On the 23rd of September, 23 American citizens lost their lives on a bus leaving a Houston nursing home to escape a hurricane that ultimately never really arrived. Officials originally determined that faulty brakes caught fire, and that that fire, in turn, ignited oxygen bottles brought aboard by the patients. Fault? The immediately obvious candidate appeared to be the bus company. But now the driver of that bus has been charged with 23 counts of criminally negligent homicide … like somehow the bad brakes were his fault. Why? I attribute it to the fact that it was because he was discovered to be an illegal alien, and that embarrassed our the government. So, to hide its embarrassment the government is now prosecuting this poor Mexican national like somehow he is the bad guy.
Why, you may ask, should our government be embarrassed? Possibly because it is they who allowed that bus driver to be doing what he was doing when the accident happened –working in this country illegally. Consider for a moment the fact that if he had a driver’s license -- and even that presumes he was required to have one to get the job – the same government now prosecuting him had to have issued it to him. All of this is a direct consequence of our government’s “don’t look – don’t see open border policy” – a policy that has been weakly denied by them for years with a wink and a turn of their head. It brings to mind the old joke that has a U.S. border agent explaining that he has no idea how illegals are able to sneak in, unless possibly they are coming in after 5:00 p.m. or on weekends. All this leads one to conclude that, if blame is to be placed at all for the death of these 23 souls, it would be more just to place it at the feet of our government. After all, it is the government that permitted their safety to be placed in the hands of an illegal in the first place.
Elsewhere, in Los Angeles the2nd District Court of Appeal seems to have gotten it right. Last week that court ruled that a U.S. company is not entitled to deny worker’s compensation benefits to a worker just because he is an illegal alien. Why, you may wonder, would I consider this “getting it right?” Because it offers an economic approach that could eventually resolve, if not solve, the illegal alien problem in this country.
Most illegal aliens are here because they are able to find work for an amount of money not available to them elsewhere in the world. They have an economic incentive to supply to this country an inexpensive labor force for which they cannot, and should not, be blamed. That is because it is equally true that most illegal aliens are here also because there exist many businesses in this country that seek to hire those laborers because they cost less than were they to hire U.S. citizens. Their incentive is also economic and so for that, as with the illegals they hire, they cannot, and should not, be blamed. If anybody, it is the government that should be blamed. That is because they encourage both the illegals and businesses with full knowledge of the fact that, where these forces of supply and demand intersect, equilibrium in the illegal alien labor force population shall be, and most probably has been, reached – resulting in the nearly 12,000,000 aliens presently residing in the United States illegally.
If we wish to change this equilibrium, it can only be done by changing the economic environment that presently fosters both these forces of supply and demand, and this can only be done if the U.S. labor force is made competitive with the illegal labor pool. To accomplish this I can think of only two practical ways. One is to convince a significant segment of the American public that it would be a good thing for them to work for less money, benefits and protections than they now have. Some politicians, however, may find this approach, shall we say, “unpopular” and therefore not politically viable. The other way is to remove the conditions that enable illegal aliens to be hired for less money and benefits than their U.S. counterparts by compelling U.S. businesses to provide all their employees – whether legal or illegal – equal wages, protections and benefits. For instance, were all businesses required by law to give illegals the same pay, health benefits, social security coverage, retirement plans, sick pay, vacation time and so on, the cost discrepancy between the two labor pools would narrow to a point of irrelevance, and because the profits now derived from hiring illegals would thereby be significantly reduced, the presently existent demand for illegals would eventually be eliminated. Now perhaps you understand more clearly why I think availing illegal aliens of things like workers’ compensation benefits may be a “good” thing.
The economics of illegal immigration is comparable to that of the illegal drug trade. As long as our government focuses its attention upon arresting individual drug users, but continues to overlook the need to eliminate somehow the huge profits being reaped by importing illegal drugs into this country, the war on drugs will never be won -- notwithstanding any pretense our government may give of wanting to win that war. Similarly, as long as our government allows businesses in this country to reap significant profits by hiring cheap -- albeit illegal (though in name only) -- labor, those businesses will continue to have an economic incentive to encourage illegals to migrate to this country -- notwithstanding how many individual illegals our government may pretend to want to arrest and deport. And until that is changed, perhaps you understand more clearly why I think for the government to prosecute a bus driver for 23 counts of negligent homicide only after it “discovers” he happens to be illegal is, at minimum, a just a tad disingenuous.
© 2005 Clifford C. Nichols, Esq.
Cliff Nichols is an attorney practicing criminal defense/entertainment law in Santa Monica, California. He may be contacted regarding this editorial at either (310) 917-1083 or www.cliffnicholslaw.com or you may join his blog at www.thedailystand.com