Laboring over day laborers

Local businesses “complain bitterly” about day laborers congregating outside valley nurseries and home improvement stores and along the ever-popular stretch of Bonanza Road just east of Rancho Drive, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said Thursday.

The men — since most seek unskilled work and demonstrate limited English skills, it does not take a degree in rocket science to conclude many are in the country illegally — wait for potential employers to drive by and offer them short-term employment.

“They defecate, they urinate” in the areas where they gather, the mayor said at his weekly news conference. “It’s not nice what’s happening out there. They intimidate people who are customers at locations, thrust themselves on them.”

Attempts to target such day laborers with new loitering laws have been ruled unconstitutional in other jurisdictions, the mayor said, in obvious frustration.

So the city staff is working on a plan to require employers who wish to pick up such workers to apply for a permit, available for a nominal $5.

Those applying for the permits could be handed information on job safety and the requirement to pay Social Security taxes, the mayor said. In addition, the fee could protect workers, who on occasion have gone unpaid or have even been robbed, he said.

Does the law really require employers to behave as though a “Social Security card” purchased for $45 at the Fantastik Indoor Swap Meet creates a legitimate tax obligation? We defer to our brethren of the bar, who sometimes do seem capable of believing six impossible things before breakfast.

But meantime, isn’t it illegal to hire such people if they’re in the country illegally? Hasn’t the mayor just proposed that the city “license” an illegal act?

What next? If the city will go to court seeking back wages on behalf of illegal aliens who claim they haven’t been paid by a “permit holder,” shouldn’t pot smokers be able to buy $5 permits so city licensing authorities can go to court on their behalf if a dope dealer rips them off?

In fact, it appears the city hopes no one will apply for these permits, at all. The idea is to reduce the trade in question by hoping those tempted to hire such workers will be scared off by the threat of being cited for not having a $5 permit, the mayor explains.

Needless to say, supporters of illegal immigration were quick to criticize the mayor’s plan, not for its likely ineffectiveness, but for being … too harsh!

“This is ridiculous, right up there with chopping people’s thumbs off,” exclaimed Vicenta Montoya, a local immigration lawyer, who suggests that if there are problems with people urinating and defecating in the streets and gutters, portable toilets should be provided.

At taxpayer expense, presumably.

The city already has ordinances against loitering, vagrancy and public urination and defecation. Police have full authority to enforce these laws.

More to the point, a federal agency — funded by taxpayers to the tune of almost $15 billion — already exists to deal with the underlying problem.

According to the Web site of the U.S. Office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — an agency with tens of thousands of employees and an annual budget approaching $15 billion — that agency’s Office of Detention and Removal Operations “is responsible for public safety and national security by ensuring the departure from the United States of all removable aliens through the fair enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws.”

Mayor Goodman should invite the news media along as his law enforcement officers round up a batch of day laborers, apply some objective screening standards to identify those most reasonable to suspect of being in this country illegally, and haul them out to the Immigration and Customs office at McCarran Airport.