Wednesday, April 29, 2009

The Nutty Irishman Solves Everything! (Part One)

That's right folks, yours truly is going to give you the solutions to all the ills that plague us, and I'm going to do it simply, effectively, and cost-efficiently. Then, I'll tell you why my practical solutions will never see the light of day. Ready?

Problem #1: Illegal Immigration. Conservative types love to spout off at illegal immigrants, and will miss no opportunity to hitch onto whatever is happening in the news and somehow contrive a way to make it the fault of illegal immigrants. The most recent example is this swine flu thing. Apparently, according to the fringe right wing hacks, Mexicans have deliberately and knowingly brought swine flu to the U.S. when they came here illegally. Bad enough they steal all our jobs, now they want to kill us. Not paranoid enough for you? Try this one: allegedly al Qaeda manufactured this latest epidemic of swine flu (in their super-secret chemical labs, hidden deep in the mountainside caves of Afghanistan). Then, instead of using one of a million possible ways to import it directly into the United States, they chose instead to infect Mexicans (with whom they have no quarrel, incidentally), knowing that they would, in turn, sneak into America and infect the lot of us.

Solution #1: Jail Time for Employers, Not Employees: Okay, so if we are going to address illegal immigration in this country, we need to go after the two things we know the immigrants do: work and sleep. Despite what you may have been told, they don't tunnel under our border fences and emerge, only to immediately give birth to babies, collect food stamps and welfare. We know they get jobs, and we know that without jobs available to them, they'd have very little reason to come here. In the drug trade, law enforcement is much more interested in nabbing the dealers than the buyers. We simply apply the same rationale here. So, we pass a law. Any company that is found to have illegal immigrants in their employ, they're the new targets of law enforcement. Any business, from your local restaurant all the way up to Wal-Mart, the owners, presidents, chairmen of the board, get sentenced to 30 days in a federal prison for each illegal immigrant they hire. No fines, no community service – go directly to jail. Imagine seeing the owner of Wal-Mart taken away in shackles, live on CNN. Watch how quickly employers would then start insisting on documentation for their employees.

Solution #2: Jail Time for Landlords Who Rent to Illegals: The second part of the solution has to do with where they stay. In most cases, they live in apartments, and those apartments are being rented out by landlords. So, we get law enforcement to go after the landlords. We make them responsible for who rents their apartments, pure and simple. If an illegal immigrant is found to be residing in an apartment (whether they're on the lease of not), the landlords or owners spend 30 days in federal prison for each illegal found there.

Why it will never happen: My solutions sidestep the notion of fining the companies. Most of the bigger companies keep tons of cash in reserve for such legal issues and would not be deterred by fines. Or if they are fined out of existence (like a restaurant), another similar business would just come along and take its place, likely hiring the same batch of illegal immigrants. No, fines are not the solution. Take some of the seven-figure salaried elites and put them in general population for a few weeks, see if that changes their perspective. But we all know even if such legislation passed, it would be rotted with loopholes that would allow their lawyers to get exceptions in almost every case, making the law moot. Besides, these business owners are known for making contributions to candidates at election time, and money talks. Even if they don't donate to the candidate directly, they can still pump lots of money into both major political parties, pretty much ensuring that whoever gets elected will remember who got them there. If I sound cynical, it’s because I am. I believe that when big business and government get together, the one thing you can count on is the average American getting screwed. Unless you own their stock, most companies will not do anything to acquiesce to your demands. Don’t like Wal-Mart’s policies? Shop somewhere else, it’s a free country. Don’t like the fact that Candidate “A” gets his ass kissed by big business? Okay then, vote for Candidate “B”. But don’t fool yourself for a second into thinking that it makes a difference to Big Business. They have both bases covered.

Of course, I could be wrong.


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