Endless effort to describe illegal aliens as “immigrants”
The leftist AJC put out a story this week on the retirement of Karen Bremer, president and CEO of the Georgia Restaurant Association and managed to omit an important component of Bremer’s agenda while misleading (yet again) readers on “immigrants” and immigration law. So..not much new here.
You can read it for yourself on the bottom but the part I refer to is midway through the piece in which the reporter, Yvonne Zusel and/or her editors describes Bremmer’s “restaurant advocacy” and “a federal worker visa program and a path to citizenship for immigrants who had been in the country for a long time.”
Here I need to interject my own knowledge of that advocacy. Karen Bremer led the business lobby’s anti-enforcement charge in 2011 against passage of HB 87 because of the obvious effects it would have on blackmarket labor that her industry uses.
I’ll stop here for any doubters and offer up a quote from the 2010 version of the New York Times with a quote from “a Manhattan chef and restaurateur who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he does not want to draw attention to his TriBeCa restaurant.
“Out of a total of about 12.7 million workers in the restaurant industry, an estimated 1.4 million both legal and illegal immigrants are foreign born, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to 2008 estimates from the Pew Hispanic Center, about 20 percent of the nearly 2.6 million chefs, head cooks and cooks are illegal immigrants. Among the 360,000 dishwashers, 28 percent are undocumented, according to the estimates.
Those numbers sounded low to a Manhattan chef and restaurateur who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he does not want to draw attention to his TriBeCa restaurant.
“We always, always hire the undocumented workers,” he said. “It’s not just me, it’s everybody in the industry. First, they are willing to do the work. Second, they are willing to learn. Third, they are not paid as well. It’s an economic decision. It’s less expensive to hire an undocumented person.”
You can read that entire NY Times report at “Immigration Crackdown Steps Into the Kitchen.”
Back to Bremer and the the subtle but constant misdirection in the AJC agenda. Bremmer was determined to stop HB 87, the”Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act of 2011” largely because of the E-Verify requirement for private employers component. Our goal was to make Georgia as inhospitable to illegal employenmtj as possible. The bill eventually passed with a mandate that private employers with more than ten employees must swear they are using E-Verify. That would be the no cost, online, federal database that verifies work eligibility of newly hired employees.
Bremer and her accomplices at the Georgia Chamber of Commerce concocted and distributed objections to the bill that included the goop that it would somehow cost E-Verify users $128.00 per employee to use.They sent out a letter to GRA members begging for action aimed at killing the bill – or at least removal of the E-Verify component. They failed. We archived that letter here.
But that is not what the AJC reported. According to the AJC editors, Bremer had “…dabbled in restaurant advocacy years earlier as part of the Georgia Hospitality and Travel Association, and also had worked in the early 2000s on pushing for a federal worker visa program and a path to citizenship for immigrants who had been in the country for a long time.”
On the “pushing for a federal visa program” point, the fact is that the U.S. has multiple guest worker visa programs in place.
On the latter reference the AJC makes it appear that “immigrants” don’t already have a path to citizenship. They do. The truth is that legal immigrants (green card holders -aka – LPRs) can become U.S. citizens after they have lived in the U.S. for five years. General eligibility points here from the feds. We suspect Bremer was pushing for one of the many failed congressional amnesty schemes ( my own absolute favorite here) that would have put millions of illegal aliens in a legalized condition that allowed them to have the same privilege.
- Related: See here and here for just two examples of the countless times the AJC editors have pulled the shameless “illegal aliens are immigrants” switcheroo on readers.
Read it yourself:
The Atlanta Journal Constitution, September, 24, 2023
Retiring Georgia Restaurant Association chief optimistic about industry’s future – here.
