Paging David Price
One of the outcomes of the recent changeover in control of the House of Representatives is that Fourth District U.S. Congressman David Price (D-Chapel Hill) now holds the purse strings for the Department of Homeland Security. Well, sort of.
Price is the chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee that oversees the DHS budget. DHS is a behemoth of a federal agency and includes a diverse group of agencies and missions — everything from immigration enforcement to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The department’s main role is to keep us safer.
That’s an expensive undertaking, of course, and to make sure the Democrats would keep flowing the funds his way, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff made a point of visiting Price late last year after the elections.
So, we’d like to ask the congressman to ask his new acquaintance why in the world the feds feel compelled to start up an immigration crackdown while there’s a war on, money’s tight, resources are thin and FEMA’s a shambles. Surely, DHS energies are better spent doing something other than strong-arming employers and disrupting the lives of people who are working for a living.
Politics seems to be the only reason why an administration in the twilight of years and down in the polls would choose to take out its frustrations in not passing an immigration reform bill on working families.
But DHS is warning of stronger enforcement in verifying Social Security numbers and promises to lean on employers who fail to follow up after being notified of number discrepancies. While that’s likely to trip up a good number of people who have gotten by on fake numbers, it’s also going to ensnare anyone with a typo or a mistake in their paperwork.
The effect on the economy, especially here in North Carolina, where many industries depend on immigrant labor — legal and otherwise — could be profound.
You may recall the winter following 9/11 when a similar but less-intense crackdown than the one promised resulted in hundreds of grocery store workers and others in this area losing their jobs.
The result was not a slow exodus to the border, but just more people driven deeper into the underground economy to put food on their tables. Many immigrant families are a mix of green card holders, native-born U.S. citizens and the undocumented.
How breaking these families apart, disrupting workplaces and spreading fear in our communities and disarray in the economy makes us safer is beyond us.
We hope the congressman will put a call into Secretary Chertoff and remind him of the varied and nuanced definitions of the word security.