That’s the title of a Christian Science Monitor story. It seems that Pres. Eisenhower considered the high rate of illegal immigration when he took office in 1951 “…a breakdown in law enforcement on a very large scale.” Ike solved the problem forthwith. Too bad Bush can’t follow in his footsteps, isn’t it?

The article states, “There was also evidence that a study by the President’s Commission on Migratory Labor in Texas in 1950 found that cotton growers in the Rio Grande Valley, where most illegal aliens in Texas worked, paid wages that were ‘approximately half’ the farm wages paid elsewhere in the state.”

Uh huh. Same today, except now there’s a bunch of richAmerica-paid mouthpieces running around who try to persuade you that having an underpaid underclass doesn’t depress wages — which is undoubtedly true if you happen to be the CEO of a major corporation, but is totally not true if you are a labor-type hourly worker, as every hourly worker in an illegal-inundated area will tell you from first-hand knowledge).

Eisenhower appointed a strong general to run the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) — a man who wasn’t corrupted by employers who whined that if their illegal workers were taken away they wouldn’t be able to find anyone to replace them. There were deportations. Lots of deportations. And not just to the border, but deep into Mexico where it wasn’t easy for deportees to try to cross the border again in a day or two.

There were also plenty of voluntary returnees, like 10+ times as many as were sent back by the INS.

And employers were fined like mad. And somehow managed to find legal workers to replace their cut-rate illegal ones.

The next time a Republican candidate talks about “law and order,” please remind him or her that as long as we have millions of illegal immigrants in this country under a Republican president (and where I live, under Republican-dominated state and local governments), that he or she is full of [redacted]; that maybe Ike stood for law and order (the corrupt ones whining in favor of an exploitable labor force back then were mostly Democrats, up to and including LBJ), but that the current crop of Republicans do not — except possibly in the most hypocritical sense imaginable.

There’s no evidence that today’s Democrats are much better, but at least they do not seem to be quite as hypocritical in their approach to law enforcement as today’s Republicans. Fah!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 10:14 am and is filed under Bradenton/local, Business, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.