Tribune: Day Labor Center Isn’t Working.

July 24, 2008

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The Portland Tribune reports (here) that the P.I.N.K.O. Detention Center doesn’t, ah, work.
For a primer on what’s going on here, please read on:

The day labor center is illegal. How exactly? Here and here.


The day labor was sold as a way to collect illegal aliens and detain them in one spot to allow the city and its proxies to match them to jobs. Think e-harmony for illegal aliens. It was sold as a humanitarian gesture; as a way to give these poor folks a job who couldn’t possibly find one without the city’s help. Now what do we have? An experiment costing taxpayers $200K –just to start–which breaks federal law, encourages, aids and abets ID theft, allows employers to break the law by hiring illegal aliens, and STILL we have DOZENS of illegal aliens on the street corners as before. It’s an abysmal failure by any measure.

If those folks at the day labor center are legal citizens, then they can go find a job at any one of the DOZENS of employment/temp firms WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE of the day labor center. But instead of encouraging legal behavior, the city has set up a temp business to compete with LEGAL BUSINESSES.

We know the day labor center has been sold as a way for Portland to help find these folks find jobs who are supposedly incapable of finding them. Incapable? Anybody who was able to get up the money to get themselves smuggled into the United States, found a way to get to Oregon, found the forger to get fake ID, found an apartment, and found a job, doesn’t need the pantywaists at the city and their proxies to find them a job.

As much as I have sympathy and appreciation for people who want to work, in this case, upholding the law is more important. Mayor Moonbeam and the Rainbow City Council should not put the city’s imprimatur on this illegal indulgence.

Tell ’em where you saw it. Http://www.victoriataft.com