All of y’all who get worked up about having Spanish-speakers around will love this letter on today’s page:
I am sick and tired of the wailing and gnashing of teeth by some business owners and Chambers of Commerce over the new immigration law.
I don’t normally put much faith in our legislators, but they hit a home run for a change. I only wish the law had been implemented earlier.
My company hired a Hispanic three years ago who used falsified documents. He worked two weeks, suffered an aneurysm and our Workers’ Compensation Commission, in its infinite wisdom, ruled it was job-related and awarded him $175,000. As a result, my workers’ compensation insurance increased dramatically.
If this law had been in effect three years ago, it would have saved me a lot of money and much grief. As a result of this incident, we now use the federal electronic database and verify every new hire.
My advice to all the malcontents: Make sure your employees are in this country legally or hire U.S. citizens.
So it turns out that illegal immigration causes aneurysms! Who knew?
Isn’t that just like those Hispanics? They come up here and take jobs just knowing they’re going to have an aneurysm, no doubt as a result of the very act of wading across the Rio … The nerve of these people.
Remember, hire U.S. citizens (or, if you must, legal aliens), because they don’t have aneurysms.
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Brad,
Assuming everything in that letter is true, how SHOULD this situation been handled:
1) By the employer?
2) By Workman’s Comp?
3) By the employee?
Had the writer not used the word Hispanic, then can we assume you would be 100% on his side in this situation?
Or are you okay with people falsifying documents to work? and with those same employees receiving government benefits at the expense of other workers who do not falsify their documents?
You would admit that there is a fairly significant population of people in South Carolina of Hispanic origin who have entered the United States illegally, right?
State law should be revised immediately to deny Workers Comp benefits to any illegal alien, along with welfare, Medicaid, etc.
Get rid of the benefits to any non-citizen to weed out those who just come to America to glom onto the welfare system and freeload.
Doug, the thing I was making fun of was the cause-and-effect relationship that the writer drew between illegality and having an aneurysm. Note the operative sentence:
The very clear implication here is that if I make sure I don’t hire any more illegals, I won’t have to pay for any more aneurysms — a lesson learned.
Basically, the person doesn’t separate the two unrelated things — illegality and a catastrophic health problem. Somehow, he is telling us, he wouldn’t have been out all that money if the guy he’d hired had been legal.
News flash from the real world: A legal foreigner’s aneurysm is not any less severe, or less expensive, than that of an illegal foreigner. To suggest otherwise is to conflate unrelated phenomena to an absurd degree.
Come on, guys — it’s worth a chuckle. It doesn’t matter what you think of illegal immigration; you should still be able to appreciate silliness when you see it.
I guess I miss the humor.
An illegal immigrant uses phony papers to get a job and develops an aneurysm. A typical government bureacracy rewards the illegal immigrant with $175,000 he has no right to get regardless of his personal health issue. The employer’s insurance rates go up because he hired a phony employee.
There isn’t a single funny thing about any of it.
This incident didn’t occur because the worker was Hispanic. It occured because the worker committed an illegal act on top of his illegal act of entering the country.
I guess you’re left to chuckle over this one with Senators Graham and McCain…
You guys are kinda dense. The letter writer is saying that he will rectify the situation by making sure all of his employees are legal, as if only illegal Hispanic workers get aneurysms.
You know, Mr. Warthen, or at least you ought to, it’s not funny at all. You don’t do holier-than-thou real well.
If the letter had no credence to you, you shouldn’t have put it in the paper, but after you published it, goring the writer on the blog shows you have the character of a scorpion or a payday lender, whichever comes first or last, depending on your point of view.
And only you, not the letter writer, established a connection between the worker being Hispanic and the effect the illness had. You’re accusing someone behind his back of being a racist, but you didn’t provide the evidence to back your accusation up.
Thanks for doing your part, however unknowingly, in continuing to undermine political correctness.
Actually, Jay, what the letter writer said was that if his company known the fellow who developed the aneurysm was illegal, he wouldn’t have been hired and then the letter writer’s worker’s comp costs wouldn’t have gone up.
What horrible advice the letter writer is being condemned for — hire legal aliens or U.S. citizens.
Geez, believe it or not, if you’re willing to come here illegally, you probably are more likely to be willing to manipulate the system improperly for your benefit, too.
Does anyone else besides me find it ironic that this guy only began verifying employment documents AFTER this incident. And yet he blames the government for previously not forcing him to use such a system and therefore has suffered the consequences of his own lack of due diligence in regards to who he employs.
Here’s some additional and tangental irony…
Since most people who support this kind of “reform” are republican’ts it only adds to the irony because guess what – you’re making more government!!!
Talk about missing the point…Wow!
I don’t think the takeaway point to this story was that illegal immigration causes aneurysms. That’s like saying carrots are poisonous because everyone who ever eats a carrot winds up dead at some time or other.
I think the point is that illegal immigration causes all sorts of mayhem and consequences for business owners and the rest of us, especially when the government bureaucracy gets involved. I say the rest of us, because you know that this business owner is either going to have to pass the increased insurance costs on to his customers in the form of price increases, or else eat those costs himself by cutting back elsewhere…meaning possibly letting another employee go or providing less service to his customers. These things would not happen but for this law-breaking alien. David
> you’re making more government!!!
One of the basic responsibilities of the Federal government is to secure the borders of the nation. That’s not “more” government, that’s “right” government.
If the government would stop doing all the things it shouldn’t be doing, the issue of “more government” wouldn’t exist.
I find it fascinating that whenever a conservative wants more government spending it’s called by some other name. In this case “right” government. If a liberal wants some new service or program it’s an increase in government spending. If a conservative wants something it’s all a legitimate government function. This comes up frequently whenever military spending is debated. Somehow wasteful spending on unneeded weapons is never considered additional government spending. It’s called enhancing our security or some other nonsense. Only in the mind of a conservative does this make any sense.
I don’t have any doubt that the tone of response – snarky & sarcastic – from Brad=The State is one factor contributing to lower readership of The State=Brad. The State=Brad means that most people assume the editorial page is the voice and soul of a paper. People don’t like being talked down to and eventually stop subjecting themselves to it.
However, I’m not too thrilled with the guy who hired the illegal so that he could pay him less than a citizen. It ties in to the story from the other Sunday about the people waking up before the crack of dawn to take a bus to Hilton Head to work at a hotel. They do the same thing as far inland as Sumter, Clarendon and Williamsburg counties to get to Myrtle Beach. Wouldn’t it be great if there was affordable housing at these beaches so these people could move their families and have much better quality of life?
These are the people who some of the bloggers say don’t want to work. Like the young men washing cars at Kenny’s in Sumter in 40 degree weather or 103 degree weather. I bet they would sell their souls for the kind of job this man hired the illegal for. But, he wanted to save some money by being disloyal to his fellow Americans.
Brad, and Mr. Businessman, we need to help each other before we help people whose very act of entering our country illegally shows the contempt they have for our laws. We’re killing the American Dream for our citizens so that lawbreakers can steal it.
I’ve been catching up on several posts today and one comment that grabbed my attention was investigative journalism. That’s the kind of stuff that sells papers, not Brad’s constant lectures about what’s right.
How about a front page series about these LLC groups Mark Sanford has formed to raise money? I bet he’s been opposed to PACs and here he is creating them. How about a front page series about solicitors giving PTI to child molestors? Do you know what happens when a pedophile gets PTI? How about a legislator’s relative whose making those decisions and the legislator’s law firm defending the perverts?
You know, Brad, if The State exposed enough things like that, you might start getting rid of legislators who oppose your pet project of restructuring. Lost Trust didn’t begin to clean out the State House.
Martin,
I went to the link Brad provided and I couldn’t find the original letter. Did this business owner actually say he had hired this illegal because he could get away with paying him less than a citizen? If the business owner did that, then I’m with you: Screw him! He, in my mind, is at least as dirty as the illegal alien he hired, and fully deserves to pay whatever increased insurance costs or other penalties result from his despicable act. All employers who do this deserve whatever hell comes their way. They are as much part of the problem as are the people crossing the borders illegally.
On the other hand, employers who honestly and mistakenly hire illegals who have presented falsified papers are not generally at fault. In my mind, the US government has failed to fulfill its’ responsibility to secures the borders, which is how these criminals get in in the first place. It’s sort of silly to now put the burden on legit employers to ensure that these illegals never get hired.
David
Sorry about the problem with the link. I posted that in advance, and sometimes that means sort of guessing about the coding.
This link should work (and I’m going back to fix the one above as well). Enjoy.
martin, you need to talk to John Monk and company in the newsroom about the front-page investigative stuff. They’re the ones that do that. For that matter, they’re the ones who do the reporting, period. My job is commenting on the news. In other words, I do the snarky stuff.
Of course, there’s a great deal of reporting in the work of my colleagues Cindi and Warren. My stuff is reporting-free. I let them do facts. I do the interesting stuff between the facts (and before some of y’all deliberately misunderstand what I just facetiously said, what I mean by “facts” is new data; writing about the “stuff between the facts” is interpretation of data).
It’s kind of a running joke around here that Cindi’s and Warren’s editorials and columns require leg work, but not mine. I just read and listen until a thought (or interrelated series of thoughts) about what I’ve read and heard strikes me, and go to town. And yet, unbelievably, some people seem to like that. Maybe it’s because I save snarky for the blog. Hundreds of thousands of people read the paper. Only one or two thousand of you read the blog on any given day.
While I embrace that exaggeration of the way I work, I’ll leave you with a serious thought — it may sound like my way of writing is easier. On rare occasion, it is. But generally, I sweat blood at some point in the course of writing a column.
The letter-writer points to several problems.
At the time of the hire, verification was optional. The credentials presented for the I-9 check looked good, so no verification was done. Happens all the time, and not just with applicants who look “Hispanic.” Now the verification is mandatory, so this is no longer a problem.
When someone suffers any injury, it becomes a matter of which bucket will pay for the injury and associated costs, the latter being relative. If Jim and Joe are in an automobile accident, who pays what?
That an aneurysm is judged to be work-related strikes me as screwy and unfair, but the workers’ comp world is always in need of reform, mainly because it’s intended to restore the worker through rehabilitation or whatever. I’ve run across folks who’ve been helped by the system and others who’ve abused it, in some cases for decades. Even (especially?) the generous Swedes have found reform necessary.
When I worked for a construction company in Minnesota, we’d have more injuries in September and October as the winter slowdown brought layoffs and unemployment to a lot of folks. Workers’ comp brought higher benefits for a longer time, so some sick fools took to walking the plank to cash in. Fortunately our insurer was pretty aggressive in tracking down fraud, so some of the really outrageous abusers got caught.
Point for discussion: Brad Warthen’s blog causes aneurysms?
John Monk and his boys in the newsroom failed to report who the lawyer was that got this huge bogus settlement for the criminal alien with a neurological problem that is genetic and totally unrelated to work.
That was who was abusing the Workers Comp system, and these lawyers are either in the legislature, or closely related to legislators who created this corrupt system.
True, Lee. And can someone find out how much of the $175,000 actually made it into the hands of the illegal immigrant and how much went into a lawyer’s pockets?
Illegals get a lot of coaching on how to mooch the USA, both back in the old country, and after they get here, by “advocacy groups” who are looking for a slice of the pie.
An aneurysm (or aneurism) is a localized, blood-filled dilation (balloon-like bulge) of a blood vessel caused by disease or weakening of the vessel wall. Aneurysms most commonly occur in arteries at the base of the brain (the circle of Willis) and in the aorta (the main artery coming out of the heart), a so-called aortic aneurysm. The bulge in a blood vessel can burst and lead to death at any time. The larger an aneurysm becomes, the more likely it is to burst.
There is no way that an aneurysm could be covered by workers compensation. Not even in South Carolina and we have one of the most liberal compensation machines in the USA. The right lawyer and the right judge and the employee is set for life on the backs of his employer. I personally know of several cases of people drawing permanent disability from workers compensation and they are not disabled by any stretch of the imagination.
You are right Lee, as usual.
The risk of aneurysm is hereditary, but genetics is not the sole cause. Quick spikes in blood pressure, like those caused by straining to lift something, can also cause them. They can, and should, be covered by workers compensation if it can be proven that it was work related. In this particular case, it was.
Tell me how you can PROVE that the rupture of a genetically defective blood vessel was caused by work.
No illegal alien has any right to any government benefits in America just by being here when his body fails, no more than if he were still in Mexico or Guatemala.
Simple, heredity only increases risk of aneurysm. Anyone can have an aneurysm regardless of family history. Physical exertion that causes a spike in blood pressure can cause an aneurysm. The WCC investigates claims and in this case decided the individuals aneurysm was related to his work. Can you prove this person had a family history of aneurysm?
In court, the burden of proof is on the claimant to show a specific activity at work being the exact cause of death. That cannot be PROVEN, when the direct cause of death is a ruptured blood vessel which had been weak for years or decades.
The WCC doesn’t do much investigation, is not a court, and does not apply the Rules of Evidence. It is a bunch of political appointees running a no-fault insurance system, handing out loads of money to claimants who hire legislators to represent them.
An illegal immigrant has no right to any welfare or other program in America, just as his brother back in Mexico has no legal right to American taxpayer monies.