From today’s Washington Post:
The Herndon Town Council last night approved the creation of a formal, taxpayer-funded gathering spot for day laborers, saying the chaos in a 7-Eleven parking lot where the workers now gather would only worsen if it did nothing.
The council members, in a 5 to 2 vote that several called the hardest decision in their public service, said they did not want to sanction illegal immigration, the chief concern of opponents of the center. Many of the workers the facility would serve are in the United States illegally from Mexico and Central America.
But council members said they were helpless in the face of what they called a federal failure to police U.S. borders. They said it was their responsibility to bring order to a neighborhood nuisance that had become the town’s most divisive issue in recent history.
So I suppose a telephone call to the INS was out of the question ?
As I said yesterday, I don’t begrudge these immigrants coming here to work. I do have a significant problem, though, with local governments effectively sanctioning illegal activitiy, which is what Herndon has now done.
At the same time, though, the Herndon Town Council isn’t the only legislative body ignoring the law:
Still, council member Dennis D. Husch, who opposed the measure along with Ann V. Null, denounced the region’s representatives in Congress. “Shame on them for their cowardly retreat,” Husch said.
Excellent point. The federal government is the entity primarily responsible for enforcing immigration laws and securing the borders, and they’ve done a pretty poor job of it.
Going after the laborers, though, isn’t going to solve anything. As I said yesterday, all these people want to do is work and as long as there are people willing to hire them, they will continue to come. If Americans were truly serious about stopping illegal immigration laws, the people that they’d be throwing in jail aren’t the illegal immigrants, but the people who hire them.
This story is not over yet. It has already become an issue in the Virginia Governor’s race.
