02/07/2012
I did a couple of posts about Pomona College ceasing to employ some illegals
The original NYT story was Immigrant Worker Firings Unsettle a College Campus,By Jennifer Medina, February 1, 2012, which noted that Pomona is "generally considered to be a liberal institution." Then why were they hiring low-wage illegals?
John Derbyshire notices the same NYT story I did recently in his latest podcast, and has a couple of angles I missed:
Second story: Nearby Pomona College, also in Claremont, California, got itself into The New York Times by asking college workers to show proof that they were not working in the country illegally. Seventeen workers who couldn’t do so were fired.
The Times story is naturally pro-scofflaw, with much lachrymose testimony from the laid-off illegals. Sample quote: "'We were here for a very long time and there was never a complaint,' said Christian Torres, 25, a cook who had worked at the college for six years. 'But now all of the sudden we were suspect, and they didn’t want us to work here anymore.'" Well, yes, because the college authorities don’t want to be in violation of immigration law. Duh.
Another sample quote, this one from 30-year-old Carmen, who'd been working at the college for $17 an hour, quote: "'I really don’t know what I am going to do,' she said, adding that her options were to look for work that paid in cash or move back to Mexico with her 2-year-old son while her husband, an American citizen, stayed here."
Yo, Carmen: If your husband is a citizen, he can petition for a green card for you. You'll probably have to go back to Mexico for a while to regularize your situation, but that’s the kind of inconvenience that comes upon you when you ignore the laws of a foreign country. Alternatively, you and your husband could relocate to Mexico, which is a pretty nice country, just not as nice as the U.S. Alternatively again, you could migrate to a really poor country like Ethiopia or Laos. Then you'd realize how lucky you were to have been born Mexican.
The really heartening thing about this New York Times story is the comment thread, which is almost uniformly unsympathetic to the scofflaws. Several commenters noted that $17 an hour would be a pretty good wage for any student who wanted to work his way through college, as used to be common. Even New York Times readers, apparently, are getting fed up with illegal immigration.[Derb Radio transcript | MP3]
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