Neil Munro of Breitbart News reported on January 11 about the efforts of certain business leaders to push for a general amnesty for illegal migrants living in this country. Mentioned specifically is one Stan Marek, the owner of a Houston-based construction firm, who is calling for a so-called “ID & Tax” amnesty.
Munro quotes Marek from a sentimental, pro-illegal-migrant YouTube video entitled “Immigration Reform: The ID & Tax Proposal“:
Let’s face it: those 11 million [illegal migrants] are not sitting on their duff. They’re working somewhere. . . . They may be working under a fake Social, they may be working as an independent subcontractor, but they’re working and they’ve got skills. A lot of these workers working in the underground economy, used to work for people like me. They were let go because of ICE audits or Social Security No Matches, or insurance audits or whatever. . . .These ICE audits have taken millions of people off of payrolls and dumped them into the underground economy where they’re working for cash and not paying taxes.
Marek’s proposal is to legalize those illegal workers (for the benefit of employers) so as to tax their labor (for the benefit of the government). That way, everyone wins–everyone that is except the unemployed American worker.
Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies responds this way.
This is crony capitalism … business partnering with government to increase its profits [by cutting Americans’ wages] while dumping the costs on taxpayers. By legalizing the illegal immigrants, the benefit to employers is greater because there’s more of the cost of [cheap labor] immigration that taxpayers can be forced to bear. [The proposal is] the latest example of employers trying to globalize the American labor market so they can hire anybody they want from abroad and break the bargaining position of American workers.
For more, see Breitbart News.