Immigrants? Check the barn
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION is shaping up as a crucial issue in the campaign for governor, and it's about time.
Some say our immigration problems really require a comprehensive national solution, but, personally, I can't imagine deciding my gubernatorial vote on any other matter.
After all, perched as we are here on the Mexican border, the effects are impossible to ignore.
Who among us hasn't heard the horses neighing uneasily in the night, and, grabbing his Winchester and striding to the barn, spotted a shadowy figure exiting the hayloft?
Who, pausing to roll a smoke after the day's chores are finally done, hasn't looked out across the sage to see a virtual village of Mexicans swimming the Rio Grande? Who hasn't noticed a calf missing from the corral -- and later found the bones of the poor beast near the ashes of a clandestine campfire out on the back 40?
A would-be cattle rancher, Governor Mitt Romney clearly understands our problems, even if the vegetarians hereabouts don't. Thus he's seeking federal authority to let the State Police arrest immigrants for being in the country illegally. I, for one, am grateful he's come in off the trail to work on that.
Still, we need to get much tougher if we're to build on our momentum.
After years as an overcrowded boomtown, the Boston area is finally seeing a salubrious outflow of people. Since there's little more beneficial to regional economic health than reinforcing a national impression that we're becoming one of those historical ghost towns so popular with the tour buses, the governor could do even more to scare people off.
Here's one idea: He could take a remote harbor island and set up a detention center for the illegal immigrants he's apprehended. We could call it . . . Mittmo.
Among the gubernatorial candidates, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey also deserves kudos. Healey, who previously took a courageous stand against the quick-fingered, undocumented kids who keep trying to pilfer in-state tuition from our state colleges, has chastised Attorney General Thomas Reilly for not cracking down on firms that hire undocumented workers.
She's hardly the only gubernatorial hopeful to rise to the occasion after the Globe reported that contractors on some state-funded projects are hiring workers who are probably here illegally. On Tuesday, Democrat Chris Gabrieli declared that the attorney general should be doing more to go after those companies. He himself would come up with ``creative ideas" to do so, Gabrieli said.
Creative ideas! Why, of course. Why couldn't poor plodding old Tom have thought of that?
As for Reilly, he says that it's up to the federal government to pursue firms that employ undocumented immigrants, and that trying to prosecute businesses for hiring them would be counterproductive for his office, given that he needs the cooperation of those same workers to enforce wage and hour laws.
Reilly has already been scolded locally for that stand. Still, he remains so stubbornly clueless about his responsibilities as attorney general that I want to invite a few outsiders in to set him straight.
Let's start with Jim Tierney, who served as Maine's attorney general for 10 years, and who now directs the National State Attorneys General Program at Columbia Law School.
``I know of no attorney general who prosecutes businesses specifically for the hiring of undocumented workers. . . To the contrary, most AGs who do work in this area follow what Tom Reilly is doing."
Um, scratch that. Actually, let's hear from Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell, immediate past president of the National Association of Attorneys General.
``It is fair to say that most issues as they relate to immigrants are basically matters of federal statute, and the US attorneys or the Department of Justice handles those matters. . . We don't actively pursue those cases. We leave it to the federal authorities to take action under federal law."
Well, who cares about a state with more cows than people? Let's turn to populous New York.
``Our policy is not to ask the immigration status of a worker," says Juanita Scarlett, spokeswoman for Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. ``Under the 1986 federal Immigration Reform and Control Act, states were pre-empted from pursuing these cases."
You know, with answers like those, I'm sorry I even asked.
Actually, it doesn't matter at all what informed outsiders say. This isn't about facts or fairness or perspective, anyway.
After all, what campaign is?
Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com. 