Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Posted by:
Michael Medved
at
2:50 AM
Within hours of his triumphant and historic speech on religion and politics, Mitt Romney faced a shabby embarrassment closer to home. The Boston Glone discovered that the landscape company he employed to take care of his lawn still hired illegal aliens to provide that service – some three months after Romney had promised publicly to deal with the problem. The former Massachusetts governor is right that he shouldn’t be expected to check personally on the papers of his hired gardeners. But the fact is that Romney, like other immigration hard-liners, has called for a massive crackdown, even criminal penalties, for all businesses that hire illegals. If he’s serious about that, why would he keep the same landscape company for months after he first learned they had a problem with undocumented workers? The deeper question for Romney – and the rest of us – is whether we really want to divert limited law enforcement resources to pursuing and busting companies that provide services that even presidential candidates, apparently, find indispensable? If we do, we’ll have to reassign police and prosecutors from going after violent criminals to going after lawn care businesses—or else we’ll need a massive expansion of law enforcement and a big growth of government.