Opinion

Beware the gift horse

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Related stories:

• Many, many thanks (January 21, 2008)
• Beware the morning after (September 30, 2003)
• Deficit gift (December 14, 2004)
• The Valentine's Day gift hunt (February 12, 2003)
• 'Tis the season to cheat consumers? (November 26, 2007)

Also by Rob Deters:

• SUVs and Earth Day do not mix (April 24, 2003)
• Senate Republicans: be wary of 'nuclear option' (April 13, 2005)
• Strange allies for environmentalism (April 20, 2005)
• Reflections on 'real world' (April 27, 2005)

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Welcome back to another semester of political sniping, ideological warfare and the never-ending battle for your hearts and minds. I hope you all had a great holiday season and, no matter what holiday you had to endure with the family, that you came back intact, perhaps a few pounds heavier and perhaps with a few gifts in tow.

Speaking of gifts, whenever our president is in a giving mood, I start to get suspicious. When Bush tells you he’s “giving” you a tax break that will pay for a DVD player and a night out on the town with your buddies, he really means that he’s going to have to raise your taxes obscenely in the long run to pay for the cut he gave his super-rich buddies. That’s the gift that keeps on giving!

As the budget deficit continues to spiral into “Monty Python”-like levels of absurdity, we all ought to be looking out for these sorts of gifts.

Or how about the gift of war? Our president has conjured up the notion of pre-emptive war (this is known as unlawful aggression in practically all other parts of the globe) and is giving it to us as a gift.

Feeling like the war on terror is getting a little slow? Gin up some shaky facts about weapons of mass destruction, and let’s invade Iraq!

Two devastating reports, one by the Washington Post and the other by the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, have recently torn the Bush administration’s claim of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to shreds.

In fact, it seems like Bush might actually believe them, because he’s removed the 400-person team that was in Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction. Why? They can’t find any!

In the too-good-to-be-true department, Bush has decided to extend legal status to illegal workers in the country. Now here’s a gift horse worth a big old look in the mouth.

(As an aside, why was it impolite to look a gift horse in the mouth? Well, assuming you were some broke-ass peasant who received a horse as a gift, you might be rightly suspicious that there was something wrong with it. If you checked out its gums and looked for signs of disease or infirmity, you were insulting the gift giver. On the other hand, who wants a poxy horse?)

In the case of extending a six-year work permit to illegal workers, what exactly do you, the undocumented worker, get out of the situation?

Well, you do get guaranteed to be paid minimum wage, conceivably you can pursue a law suit against your employer for discrimination or poor treatment more easily than if you are illegally working and you might qualify for some government assistance. On the other hand, you may have to pay a fine to the government for working illegally, you get put on the INS rolls as an illegal worker and you get no preference in applying for a green card. In other words, you become a marked serf serving out your time in the bottom of the barrel of the service industry until forcibly removed back across our borders to wherever you came from.

Do I sound cynical? I don’t want to, but in the case of Bush and Karl Rove, I can’t see this as anything but a ploy. It will look like Bush cares about Hispanics (who are mainly the target of this law, but any immigrant population will presumably benefit), but in reality he cares about Wal-Mart.

Remember this fall when Wal-Mart got busted with numerous fines for using undocumented workers in its shops as cleaning crews? Those workers were mainly Eastern European, as if that mattered, but the point is businesses use undocumented workers to clean, perform basic maintenance and work in dangerous and disgusting jobs: jobs Americans don’t want, as big business will tell you. Now Wal-Mart, the hotel industry, poultry processing plants, large-scale farms, anywhere there is an aggregation of illegal workers — they will be able to make them all sign a form and, voila! Their worker-exploitation days are over.

If I could ever believe that Bush actually had this country’s best interests in mind, I might think he’s giving the gift of legality to a generally ignored population. On the other hand, this idea doesn’t seem likely to have the legs to get out of the House or Senate. In that case, Bush will get to claim he tried to help the underprivileged, but those liberals just won’t stop keeping the poor man down.

It’s a win-win situation whether or not the bill gets passed, just the sort of empty gesture our president is so good at.

All this giving has made me feel like I need to get on ball and do some giving myself. So I promise, all this semester, I’m going to give the president one hell of a hard time.

Rob Deters (rvdeters@wisc.edu) is a second-year law student.