$1.5 Million Golf Clubs Paid For By Illegal Serfs

Gordon Smith, a man who has proven his truthfulness with lying political advertisements, may have a bigger lie to defend. That lie would have to do with how it is he makes his millions of dollars to buy golf clubs and mansions and exotic Senate office furnishing with.

Willamette Week went over to Weston, Oregon to take a look at Smith Frozen Foods and - oooh, big surprise - found out that most everyone knows they hire illegally. They pay real crappy also, you can do that and make millions if you've got an illegal source of labor - I've said it before - the new serfs. Minimum wage to process food, irregular work, and apparently draconian employment policies all can follow hand in glove if you have an easily repressed work force. It is real tough to make the case that these jobs are being taken away from Americans, the wages and conditions are way too shoddy to garner much interest. From that point you might start to ask questions - like why are the wages and conditions too crummy?

On Aug. 14, Smith told WW: “We need to support legal immigration and not incentivize illegal immigration.” A year earlier he told KXL’s Lars Larson his company goes “the extra mile” to make sure it doesn’t hire any illegal immigrants.

Yup. Obviously working at Smith's plant is a real incentive for legal immigrants - everybody wants to work for peanuts and get treated badly - while they make a smarmy haircut millions. You may have heard of E-verify, a voluntary program that allows businesses to check that Social Security numbers match the person,

A spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement defended the free, voluntary program. “If an employer uses E-verify and they encounter errors, there are steps in place to address that,” says ICE spokeswoman Lorie Dankers. A representative for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services added that E-verify results in errors less than 1 percent of the time.

But Smith wasn't pleased with it, they didn't like it,

Smith Frozen Foods chooses not to use this program. “We tried it in the past, and we were not very happy with it,” Brown says of E-verify, which is used by 80,000 companies in the United States. “It doesn’t work very well.”

Well it certainly would be inconvenient to the practice of hiring illegally. It would sort of dry up that piece of the labor market - unless you were willing to blatantly hire illegally. Legally you can deny a certain amount of responsibility for illegal hiring but there are limits to it, not sufficient limits, but they exist. You are supposed to photocopy documents used for employment verification -

According to a May 23, 1988, memo from the U.S. Department of Justice obtained by WW, Bob Cortinas, who was then Smith’s personnel director, told federal investigators he was instructed by Smith’s legal department not to photocopy workers’ documents “so that it would make it harder for [immigration officials] to find errors.”

But, but...

He is a U.S. senator who voted against granting amnesty to the millions of illegal immigrants currently living in the United States.

You have to remember that there is little incentive for the plutocrats to hire legally when they have access to a labor pool that they can exploit. Wages in E OR are below the State's median income, it certainly doesn't help when a US Senator is doing his level best to get rich off the backs of people he can exploit while he does favors for other plutocrats. I think maybe it is time that Gordon got a break from the rigors of Congressional duty and took some care of his business, like before he winds up charged with a crime. He is aware that it is criminal behavior.

What a punk.