A couple days ago, 50 illegal aliens were arrested while working at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina. The aliens were from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and the Ukraine.

Sounds good so far: the last thing almost every American should want is illegal aliens working at military installations, right?

However, Allen McNeely, head N.C.'s Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health division, isn't happy because the aliens were arrested while attending a fake "mandatory state OSHA" meeting:

McNeely said one of the contractors who employed the immigrants faxed him a copy of the flier, which tells all contract workers to attend an OSHA briefing at the base theater and promises free coffee and doughnuts.

McNeely said that neither his division nor the federal OSHA was involved in the arrests.

He said the ruse eroded trust between the Labor Department and the workers it is trying to keep safe.

In recent years, the Labor Department has made an effort to reach out to the state's thousands of immigrant workers, especially those in construction, because they are among the most likely to be killed or injured at work.

"We are dealing with a population of workers who need to know about safety," McNeely said. "Now they're going to identify us as entrappers."

Well, that's just too bad, isn't it? Based on those and the following comments, in a perfect world McNeely would be out of a job. Instead, expect him to get a promotion. From "Questions Arise About Arresting Illegal Immigrants In N.C.":

...Despite tighter identification restrictions, the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles cares less about tracking legal status than it does making sure drivers understand the laws of the road.

Contrary to popular belief, the North Carolina Department of Labor's role is to make sure employees have safe working conditions. State labor inspectors do not enforce immigration laws.

"We just don't make any demarcation between a person's status," said Allen McNeely, a spokesman for the Department of Labor. "I think what we do is go in and look at what job they're doing."