Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Why Some Employers Like Illegals

I came across an interesting article in the latest Human Resource Executive magazine under the heading, Executives Charged With Employing Illegal Workers. It seems owners of Rosenbaum-Cunningham-International, based in Las Vegas, has employed illegal aliens all over the country. About 200 of them were arrested in raids conducted by the U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement Agency.

Owners Richard M. Rosenbaum, Edward Scott Cunningham and Christina A. Flocken were collecting income, Social Security, Medicare and employment taxes for the workers, but found better uses for the money than the feds. They used 60% of the money to pay company bills and divided the rest among themselves to purchase luxury boats and cars, race horses, lavish homes and other lifestyle-enhancing activities.

I guess it's not all about jobs nobody else wants.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The whole illegal immigration thing is completely topsy-turvy...case in point, Miss USA is booed in Mexico...aparently because she is from the United States. Yeah, America is so terrible that Mexicans are illegally taking up residence here in droves. And Linda Valdez at the Republic has the idea that to fix the illegal alien problems, we should give money to Mexicans so they'll stay in Mexico....why that's...brrrrilliant.

Would it help to confuse it if we run away more?

Liza said...

After spending more than 20 years in California, I can tell you there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that what Rosenbaum-Cunningham-International are guilty of has been going on for a long, long time. This has been a source of easy money for a LOT of people.

Sirocco said...

It's unquestioned some employers abuse the system. That doesn't mean the idea of allowing immigrants/guest-workers over to fill certain jobs is inherently incorrect. It just means we need to do a better job of identifying and punishing the abusers.

High-tech employers abuse the H1B Visa system left and right as well.

AZAce said...

I like to distinguish between legal guest workers and those who enter illegally who more often end up exploited by unscrupulous employers. Having employed many green card and H1-b holding immigrants in the past to fill jobs otherwise unfillable, I understand there is a time and place for the practice. I have also seen employers who could fill jobs with U.S. citizens pass them over to access the easily exploited even when citizens would have performed the work at a competitive wage.

Anonymous said...

AZACE:

That is why so many of us want a real guest worker program and to bring the 12 Million out into the sunshine. The pathway (with penalty) to citizenship would deal with this problem quite well. Right now, it is illegal, we ramp up enforcement over and over, and continue to drive the problem underground.