The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, who is also the CEO of Amazon, released an editorial this week blasting the enforcement of national immigration law as “cruel” and said U.S. businesses should not be deprived of employing illegal alien workers.
In an editorial in the Washington Post, the editors wrote that the recent raids on seven Mississippi food processing plants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were “cruel” and “pointless” despite arresting and identifying 680 illegal workers, including more than 200 who had previous criminal records. About 300 of the illegal workers arrested were released that same day on “humanitarian grounds.”
The Washington Post editors wrote:
The deportation sweep Wednesday by hundreds of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at several food processing plants in Mississippi left a trail of tears, business jitters and widespread anxiety in places where undocumented immigrants are so tightly woven into communities that the towns would struggle to exist without them. The raids inflicted predictable suffering — especially among children whose parents were suddenly carted off — to such a degree that just 24 hours afterward, ICE had released some 300 of the 680 migrants it had arrested, including those who had no criminal records. [Emphasis added]
…
First, the raids underline American agriculture’s deep dependency on undocumented workers, who in 2014 accounted for 17 percent of employees in the sector — and considerably more than that on farms and in many food processing plants. Little wonder that plant managers and local residents in towns targeted by ICE last week worried that the raids would sap their businesses and vitality. [Emphasis added]
Pro-reform advocates have long demanded a nationwide mandatory E-Verify system that would ban employers from hiring illegal aliens over American workers — thus shoring up millions of U.S. jobs for Americans, driving up wages, and preventing businesses from relying on cheap, foreign, exploitable labor.
The Washington Post editors, though, write that businesses need illegal workers because low wages and awful working conditions at these food processing plants make them unappealing to American workers.
“The fact is that relatively few Americans want dirty, dangerous jobs that pay $12 per hour, while requiring some employees to report to work at 3 a.m.,” the editors wrote.
Not mentioned by the Washington Post editors is the fact that the food processing plants raided in Mississippi had employed 18 juvenile illegal workers, including one as young as 14-years-old.
As Breitbart News has analyzed, ICE raids have proven to be hugely beneficial for American workers in terms of increasing wages and bettering workplace conditions. Last year, for instance, 600 jobs that were previously held by illegal workers went to black Americans after an ICE raid ,and wages for the jobs rose 25 cents.
Research has revealed that in the long-run, deportation of illegal aliens saves American taxpayers billions in tax dollars. The cost of illegal aliens to American taxpayers over a lifetime is about $746.3 billion, for example. Compare this to the cost of a single deportation, which is about $10,854 per illegal alien based on Fiscal Year 2016 totals.
Overall, deporting all 11 to 22 million illegal aliens in the country would amount to a cost savings of about $622 billion over the course of a lifetime. This indicates that deporting illegal aliens is six times less costly than what it costs American taxpayers to currently subsidize the millions of illegal aliens living in the U.S.
The unprecedented illegal population in the U.S. is primarily concentrated in California, New York, Florida, and Texas. Today, there are at least about eight million illegal aliens 18-years-old and older who are employed in American jobs that would have otherwise gone to legal immigrants and citizens. The illegal workforce is particularly high in the construction industry, where 24 percent are illegal aliens, and the farming industry, where 15 percent of the workforce are illegal.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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