From the Daily Item:
Unemployed mason Todd Harter heard there was a strip mall under construction not far from his central Pennsylvania house, drove the 30 miles to check it out and asked the man in charge for a job.Harter noticed all the workers spoke Spanish. The owner of the masonry company “looked at the Mexicans, looked at me, and said, ’I don’t think you’d fit in,’” said Harter, 38, of Nescopeck. “It made me mad.”
What made him even angrier is that federal immigration agents neglected to take immediate action after his father and others told U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement they suspected illegal immigrants were working on the job site.
If the federal government won't enforce the immigation laws what can Hazleton do about it?
There was a similar incident on a bigger scale in the construction of the new Wal-Mart distribution center in or near Schuylkill County, which was state-supported to supply jobs. Unfortunately, I can't find the giant Harrisburg newspaper article about it. Anyway,
ReplyDeleteMy letter to the editor, Sunbury Daily Item:
Re http://www.dailyitem.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060622/NEWS/60622006, thanks for the thorough rundown on this story--not the first in this part of the state about well-qualified local people who can't get hired at worksites that employ only illegal immigrants--but how did the employer violate child labor laws? Was there a typo or were the undocumented employees underage as well?
At any rate, Representative Sherwood surely can't expect the county and the state to just bide their time indefinitely, while our people go jobless and broke. You'd think in an election year he'd be more interested in his constituents.