When the pool of willing workers is much larger than the number of jobs that are available to them, however, employers are at an advantage when it comes to hiring, and some inevitably insist on working conditions that contravene those laws. The United States has some of the best laws protecting working conditions of any country on the face of the earth in the history of man. That law was written by legislators who had a tighter grasp on how the world actually works than at least some members of the current 116th Congress. But how, exactly, does limiting immigration protect the "working conditions of workers in the United States?" Is this surplus verbiage? Was Congress not paying attention when it passed the law? One of the express reasons in section 212 of the INA for limiting the flow of alien workers to the United States is to protect "the wages and working conditions of workers in the United States." You can find numerous studies back and forth (including from the Center for Immigration Studies) discussing the effect of illegal immigration on wages. More importantly, however, the chairmen fail to grasp an essential truth that Congress itself has actually written into the immigration laws. But that fact in no way protects them, absent an agreement with the government, from removal from the United States.
It is worth noting that even illegal immigrants are entitled to the protection of most of the labor laws of the United States, with the (obvious) exception of the employer-sanctions provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). We are alarmed by the potential serious chilling effect of these enforcement actions close in time to these workers vindicating their rights to a safe working environment. For example, in 2018, ICE carried out an enforcement action at a Salem, Ohio meatpacking plant, a week after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the plant for $200,000 for multiple safety violations. There have been other instances of ICE arrests shortly after a company faced non-immigration government enforcement.
They noted that one of the employers, Koch Foods, "paid $3.75 million in a 2018 legal settlement with the government to resolve a lawsuit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of Hispanic workers who alleged race, sex, and national origin-based discrimination." The chairmen made another point in their letter that merits analysis. I will note that none of the affidavits ICE submitted in connection with its applications for search warrants of those locations were referenced in that letter. I explained how it was premature for the chairmen to make the latter assumption, and that those responsibe for any separations were the parents themselves. My last post discussed the chairmen's contentions that parents were separated from their children in the course of that operation, and that the operation apparently targeted only the workers who were working illegally, and not the employers of those aliens (again, facts discounted by the aforementioned affidavits). Specifically, on August 9, 2019, Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Chairman Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) of that committee's Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) of the House Homeland Security Committee sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan demanding information about that operation. They have it exactly backwards: Illegal immigration creates conditions in which all employees are subject to exploitation, while worksite enforcement prevents such exploitation. In addition to the complaints I discussed previously, lawmakers critical of immigration enforcement have also asserted such operations have a "chilling effect" on workers seeking to protect their rights to a safe workplace. Attorney's Office, including (according to ICE affidavits had anyone bothered to read them) investigations of some or all of the five employers who run those plants and/or their employees. That operation is part of ongoing criminal investigations, according to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in which 680 aliens were arrested at seven agricultural processing plants in Mississippi. In my last post, I discussed congressional complaints about an August 7 worksite-enforcement operation by U.S.