By D. Cupples | Rudy Giuliani wasn't lying at last week's CNN/YouTube debate, when saying that Mitt Romney was paying illegal aliens for house-related work. Rudi lobbed the accusation of hypocrisy moments after Mitt accused Rudy of having been soft on illegal immigration when he was mayor of New York.
Why would Romney need to hire cheap, illegal labor? He valued his and his wife's assets at $190-$250 million, more than enough to fund his entire presidential campaign. (Houston Chronicle) After the Boston Globe publicized the illegal-worker issue, Romney fired the company responsible. The Globe reports:
"This evening, responding to inquiries from the newspaper, Romney's presidential campaign announced that he had fired the company for failing to comply with federal law.
"'After this same issue arose last year, I gave the company a second chance with very specific conditions. They were instructed to make sure people working for the company were of legal status.... The owner of the company guaranteed us, in very certain terms, that the company would be in total compliance with the law going forward.....'
"At last week's Republican debate in St. Petersburg, Fla., Romney was quick to attack Rudy Giuliani for safeguarding illegal immigrants in New York City.
"Yet early the next morning after the debate, illegal immigrants from Central America were in plain view on the lawn in front of Romney’s salmon-colored mansion in Belmont. Chatting in Spanish, they hustled to rake massive clumps of leaves, dump them in barrels, and clear debris from his tennis court.
"Their boss, Ricardo Saenz of Chelsea, was the same man who for a decade brought illegal immigrants and others to work for Romney, whom he had met through their shared Mormon faith. A year ago, a Globe article revealed that illegal immigrants landscaped Romney’s 2.5-acre property.
"In the past two months, The Globe observed Saenz and his crew at Romney's estate once a week, except during the week of Thanksgiving.... The work was sandwiched in between other jobs elsewhere, on workdays that sometimes lasted 10 to 12 hours." (Boston Globe)
It's interesting that Romney's repeated hiring of (cheap) illegals was enabled by a fellow Mormon. Generally, Mormons tend to respect the "law of the land" and to speak of good treatment for their fellow human beings. Low wages for long days doesn't seem like especially good treatment of the human beings who clean one's tennis courts.
This is not the first time we've seen evidence of a sense of entitlement on Romney's part. In August, when asked why his five military-aged sons weren't fighting in the Iraq war that Romney so vociferously supports, he said that his sons were serving our nation by helping their father's political campaign (USA Today).
See Memeorandum for other bloggers' reactions.
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