Riley's Golden Goose, or Running a City with Illegals

How many P & C readers got indigestion over Saturday morning's headline, Company's Goose Cooked After Bird Killing? Plenty, I'll bet. While our state legislators pass an immigration bill at a speed somewhere between dead slow and stop, let's look around.

Once your friendly neighborhood teenager had a nice income in the spring mowing lawns. Now those nicely manicured lawns are worked by illegal aliens employed by temporary services.

Once the City of Charleston employed workers to care for its parks. No longer. Now it employs illegal aliens procured by temp agencies. And they certainly cost less than any legal workers who might, after all, complain about their rights under the law. Sweet, isn't it? That allows Mayor Riley and his friends to state that they had "NO IDEA that gambling was going on in this establishment," to paraphrase Casablanca. Right.

Doesn't it make you wonder what other parts of city government are employing illegals? How about other cities? Other city contractors? Staffing 2000 isn't the only temp agency to use illegals and claim that they're all legal. The agency is only one step up from using slave labor.

Those poor workers probably thought they'd enjoy a nice roast goose. Does it make you angry to think that Charleston has knowingly exploited the evil situation this country now faces? Knowingly because South Carolina has one of the lowest percentages of legal Mexicans (and other Latin Americans) in the country, and Staffing 2000 has provided its so-called legals for nine years? What did they do, round up every poor but legal Mexican in the entire state?

To use the excuse that the City just noticed that Staffing 2000 is not on the list of state-approved contractors is just plain nonsense. We all know what's going on here.