Oh, Halliburton
Chris Kromm reports that Agents detained about 100 illegal immigrants working for a Halliburton subcontractor hired to do Hurricane Katrina recovery work. I would think that if the administration wanted us to believe DHS claims of deporting illegal immigrants, this would be a good pace to start.
Update: to be clear (based on comments), yes it is a subcontractor. Still, it is bad news for a company with such close ties to the administration. And it still would be a good idea to start cleaning up entities violating illegal immigrant laws regardless of how many degrees of separation there are.
October 22nd, 2005 at 10:23 am
Note that it wasn’t Halliburton that hired the illegals, it was the subcontractor – so why the headline, “Halliburton caught”? And why isn’t the subcontractor even named in the story?
October 22nd, 2005 at 10:49 am
If you follow the links back to the story, you’ll see that, in fact, the sub was listed:
The Birmingham, Ala.-based subcontractor, BE&K, was awarded the work by Houston-based Halliburton. Immigration officials would not confirm or deny that illegal workers were detained at the Belle Chasse Naval Air Station. A call to BE&K headquarters was not answered.
Would a super of a construction site not be responsible for his subs work? Why wouldn’t the same hold true here?
October 22nd, 2005 at 11:22 pm
Would the super of a construction site be responsible for subcontractors hiring? I very much doubt it. Or do you think you can tell illegal aliens just by looking at them?
October 24th, 2005 at 4:50 pm
I’ve been thumping this drum for a while now. With all the emphasis on border security, it seems to me that the better way to approach illegal immigration is to come down hard on the companies who hire illegal immigrants. In this case, it would mean the firm hired by Halliburton.
If you attack the supply of jobs for illegals, you take away the incentive to come here.
October 24th, 2005 at 5:51 pm
“If you attack the supply of jobs for illegals, you take away the incentive to come here.”
I frimly disbelive that. A life of crime is probably better than a normal life in mexico. Secondly, if you get the companies to fire all of the illeagal’s where are they going to go, what are the going to do? My guess some would find more illeagal work, some would go back home, some woud become criminals.
I am not saying you do not need to enforce the laws but the illeagal problem cannot be handeled by JUST cracking down on the companines, though cracking down on the companies is part of the soultion.
October 24th, 2005 at 11:39 pm
Where we are, we have a lot of Mexican immigrants, many of them undocumented. There is not a serious Mexican crime problem here. They come here because they can find work here. Maybe this isn’t true in LA or somewhere closer to the border, but here, anecdotally, they’re here for the work.
Cracking down on employers wouldn’t eliminate it, but it’s a big part of it.
And what do you do with the illegals who are already here? Same as now, you deport them. But you also punish the people who hired them, something we don’t do nearly enough of.