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    Maid in California

    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.

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    I have been saying for some time now that anyone serious about illegal immigration would begin using RICO enforcement tactics against those who employ them.

    This would, of course, include asset seizure.

    Can you visualize this, even in your wildest pepperoni pizza fueled fever-dream?

    And the reason why it will never happen is that unlike the illegal immigrants themselves, the peolpe who employ them have connections and make campaign contributions. 

    Not to mention the means to generate the sort of mindless propaganda that the poorly-educated will swallow whole, about how "them Meskins" are taking their jobs.

    They are not.  The employers are giving them away.


    Part of what's happened to Whitman here is that she's been hoisted by her own petard.  She debated Jerry Brown for the first time Tuesday night, just prior to Allred's media-siezing announcement.  During the debate, I was hoping Brown would hammer your point, but it was actually Whitman who came out in favor of prosecuting employers!  She had no idea at the time that Allred was waiting in the wings.

    Well, the zapato is on the other pie now, isn't it?

    But you're right about how to properly address the issue.  The incentives for people to come here are economic - the response should be in kind.  A physical fence is a fool's errand.  If one wishes to stop the flow of immigrants, one needs to put up an economic wall.  And that means going after the demand for labor, not the supply.

    To his credit, Obama has already started to pursue a more sensible enforcement policy in this respect.


    I've always been an open borders kind of person, realizing of course that some business interests agree for  nefarious reasons.  Morally, I've never been able to get with this notion of having your country assigned to you by the accident of your birth.  Sometimes I just feel French, you know?

    To me, Meg Whitman's biggest sin here is her dishonesty.  She calls this woman who worked for her for almost a decade "her friend."  She fired this woman when she learned about her immigration status.  She fired her supposed friend.  What?  She's wealthy.  She could have hired the best immigration lawyer in the country to work the system on her friend's behalf.  There's nothing that would make me believe that Whitman couldn't have gotten her employee on the path to citizenship.  Indeed, there are even provisions in the law for domestic help (mostly for diplomats who have worked overseas, but still).  If she can spend $120 million on her campaign, she could have spent $120,000 on legal help for her "friend."

    Or, heck, she could have set her "friend" up for life.  She could have said, "You know, I'm running or governor.  This won't do.  Welcome to early retirement, I think you'll be quite please with your annuity."  They were "friends" after all.


    The personal politics of this story are as rotten as you suggest.  And I think this is likely to hurt her with voters, particularly those in the Latino community.

    But it's also a microcosm of the Republican rhetoric on immigration.  Whitman was happy to benefit from cheap labor and she's happy to benefit from a political scapegoat.

    Also, I am forced to wonder this: Just how greedy do you have to be to do what Whitman has apparently done?  With her money, she could legally employ a whole team of housekeepers without any significant difference to her financial picture.  I wonder if she is now reconsidering her decision to save a few bucks an hour.


    It's like when celebrities purposefully go out to get drunk and use drugs and then get caught driving home.  You're rich.  Hire a damned car for the night and nobody will care about whatever else you do.  Instead they try to save a buck.  And don't tell me these people are rich because they're cheap.  They're not.  For the most part they're rich because they lucked or worked into one gig that pays an outsized bonus.  Nobody, not even Warren Buffett ever actually pinched their pennies into multimillionairedom.


    Whitman was paying $23 /hour..so she did not do it to save a few bucks.

    I am a progressive Dem, but I am not sure that Whitman  knew she was illegal before she was told in June 2009. Sure it appears there was a SS letter, but that letter stated that it was not about immigration status.

    The real problem is that it would be very easy to prevent people working illegally here, all the government has to do is mandate E Verify and have SS follow up on the problem SSN it knows about. Jail dishonest employers who use illegal labor and the problem is solved.

    But the moneyed interest (both parties) don't want that.

    They are pursuing a North American Union, without our knowledge or consent, and part of that is open borders.

    Gee, Canadians know about it. Mexicans know about it. The dollar is going to be replaced by the  Amero.

    As one Bush memo put it, since Americans will protest, it has to be done by "evolutionary stealth". Hence Spanish is being made the second official language of the USA. The North American highway is being built ( while the Feds continue to deny it), even though Canada and Mexico talk about it. There is no enforcement of our immigration laws because they want Mexicans to flood into the USA, become citizens and then vote for the North American Union. The infastructures of the three countries are being merged as are our economies.

    Of course, it is not being done like in Europe, where the people of each country got to vote on a union and policies were put in place so each group could preserve their language and their culture and their social benefits. Nope, no protection for regular people with the North American Union!  With 30 million of so Mexicans joining up, our social benefit system will be destroyed. But heck, the way it is being strucutured, the rich will get richer...so on it goes.


    Evidence?


    Oh sheesh you kind of lost me at the end there, but...

    You're right, it does seem that she was paying a wage that would amount to about $48,000 a year.  I've worked for some really rich people and I got to know them and I happen to know that their home staff did way better than that (and way better than me).  But, I accept that Whitman was probably not in the market to hire an illegal immigrant and that she paid a middle class wage.  More likely that she chose an agency that would hook her up with the best deal possible and that the agency uses illegals for both leverage and convenience.  Illegal employees don't complain, no matter what happens.

    Now... I'm going to say this just to bother you... But this whole phony superhighway Amero business... wouldn't necessarily be the worst thing in the world for us.  Canada has enormous resources and a fully developed economy.  Mexico is an emerging market with enormous resources as well.  Sure, it has it's troubles but East Germany had it's troubles too and West Germany worries about reuinification because of it.  Where's Germany now?  Yup, strongest economy in Europe, one of the strongest in the world and, if judged according to it's size, the globe's heaviest hitter.

    So maybe we should build that highway and adopt the Amero!

     


    Never did I think that you of all people would advocate a NEW WORLD ORDER.  Say it ain't so, bruther!

     


    Horsemen 4Eva!

    WHOOOOOOO!

    Wow, Dibiase was so young, there.


    Yep, both the Repubs and the Dem elites love their illegal immigrants. It keeps American wages nice and low, and subsidizes the dishonest employers who use them through American middle class taxes. But hey, those big campaign contributors are kept happy. Who cares that over the last 20 years, the American working and middle class has been destroyed! The rich have gotten richer!


    The bottom line is that we are always going to have immigrants willing to do unpleasant things that Americans are not willing to do, such as being Meg Whitman's friend.

     


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