Exploitation, Utah-Style


"Utah," a misguided member of the Washington Post editorial staff writes," has passed the nation's most liberal and most reality-based policy on illegal immigration. And the Republican governor is expected to sign it."

For that we are all to stand up and applaud. It is "a milestone," Les Hockstader opines, which began with

the "Utah Compact," a pithy declaration of reform principles drafted last fall by business leaders and conservative elites, who feared Utah would follow in Arizona's footsteps and risk losing tens of millions of dollars in tourism and convention business, as Arizona did. The compact helped swing public opinion in Utah away from the illegal-immigrant bashers who admired Arizona's law.

The effort, which an impressed Hockstader finds all the more "interesting" because it "is coming from unimpeachable conservatives," consists of a package of three laws, one a less controversial version of Arizona SB 1070, a second which, The New York Times reports

authorized the creation of a state guest worker program by 2013, and instructed the governor and the state attorney general to negotiate with federal authorities for a waiver to allow Utah employers to hire illegal immigrants.

State Attorney General Mark Shurtleff noted "it's a federal crime to employ an illegal alien. I don't know how you get a waiver for a federal crime. I'm going to try."

If the waiver is granted, it may open a whole new role for the federal government. Perhaps businesses in Utah, or another state, can apply for a waiver to pay workers less than the middle wage or to employ child laborers. The possibilities, truly, are endless. And what could be better than waiving application of a law by a "government of laws, and not of men?"

The third new immigration law aims to facilitates the transfer of laborers from Mexico to Utah through existing federal guest-worker programs.

Perspective comes from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who in October explained

Germany's attempt to create a multicultural society has "failed, utterly failed."

Merkel, speaking October 16 at a meeting of her Christian Democratic party in the city of Potsdam, said decades of allowing people of different cultural backgrounds to live side by side without integrating into mainstream society has not worked for Germany.

"In Frankfurt on the Main, two out of three children under the age of five have an immigrant background,” Merkel said.

“We are a country which, at the beginning of the 1960s, actually brought guest workers to Germany. Now they live with us and we lied to ourselves for a while, saying that they won't stay and that they will have disappeared again one day. That's not the reality. This [multicultural] approach -- saying that we simply live side by side and are happy about each other -- this approach has failed, utterly failed."

Germany's failed guest worker program, evidently, invited laborers who were to "have disappeared again one day." Similarly, Hockstader indicates "Utah's guest-worker bill doesn't grant citizenship, of course."

Of course it doesn't- if it did, the labors would be more difficult to exploit and might actually integrate into society, enriching the American mosaic. It's easy, therefore, to understand corporate America's delight at the thought of an extensive network of temporary workers. But it's disconcerting that a portion of the left does not understand that such programs, which treat immigrants as disposable, second-class citizens, incorporate the seeds of the destruction of the very multiculturalism they purport to promote. Just ask Angela Merkel.

Share|