This whole Bernard Kerik thing really bugs me. For a little background, here’s Kevin Drum’s summery from the other day :

On Friday he withdrew his nomination to be secretary of homeland security, saying he had “discovered” that a former nanny might have been an illegal alien and that he might have, um, inadvertantly failed to pay all the required taxes during her employment. Thus Kerik joins a distinguished line of “nanny problem” politicians stretching from Michael Huffington to Zoe Baird to Linda Chavez.
. . .
Here’s what’s amusing: apparently nanny problems are now so common and well accepted that they’ve become a standard excuse to cover up more serious offenses. Heck, it almost makes you a martyr, since the chattering classes unanimously agree that nanny issues are trivial ? it’s just so hard to find good help these days ? and are used mostly as political payback anyway.

(For more background on why Kerik really withdrew his name, Josh Marshall’s been following the arrest warrants, mob ties, and that woman he was shtupping.)

The fact that, as Kevin pointed out, employing an illegal worker is seemingly “no big deal” infuriates me to no end. Even if you take aside all the other allegations of misdeeds on Kerik’s part, the “nanny problem” alone should be enough to disqualify him from public life. Even if it’s just one employee, this is a small part of a much, much larger problem that extends from sweatshops to farm labor to the homes of the richest people in this country. In the end, it screws everyone involved, except for the employers.

First of all, let’s cut through the lie that immigrants who sneak into the country are doing jobs that Americans won’t do. That’s bullshit. It’s not that American workers aren’t willing to pick fruit or clean up garbage, it’s that they’re unwilling to do it for practically nothing. Illegal immigrants, on the other hand, are willing to put up with much worse treatment since they’re often unaware of their rights and kept in fear of being deported. If anything it’s the workers who are being exploited, yet conservatives have found a way to turn these victims into bogeymen who are stealing jobs that were never legal to begin with.

But American workers also have a point when they complain about losing jobs to immigrants since, in a way, they’re being doubly-screwed. On the one hand, every job that’s being offered illegally is one less job that would be filled by a member of our labor force. On the other hand, undocumented workers (isn’t that a lovely euphemism?) aren’t paying into the tax system, so they’re essentially cashing in on some of the benefits that they didn’t help pay for.

Let’s take a step back and look at this problem. In one corner we’ve got the displaced American laborer, who’s justly pissed that their jobs are disappearing and that the number of people coming into the country to compete for (presumably) the same jobs. In the other, we’ve got the immigrant worker, who’s working longer hours in unsafe working conditions and is just trying to have a better life in their new home. The immigrants are angry for being made scapegoats, the Americans are pissed because they’re unable to find work, and everyone’s pissed because the problems seem to be getting worse and worse. On top of all that, when you consider that most of the workers we’re talking about are of Asian or Latino descent, these tensions get further amplified with a tinge of racism.

Yet, there’s one party that’s constantly left out of this equation : The employers.

They’re the ones who deserve the blame here. They’re screwing the Americans and the immigrants by going around every labor and tax law they can get away with. Yet, these employer crimes are rarely kept in the correct context. It’s not simply a matter of a few minor OSHA violations and some tax evasion, this the violation of the most fundamental rules that keep our economy strong. If every worker can’t be guaranteed a bare minimum in working conditions, wages, and benefits, what’s to stop the race to the bottom? These employers aren’t simply petty lawbreakers of the white-collar variety, they’re exploitative criminals who should face a long stint in prison.

Where’s the outrage over this? I’d think this would be an issue that (real) conservatives and liberals could equally champion. For liberals it would mean better working conditions and a strengthened labor force. For conservatives it would mean seriously disrupting the “supply and demand” that feeds our immigration problem. As long as there’s a supply of shitty jobs, there will be people willing to sneak into the country to fill them.

Granted, I’m oversimplifying this problem, lumping together the twin problems of tax evasion and various labor law violations, ignoring inconvenient questions (like “What happens to the workers if their bosses go to jail?” or “How do we convince people to become whistleblowers?”), and doing nothing to account for degrees of severity (ex. not paying taxes on a worker who is otherwise well-paid obviously isn’t the same as running a sweatshop). My point in all this is that when it comes to illegal workers, we shouldn’t fall into the “us vs. them” trap that makes it easier for the real bad guys here to avoid any responsibility. This is a very, very serious problem that needs to be debated, but that isn’t gonna happen until we start realizing that we’re all victims here in one way or another. Well…almost all of us.