It looks like Bob Schaffer just handed Democrat Mark Udall and the DSCC an explosive issue to clobber him with in the Colorado Senate race this year. Reflecting on the issue of immigration, Schaffer told the Denver Post that he’s got a solution for the hot-button issue:
He pointed to the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. protectorate that imports tens of thousands of foreign textile workers, as a successful model for a guest-worker program that could be adapted nationally.
“The concept of prequalifying foreign workers in their home country under private- sector management is a system that works very well in one place in America,” he said of the islands’ program. “I think members of Congress ought to be looking at that model and be considering it as a possible basis for a nationwide program.”
If the workplace conditions of Northern Marianas are Bob Schaffer’s ideal model for a foreign worker program in the United States, we should all be very, very afraid. TPM Muckraker has a good backgrounder on the Northern Marianas (who retained the infamous Jack Abramoff as their chief lobbyist) here:
During the 1990s, Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-AK) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA) were frequent critics of the sweatshop conditions used in factories in the Marianas that made clothes with the “Made in the USA” label for companies like Tommy Hilfiger USA, Gap, Calvin Klein and Liz Claiborne. In 1992, the Department of Labor sued five garment factories owned by Willie Tan and eventually fined the Tan companies $9 million — the largest fine they had ever imposed.
American officials and human rights advocates testified before congress that workers, 91 percent of whom were immigrants from China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, were working below the CMNI minimum wage ($3.05), often seven days a week and up to 12 hours a day, and living in shacks behind barbed wire and without plumbing. Many workers also paid $5,000 to $7,000 in “recruitment fees” to gain employment, often with money borrowed from loan sharks who took all of their wages until the fees were paid back.
Are those the kinds of conditions that Schaffer wants to replicate on a “nationwide” level? How about the forced abortions and sex slavery that many of the Islands’ immigrant workers are subject to?
The political stupidity of Bob Schaffer is mind-boggling. Beyond mind-boggling.
(Big hat-tip to ColoradoPols for the scoop.)
Bob Schaffer:
MADE IN THE USA!
The notorious Abramoff junkets to CNMI, that featured DeLay and I think both Doolittle and Pombo, and a rogue’s gallery of others.
1) Obviously the trip worked. He was “fooled” into thinking that CNMI was an immigration paradise.
2) Therefore it is right and just that he’d be screwed by this in 08. He’s making this particular error because he really is a conservative moron. Good. That’s the best kind of political error: the kind your flawed ideology actually leads you to make (as opposed to something random, like Sue Kelly’s friendship with Mark Foley). If he fails because he thinks the Tan Family Enterprises are A-OK, then he’ll richly, deeply deserve it.
3) I hate seeing politics settled on grounds that are frivolous or not truly relevant. Sham issues and sham controversies annoy the hell out of me. George Allen’s racism, Conrad Burns’ corruption, and Bob Schaffer’s systematic failure, on the other hand, make me glow inside (or rather, the fact that they lost directly because of those things makes me glow).
Of course, Schaffer hasn’t lost yet. But I’ll be very interested to see what kind of role this incident plays in the campaign.