Mitt Romney’s “Self Deportation Plan” Starts to Work at Pomona College

Mitt Must Feel Great, A Win in Florida and A Group of  People Losing Their Jobs

That's Okay, These are not Mitt's Kind of People

One of the ways in which Presidential candidate Mitt Romney is pandering to the Conservatives is taking a very unyielding stand on illegal immigration.  Mr. Romney opposes any consideration of allowing any illegal immigrants to stay, even if they were brought to this country at a very young age by their parents, and even if they have been model and productive citizens.

Mr. Romney admits that as much as he would like to do so, it is impossible to round up 11 million or so people, put them in concentration camps for a while and then deport them to countries, in many cases countries the people have no memory of nor any ties to.  So Mr. Romney proposes what he calls “self deportation”.  He would deny these people the ability to earn a living, to have even a menial job and to have access to any benefits.  By impoverishing them to the point of starvation he would cause them to leave the country, hence the “self deportation”.

A look at how this process would take place is illustrated in a recent article about employees at Pomona College in California.  There the college decided to examine the documentation of its employees, and guess what they found.

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Christian Torres lost his job as a food service

 worker at Pomona College, generally considered

 to be a liberal institution, after the school asked

 dozens of longtime workers to show

 proof of United States' residency.

By the time the investigation was complete, the law firm had identified deficiencies in the files of 84 employees, including dining hall and maintenance workers as well as professors and students working for the college. Each employee received the same letter asking for documents to re-verify their work status. Of the 17 employees who ultimately lost their job, 16 were dining hall workers.

Who were these master criminals, people who had willfully flouted U. S. law by not being able to document their residency, people who in the minds of Conservatives are the same as rapists, murderers and thieves.  Here is one of them.

Carmen, 30, who asked that her last name not be used for fear of alerting immigration officials. Carmen had worked at the college for 11 years, using the money she earned to put herself through a public college. But she never looked for another job, fearing that she would not be able to produce the proper documents. For years she made about $8 an hour, but in recent years raises had increased her wages to nearly $17 an hour. She and her husband bought a modest home in nearby Pomona this fall and moved in just two weeks before she was fired.

Boy, there is somebody we really don’t want in this country. Imagaine how Mr. Romney must feel, having people in this country going to work every day and earning in one year less than what Mr. Romney makes in one day.  How dare they even think about living in the same country that he does!  And what are Carmen’s prospects for the future?

“I really don’t know what I am going to do,” she said, adding that her options were to look for work that paid in cash or move back to Mexico with her 2-year-old son while her husband, an American citizen, stayed here. “I’m still in shock. This is the only thing I’ve really ever known.”

And in case anyone was wondering, yes there is another aspect to the purge of food service workers.  It seems they were considering forming a union.

For the last two years, many of the dining hall workers had been organizing to form a union, but the efforts stalled amid negotiations with the administration. Many on campus believe that the administration began looking into the employees’ work authorization as a way to thwart the union effort, an accusation the college president, David Oxtoby, has repeatedly denied. But that has done little to quell questions and anger among the fired workers and many who support their efforts to unionize.

Of course that motivation is denied by the college president

The idea that the college had mounted the effort to stop the union drive was the opposite of the truth, he said. “We’ve been trying to improve the relationship with workers for some time, and this has been a big setback,” Mr. Oxtoby said. “Rationally, it would have not made strategic sense.”

Yeah, just pure coincidence that 16 out of 17 workers fired were those trying to form a union. That should hellp Mr. Oxtoby towards his goal of  improving relations.  He can explain all of this is just a coincidence, happens all the time.