Hiring Illegals

I live in Fairfield County Connecticut in an area that is predominantly single family homes. Most of these homes are surrounded by a lawn or some type of garden. While some people mow their own lawn, the majority of the lawns are tended to by some sort of garden service. Over the years, I have had at least ten different companies mow my grass or do landscaping services. I would estimate that nearly half of the workers employed to do this work were Hispanic. Were they illegals? I have no idea. Indeed, there is no way that I could know this since I had no direct dealings with them. I hired their employer, not the individual workers. I could not even identify essentially all of these workers if I met them. For nearly all of them, I had no contact whatsoever with these workers. They showed up at my house for an hour at most and cut the grass outside and then left. Even if I was home at the time, which was not often the case, I usually did not even know that they were here.

My experience with these people who mowed my lawn seems much like that which Mitt Romney described in last night's debate. He did not hire illegals; he deal with a garden service that in turn hired workers who may have been illegal. Nevertheless, Rick Perry said that this act of hiring the company "disqualified" Romney from speaking about illegal immigration. Romney was a "hypocrite" on the subject in Perry's description.

As I thought about Perry's attack, I decided that this was truly a desperation move by Perry. He has been sinking in the polls and needed to do something to regain some momentum. This illegal immigration focus for his attack also helps restore some of Perry's lost luster on the subject that resulted from his position on in state tuition for illegals and his claim that those who opposed such a handout have no heart. Sadly, I think that the attack signals the beginning of the end of the Perry candidacy. Americans on the whole are neither stupid nor unfair. Most people understand how Mitt Romney could have had illegals working on his lawn on an occasion or two without ever knowing about it. Perry's attack was a low blow that assumes that his listeners are too dumb to realize the unfairness of Perry's point. The truth is that the attack said much more about problems with Rick Perry than it ever could about Romney's fitness for office.