Andrew Rosenthal/New York Times wants stimulus money to go to illegal aliens

The New York Times offers the editorial "Helping Workers in Hard Times" (link) in which they explicitly support stimulus plan jobs going to illegal aliens. Andrew Rosenthal heads the NYT editorial board; whether he wrote it or not, he's ultimately responsible so please send him a polite response: editorial *at* nytimes.com.

First, there's the "jobs Americans won't do"/"jobs that not even blacks want to do" argument:

Undocumented immigrants make up only about one-twentieth of the work force but are overwhelmingly represented in the most dangerous, dirty and low-paying jobs. Driving out every undocumented worker, a temptation in hard times, clears the way for laid-off Americans to pick lettuce, wash dishes and cars, and wait all morning outside Home Depot for a contractor to drive up... That doesn’t sound terribly smart.

Then, they discuss the EVerify provisions that were stripped from the stimulus plan:

[The idea of eVerify in the bill] crashes on the rocks of common sense. It is impossible to know how many undocumented workers might get hired through the stimulus, but the Congressional Budget Office has already quantified the cost - in thousands of lost jobs and billions in lost tax revenue - of the mandatory mass expansion of E-Verify. That is from all the workers who would be fired because of database errors or simply moved off the books.

See an accurate discussion of those costs here. Considering that spending trillions of dollars is now mainstream, a program that would require an outlay of about $1.2 billion a year and would result in lost revenues of about $1.8 billion a year - from money that was earned illegally - is practically nothing. Comparing the costs of the program to the amount of money likely earned by illegal aliens under the bill is left as an exercise; I suspect the latter is far higher.

Then, they explicitly support allowing illegal aliens to receive jobs under the stimulus bill:

There is a better strategy that hews to core American values and common sense. It is to support workers - documented or not. It is to fight back against abuses that make wages and job conditions worse for everyone. It is to throw light on off-the-books labor, and on the tax-cheating businesses that have exploited it for too long.

Sun, 02/15/2009 - 13:49 · · Importance: 9