“We will prosecute those who violate the law,” promised California Attorney General Xavier Becerra on Thursday, threatening to fine employers, public or private, who voluntarily give information on employees, concerning their legal status to be in the country.
Becerra sternly warned anyone who runs a business in California that they will be fined up to $10,000 if they dare to assist federal immigration authorities. He was responding to remarks made by Thomas Homan, acting director of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to Fox News earlier this month, in which Homan said a crack-down on illegal immigration in the Golden State was on its way.
“California better hold on tight,” Homan warned. “If the politicians in California don’t want to protect their communities, then ICE will.”
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Homan was responding to a new law in California that is designed to ensure that illegal aliens be allowed to stay in the state. The law, the “Immigration Worker Protection Act,” was signed by Governor Jerry Brown last year, and took effect on January 1 of this year. The bill, authored by David Chiu, a state assemblyman from San Francisco, requires employers to ask federal immigration agents for a warrant before granting access to a worksite. The law makes California an official “sanctuary state” for illegal aliens.
Other provisions of the law are designed to prevent employers, public or private, from voluntarily sharing confidential employee information without a subpoena; requires employers to notify their workers before a federal audit of employee records; gives the attorney general and labor commissioner exclusive authority to enforce new provisions of state labor laws; and prohibits employers from re-verifying information on employment verification forms, unless compelled to by federal law.
Speaking at a press conference, Becerra made it clear that he sees the law-breakers as those who want to end illegal immigration, not those who want to continue it. “It’s important, given these rumors that are out there, to let people know — more specifically today, employers — that if they voluntarily start giving up information about their employees or access to their employees in ways that contradict our new California laws, they subject themselves to actions by my office.”
All of the public officials responsible for the passage of the law and its enforcement, including the bill’s author, Chiu, the governor, the attorney general, the state’s labor commissioner, are Democrats. And since the overwhelming majority of immigrants in California only add to the Democratic Party’s hegemony, it is not surprising that the Democrats favor a steady influx of would-be Democrat voters. Both U.S. senators and most of the state’s legislative body (80 of 120) are Democrats. Except for Hollywood celebrity Arnold Schwarzenegger, a liberal, Republicans have not elected a governor since the ’90s, and a Republican has not carried the state in a presidential race since 1988. In fact, none has come closer than George W. Bush in 2004, who still lost the state by 10 percentage points.
This obvious motivation to continue to flood the state with Democrat-leaning immigrants is yet another example of why a movement is growing in California to split the state into at least two states, with many of the rural interior counties breaking off to form the state of New California.
“The current state of California has become governed by a tyranny,” said a leader in the New California movement, Robert Paul Preston, last week. Preston added that the Republican Party is almost “entirely irrelevant in California.”
The actions of the present government of California with this law designed to increase the numbers of illegal aliens in the state is a powerful example of the wisdom of maintaining the electoral college system of electing the president. If presidents were chosen purely by the popular vote, then adding even more voters to the voter rolls designed to advance the Big Government agenda of the California Democratic Party would have even more effect on the rest of the country. But with the Electoral College system, there is less incentive to add an increasing number of voters through illegal immigration than there would be if the president were chosen strictly through popular vote.
It would appear that California is inhibiting the federal government from carrying out its duties under the U.S. Constitution. In Article I, Section 8, Congress is delegated the enumerated power “to establish an uniform rule of naturalization.” While we should rightly decry the federal government overstepping its bounds under the Constitution, this would appear to be an area that the states actually wanted the federal government to take charge of. Additionally, in Article IV, Section 4, Congress is charged with the duty to “protect each of them [the states] from invasion.”
What we have going on in this country is an “invasion,” and California is doing its best to help that invasion continue, rather than stop it.
Image: Clipart.com
