April 5, 2019: Why Are Republicans So Inept at Identifying Undocumented Workers?

 

4/5/19: Trump lovers will be thrilled to hear that on Thursday ICE launched one of its largest raids in years, netting 280 undocumented workers at CVE Technology Group and four related businesses in Allen, Texas. No telling how many of those 280 were waiting to rape or murder upstanding Americans. You can definitely assume all of them were working cheap.

Soccoro Lechuga, right, was one of those arrested.

She had worked at CVE for six years.

 

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$6.43 per hour, with no overtime pay.

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It’s odd how often businesspersons – who lean heavily Republican when voting and donating to campaigns – are caught hiring the undocumented and then insist they believe we need a giant border wall. A check of public records fails to yield much info on Edward Cho, owner of CVE, but odds are strong he donates more to Republican causes and candidates than otherwise. Nearly three out of every four dollars donated to political parties in Texas end up in GOP coffers. 

The state is controlled by Republicans: governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, both houses of the legislature. Both U.S. senators and 23 of 36 representatives in the U.S. House are members of the Republican Party. Yet they remain inept when curtailing the hiring of undocumented workers in their own state.

 

The Texas Tribune pointed this out in an article in 2016: 

In Texas, 1.1 million unauthorized immigrant workers [emphasis added] made up 8.5 percent of the state’s total labor force, concentrated in industries like agriculture, hospitality and especially construction, where an estimated 25 percent of workers were unauthorized.

 

Researchers at the Workers Defense Project and the University of Texas at Austin put that number even higher, finding that half of surveyed construction workers in Texas said they were undocumented.

 

Typically, Tribune reporters talked to two undocumented brothers working in construction. They said they often put in 14-hour days, for which they earned $90, meaning they worked for $6.43 per hour, with no overtime pay. (See: 4/9/19, for hiring practices at Trump National Golf Course in Jupiter, Florida.)