Why Won't the Feds Arrest Millions of U.S. Citizens, Too?

Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby in Illegal immigrants are here to stay, lays bare for all to see that the current immigrant worker witch hunt is fueled more by racism rather than a quest to uphold the law--as so many anti-immigrants love to claim.

If the witch hunts were really about enforcing the law, wouldn't the authorities also arrest and imprison the millions of U.S. citizens that break the law each and everyday when they employ undocumented workers? And wouldn't a real effort in this regard cause the immigrant worker supply to dry up overnight?

But this is not what is happening. Why not?

My take is that it doesn't happen because the U.S. citizens breaking the law are white. They break the law but only the workers--which are brown--get punished.

Until I see real evidence that the anti-immigrants and the government (at all levels) begin arresting U.S. citizens on par with their "criminal" activity, I'll not believe any of them when they claim that they're simply upholding the rule of law.

Applying a law unevenly is not upholding the rule of law. It is simply officially sanctioned racism.
Illegal immigrants are here to stay (by Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe -- 3.14.07)

SUPPOSE YOU LEARN that a New England manufacturer is exploiting its employees, many of them illegal immigrants, with wretched working conditions. It fines them for talking on the job, refuses to pay overtime, and penalizes them for bathroom breaks of more than two minutes, all in addition to low wages, long hours, and squalid facilities. What do you do?

Well, if you're the United States government, you send armed agents to haul the workers off in shackles to a military base 100 miles away, then fly scores of them more than 2,000 miles to a holding pen in Texas. You provide the frightened detainees with little information and no access to lawyers. You act so rashly that many of those you seize are separated from their children and can't get word to spouses or babysitters. You display such ineptitude, in fact, that babies end up in the hospital, dehydrated, after their nursing mothers are taken away.

The company's owner and managers, meanwhile, you arrest, charge, and release on bail. They reopen for business the next day.

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