Illegal Alien Employer Capitulates - Most Important Victory Since Proposition 187

I said [1]yesterday [2] to watch this space and the Yakima Herald-Republic for news of the Zirkle Fruit illegal immigration class action. And today Leah Beth Ward has proved me right. In "Zirkle settles job suit [3]" (December 30 2005), she breaks the news that Zirkle has capitulated on the eve of trial, paying $1.3 million that will be distributed to 20,000 legally-resident workers (actually court documents suggest it will be 5,000 at the most)...and, vitally, to their lawyers.

This is the most important victory for immigration reform since California's Proposition 187 in 1994. Zirkle's legal workers will get about an additional dollar for every hour they worked, compensation for the wage depression [4]caused by competition from illegal aliens. The plaintiff lawyers, notably the heroic Chicago-based Howard Foster [5], who has made a number of appearances [6] in VDARE .com [7], will get a third or more of the total award in contingent fees and expenses.

The result: blood in the water that will attract the attention of America's shark-like plaintiff bar to the employers of illegal aliens. The Zirkle case is small, but the precedent it sets is huge. And Ed Rubenstein has shown [8] that, while illegal aliens are not the pillar of the economy that is sometimes claimed, they may receive as much as one percent of GDP in wages - over $100 billion. If that came out of American workers' pockets, putting it back could earn trial lawyers over $30 billion in contingent fees and expenses.

Ironically, I won one of my very few MSM journalism prizes, along with my co-author Leslie Spencer, for a 1989 expose [9]in Forbes magazine of the trial lawyers' formidable power. (They are what really created Ralph Nader [10], for example).

I am delighted to see this bunch of thugs and bandits descend on the corporate crooks who employ illegals aliens at the expense of Americans. I think they deserve each other.

As Winston Churchill said [11] at the height of World War II, "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."