Meg Whitman has a maid problem.  It's too early to know all the facts, but what Whitman knew and when she knew it isn't what really matters here.  Even if she didn't know, she would still be guilty of one of the great Republican pastimes - the simultaneous persecution and exploitation of immigrants.

Don't let the rhetoric fool you.  Republicans love illegal immigrants.  Why shouldn't they?  Illegal immigrants provide tremendous bang for a buck, and not simply because they often do very hard work for very low wages.  The economic incentive for businesses to employ illegal immigrants is obvious: skirting tax, wage and labor laws.  The labor of illegal immigrants is cheaper for several reasons, some of which have to do with exchange rates and remittances, but the direct benefit to employers is that they can employ illegal labor without paying the minimum wage, without paying the appropriate taxes and often without providing a safe work environment.

But there is another benefit that Republicans reap from illegal immigrants: immigrants are a very convenient scapegoat, particularly in tough economic times.  Even before the financial crash in 2008, Republicans had for years been crowing that illegal immigrants were destroying the country.  The chief reason for this is that illegal immigrants don't really have any political representation to speak of.  This leaves politicians free to scapegoat them without too much fear of a direct political backlash.

Even before the current economic downturn, a scapegoat was needed to explain why wages for working Americans had stagnated for decades, despite significant increases in worker productivity.  Where was the workers' share of the pie going?  Of course, Republicans don't want people paying attention to the fact that the money gets funneled to their constituents (read: Chamber of Commerce, the investing class).  So they make a very reliable political move - scapegoat a minority group that has no real recourse within our system.

So if you're upset that you can't make ends meet, the Republicans want you to know that you have someone to blame - nameless, faceless immigrants that have even less wealth and political power than you do.

When the Republican rhetoric is understood in this way, we can see why they devote all commentary on the issue to avoiding any kind of meaningful reform to the system, preferring to pound old tropes like "enforcing the laws on the books."  Or proposing that we build a fence over 2,000 miles long.  Or two fences.  And then patrol it with drones.  Unserious stuff like this is exactly what it looks like - diversion.

The reason for diversion instead of action is simple: Republicans very much approve of the current status quo.  They like having a labor pool of millions that will do difficult work for little compensation without exposing their employers to tax liability or labor law suits.  They also like having a convenient political scapegoat that will distract people from recognizing who is really giving them the shaft.  In fact, if you take their platform seriously, it seems very much like they would prefer all working Americans were employed under the conditions that illegal immigrants work.

Whitman is an exemplar of this pernicious brand of hypocrisy, but there are two special circumstances of her candidacy that give us a rare glimpse into the truth of all this.  One is that she is a political greenhorn, a fact that has been demonstrated by her losing her cool several times during the campaign already.  The other is that she is running for governor in a state with very large Latino and immigrant populations.

That means she can't really hope to win without reaching out to those communities.  However, whipping up xenophobia has its consequences, as she discovered back in August when right-wingers boxed her into a corner, forcing her to admit that she doesn't really mean what she says in her Spanish-language ads about opposing measures like California's Proposition 187 or Arizona's SB-1070, which remains a hot-button issue in the Latino community.  Whitman is discovering what happens when the previously convenient scapegoats are now an indispensible voting demographic.

Whatever comes of Whitman's maid controversy, Republicans like Whitman will continue to employ the classic doctrine of divide and conquer by playing on the very real economic insecurity of the white working class, scapegoating immigrants and generally robbing us all blind as fast as they possibly can.  Don't buy it.