Will companies be prosecuted?
U.S. Attorney Mike Hurst has pledged to vigorously prosecute any companies that knowingly hired illegal immigrants at the seven Mississippi poultry plants raided in August.
If Hurst does, it will be the exception for how these massive raids usually go.
As the Clarion Ledger and other media outlets have documented, although large numbers of undocumented workers are arrested and often deported in these raids, criminal charges seldom materialize against the companies for whom they worked or the managers who hired them.
Usually, the penalties are a negotiated fine, and not much more than that.
The reasons are varied. One of the biggest is it’s hard to prove that companies knowingly hired illegal workers. They usually have a plausible defense, such as that they ran their applicants through E-Verify and had no way of knowing the applicants were using counterfeit Social Security cards or other documents. Or they hire a third party to do the pre-employment screening, which distances the employers even further from culpability.
Still, it’s obvious that at least at the assembly-line level, it was known by managers that some of these employees were not working legally at the chicken-processing plants. It’s kind of hard to miss an electronic ankle bracelet, which some of the workers rounded up in the raid were wearing as a result of being arrested for previous immigration violations.
It’s easy to crack down on undocumented workers. It’s much harder, not just in terms of a provable case but because of political pressure, to go after the employers and deal with the ramifications in lost jobs and higher production costs.
Reducing illegal immigration won’t happen, though, unless employers quit creating the incentive that lures the undocumented into the country.
Tim Kalich
Editor and Publisher
Greenwood Commonwealth
‘Budget notes’ try to hide spending
As the Clarion Ledger keeps digging into a previously little-known practice used by influential Mississippi legislators to direct money to pet causes or pet state agencies, it keeps finding surprises.
The latest revelation is that top lawmakers and legislative budget staffers routinely award millions of dollars in pay raises using so-called “budget notes.”
Budget notes, which only Capitol insiders knew much about until recently, are supposed to be used to clarify unclear language in budget bills passed by the Legislature and signed by the governor. But what they have become is a mechanism for creating earmarks — authorizing expenditures, awarding contracts, giving out raises that the majority of lawmakers know nothing about.
Some of this spending might be justifiable — such as raising the pay of key state employees or of rank-and-file positions that turn over too much because of uncompetitive salaries. Some of this spending is ludicrous — such as paying a company $2.3 million to hang up posters in public schools.
But all of it is being done contrary to the way contracts are supposed to be awarded or raises are supposed to be given: that is, a few insiders are calling the shots, bypassing the majority of the Legislature and keeping the public in the dark.
Budget notes, from what we can tell of the practice, is a way to dodge the state’s bid laws and to reward cronies. The practice should be ended.
If lawmakers can’t write bills that spell out exactly how the money is to be spent, then they need to write the bills more precisely.
Tim Kalich
Editor and Publisher
Greenwood Commonwealth
