approx. #39 tripped the spam filter. FYWP.
aimai
Me too. I’m in moderation for a one line joke about The Sound of Music.
aimai
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
“unless that is, they are hired to do household chores.” or your gross income is greater than $100,000.
evinfuilt
@Mnemosyne:
Well, judges seem to agree. If you recall the hit and run late last year where the poor banker was let off with a misdemeanor because a felony would be inconvenient for him.
There are two classes in this country now, and two sets of laws. This texas congressman, she just wants to be kind to one of those classes and make sure they don’t break any laws.
rikryah
the gall of these mofos is ridiculous.
Sloegin
The Bush justice department enforced the hiring laws on employers during the 8 years… I think twice. Or it might have been 3 times. Hard to keep track of such big numbers.
liberal
I can see protest about the racist aspects of the anti-immigration movement, but in abstract, a country has the right to control admission through its borders. In practice, I find it very hard to believe that illegal immigration doesn’t push down wages at the bottom of the income ladder.
@gene108:
No one who is serious about controlling illegal immigration would think of doing anything else. It’s much easier to deter by cracking down on employers; they’re easier to locate and have much more to lose. Furthermore, cracking down on the immigrants themselves just makes their plight that much worse, which I presume means employers can pay them even lower wages and opens up blackmail opportunities.
liberal
@aimai:
We have both a nanny and cleaning people. For the nanny, checking the I-9 was easy, because it had to be done only once. The taxes, OTOH, are a gigantic pain in the a**. I don’t mind paying them, but keeping track of them for a single employee is a major hassle, especially given how many there are (employer-side payroll tax, employee side, and UI). Plus bullshit like I once made a mistake on how the taxes were netted, so that increased the UI for one quarter by $8, for which I was (for my honestly in revising) fined $35—the fine didn’t scale at all with the violation.
Cleaning ladies are from a company. It’s pretty clear that they satisfy the IRS def’n of contractors. Nanny is pretty clearly an employee not a contractor.
I don’t see how this is an issue except for the burden of enforcement. For us for the nanny, it was pretty easy: in our ad we said any candidate had to be legal to work. (One person called on behalf of her relative, and didn’t seem to understand that a tourist visa isn’t enough!) And in our hiring interviews we made it clear; and upon hiring did the I-9.
Svensker
@NonyNony:
My, how uncivil you are. 100% correct, tho.
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
Did anyone read the article?
The ostensible reason behind the bill was to prevent Kimba Wood-like situations, and not suppress labor prices.
See, because the GOP’s beneficiaries all at one time or another have hired undocumented labor–and I’ll bet most knew it at the time, but wanted to save few bucks.
But the real payoff in the article is THIS
Pococurante
Hey, my floor isn’t going to mop itself after all…
Nylund
@The Ancient Randonneur (formerly known as The Grand Panjandrum):
Actually, the law also exempts landscapers as well.
Basically, it gives exemptions to the few jobs were the rich person might do the hiring themselves. The politicians wrote it to make sure that they, their wives, and their buddies at the country club wouldn’t be at risk, just “the little people.”
Nylund
The language of the bill itself is gives exemptions to anyone who hires an illegal “for the purpose of obtaining labor or other work to be performed exclusively or primarily at a single-family residence.”
So its not just maids. If you hire a person to work on your single-family property for any reason, you’re fine.
In other words, you can hire all the maids, nannies, gardeners to work at your house as you want. I call it the “Meg Whitman” clause.
Howlin Wolfe
@NonyNony: YEP!
Xenos
@dr. bloor:
Once the XIVth amendment is stripped out, those children become stateless persons without civil rights. One step away from chattel slavery, more like a permanent restavec who can grow up and serve you through adulthood. They still get to be counted as 3/5ths of a person for proportional representation’s sake, though. (Does anyone know if the 3/5ths language in the constitution was ever explicitly repealed?)
And you though Octavia Butler wrote fiction…
Xenos
@Nylund: Keep in mind, under Texas law, an enormous ranch has the same legal status as a single family house. This allows all sorts of chicanery in the bankrupty courts, but would also come in handy in this situation.
Citizen_X
@Mike in NC:
Fixxed.
Comrade Kevin
@Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods: Yee-HAW!
DonkeyKong
“Blessed are the leaf blowers, for they will be called sons of bitches.” Perry 5:9
Chuck Butcher
I don’t suppose anyone would be surprised that I think such exemptions are horseshit – especially since I have had I-9s to file and it is scarcely a pain in the ass. If you can afford to hire domestic help, you have the time and education to deal with such a minor inconvenience.
You cannot have 10-20M people laboring in the shadows in a country without having some real problems, short term and long term. The most immediate result is wage depression, the long term ought to be obvious in regard to having residents w/o the social and political contract. It isn’t clear to me that the nation can absorb all those who are now here, but it is surely clear that it cannot continue unabated. I’d think that justice would be served by providing some kind of path for long term illegal residents to correct their status. St Ronnie’s flat amnesty simply proved to the world that all you had to do was get here – that and letting employers walk free.
Darkrose
@Radon Chong:
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine started writing a fanfiction series set in a world where economic inequality led to a Constitutional amendment allowing debt slavery.
It’s terrifying to think she wasn’t being all that speculative.