Sunday, March 25, 2007

Compete without 'illegals'?

Do you have to hire illegal immigrants to compete in the landscape business? Kirsten Stewart says you do — in her California market, at least.
The 40-year-old landscape business owner, who lives in Santa Monica, refuses to hire undocumented immigrant workers. Because she pays more for labor she says she can’t match competitors’ bids for landscape work, and her business is suffering because of that.
She claims that the reason why Americans don’t want to take landscape jobs is because the wages are so low because of the availability of illegal workers.
We’ve often wondered what percentage of immigrant landscape employees are working with forged papers. Nobody seems to know and the subject is rarely brought up, at least not publicly.
We’ve also often wondered how the Pew Hispanic Trust came up with the figure of 10 to 12 million illegal workers in the United States. Somehow that number has become taken as Gospel and is used whenever the issue of immigration comes up.
Read about Kirsten Stewart’s stance on illegals (as written by Mark Cromer, a writer for Californians for Population Stabilization) by clicking on the headline. — Ron Hall

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