One of the groups advocating for mass amnesty, including the grotesque Senate-passed S.744, is a labor union front group called the Restaurant Opportunities Center. ROC is pursuing loopholes in Obamacare to give taxpayer-funded health care to illegal aliens.
ROC, it turns out, deserves special opprobrium for not only advocating on behalf of illegal aliens, but for employing a prominent one, apparently knowingly. Making ROC even more detestable, ROC collects federal funds, which essentially frees up its own bucks for its offices in Washington and elsewhere. More on the federal dole later.
The illegal alien until-recently ROC employee is Claudia Munoz. She has served as Lead Coordinator at the ROC Houston "local" and started out in the New Orleans office. Munoz joined an immigration pressure group and was arrested in Michigan this spring. She took pains to precipitate her arrest. Munoz made a U-turn on the Ambassador Bridge!
The cofounder of ROC, Saru Jayaraman, features Munoz in her book, Behind the Kitchen Door. Jayaraman details how Munoz, a "DREAMer" who finished high school and attended college in Texas, got a job in a restaurant. It's presented as a one-sided sympathy tale, by design. The exploitative restaurant manager comes across as cartoonish, like Snidely Whiplash in the old Bullwinkle cartoon tying the poor damsel to the railroad tracks.
It's hard to believe Jayaraman, whose book recounts her interviewing and hiring Munoz, did not know that Munoz was an illegal alien when she was hired. Jayaraman certainly ascertained this fact while Munoz still worked for ROC. After all, her immigration status was discussed in this book, which came out while Munoz was apparently still with ROC. And Jayaraman isn't keen on helping legal workers have a shot in job competition against illegals. The union has characterized the E-Verify system as "inhumane".
Back to fattening its wallet with taxpayer monies: ROC recently received $200,000 of a federal grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's ostensibly to promote healthier food options for restaurant workers. But it smells like a legitimizing excuse to get on premises, organize restaurant employees, and actuate them on the front group's political agenda, which includes advocating wholesale amnesty and the neutering of enforcement.
ROC advocates amnesty, throwing working Americans under the economic bus. A century ago, unions spoke up against mass immigration. They understood that artificially flooding the labor pool through immigration depresses wages and lowers working conditions, thus hurting the earnings and livelihood of working Americans. You know, supply and demand. Increased supply, weaker demand. Less plentiful supply, greater demand (which translates into a higher price — wages — for the scarcer thing, in this case workers). Remember Booker T. Washington's plea to employers to "cast down your buckets where you are?" Or farm labor organizer Cesar Chavez, who opposed illegal immigrants precisely because it hurt the very people he sought to help, farm workers. Along the way, Big Labor sold out the American workforce and put all its chips on cheap foreign labor, even the illegal variety.
ROC is rather rotten, as well as misleading. After all, most restaurant owners want to do the right thing for their customers and employees. Most seek to be law-abiding and want a legal workforce. And despite ROC's bluster, most restaurants aren't raking it in. Most only make a 2 percent to 4 percent profit. Those are pretty thin margins. Who's it really serving for ROC to mount a high horse to tout amnesty? Clearly not the low-skilled American worker, who deserves the dignity of a job, the more attractive wages and benefits set by a tighter but enterprise-based labor market, and freedom from unfair job competition from millions of foreign lawbreakers.
