Ned Hodgman

Item 1:  Immigration Enforcement + Job Training = More Americans Employed

Most people believe that immigrants, particularly illegal ones, work where Americans won’t.  Following the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in New Bedford, Mass., New Bedford Standard-Times reporter Jack Spillane tested this hypothesis.  He didn’t have to go far, as there was a long line of native New Bedforders and legal immigrants outside the Michael Bianco, Inc. plant where more than 300 jobs had suddenly opened up.  However, as Spillane wrote, “a spokeswoman for Michael Bianco said that while the plant needs lots of trained stitchers (now that it has lost more than half its work force), what it doesn’t need is any unskilled labor.”  The factory in question had previously received a federal grant to train unskilled workers.  While it’s not clear how those funds were spent, the presence of 300 illegal immigrants makes you wonder.   It’s clear from Spillane’s piece that no more locals are being trained right now.  But as the New York Times observed recently, “the question is not whether job training can work, but why there hasn’t been a concerted national effort to make it work.”   The Times editorial notes that whereas federal funds provided real vocational training for a paltry 36,000 people nationwide in 2006, one locally funded program in the Bronx has already trained more than 1000 people, 80 percent of whom are now employed.  Serious government attention to this issue could help New Bedford as well as New York or New Mexico. 

Item 2:  Responsible government spending is the key to solving illegal immigration and employment practices

As we have pointed out previously, government competence is at the heart of reducing illegal immigration and illegal employment practices.  America’s local communities seem to have a clearer grasp of this reality than many of us inside the Beltway.   A recent editorial that ran in several MPG Newspapers group papers around Boston (including the Waltham Daily News Tribune, the MetroWest Daily News of Framingham, and several others) notes that in fixing immigration and employment practices, “there is one class of employers that should lead the way: government and private companies with government contracts.”  The editorial explains in plain language what government should be doing and isn’t.   It asks, for example,

“What if the clients that bought the leather goods manufactured at the Michael Bianco Inc. plant demanded the company use only documented workers? What if that requirement was written into the $91 million contract the Pentagon gave Bianco to produce military equipment?”

“And what if the federal government, as part of a uniform, scheduled enforcement effort, visited the plant, inspected its records and the workers’ documentation? If the employers were hiring and exploiting illegals, they could take away the contract. Then they could close the plant down and have everyone reapply for their jobs - with the proper documentation.”

These concepts are simple enough.  Where is the government’s followup?

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