OPINION:
Truth matters. And so does the rule of law. Then why is San Francisco a sanctuary city?
One view, the more or less charitable view, is that people there care about illegal immigrants. People who believe that also believe in the tooth fairy.
Another view, more cynical, but likely more accurate, is that the political class there wants to flood the city — and the state and the country — with people who will vote for Democrats.
Lincoln said that you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Too many people may be catching onto the chaotic wokieness that defines the current Democratic Party. So, it’s time for new, and uninformed, and probably uninformable, recruits.
A third explanation for the sanctuary city craze is far simpler and far more selfish: The richies want cheap household help — cheap maids, cheap gardeners, cheap chauffeurs. San Francisco is a rich city, or at least it has a lot of very rich Washington, D.C., and its attendant ZIP Codes are also home to rich Americans, actually to the single largest collection of rich Americans. Many of them are federal workers, who are paid, of course, more than their counterparts in the private sector (known, but only outside of Washington, as “taxpayers”). And if both husband and wife work, that produces a lot of income.
Both the Pew Center and the Federation for American Immigration Reform indicate that there are thousands of illegal aliens working as maids, household cleaners, etc., in the District of Columbia/Virginia/Maryland area. It’s a good bet that at least some of them, and perhaps many of them, work for federal employees.
Surely those federal employees should set a better example for the people who pay their salaries. And if they won’t set that example voluntarily, they should be urged to do so.
President Trump should urge them.
He should issue an executive order requiring all Senior Executive Service federal employees (whose salaries range from $131,240 to $197,300 — there are about 8,000 of them) to file a form with the Office of Personnel Management stating, under the penalty of perjury, that at no time during the last five years did they employ an illegal alien.
The form can’t simply state that they don’t currently employ an illegal because they could “fire” their gardener on Monday, sign the form on Tuesday and rehire the illegal on Wednesday.
And the filing requirement shouldn’t cover all federal employees because we want the employees who are required to file to know that there are people below them (who aspire to their jobs) who would be in a position to, and might feel obliged to, see that the form was filled out correctly.
The Justice Department should be instructed to investigate a random sample of the responses and prosecute employees who lied on the form.
Senior Executive Service employees who confessed to having hired illegals could choose between continuing their employment at a salary three pay grades lower or, of course, being dismissed from the Senior Executive Service.
Employees who lied would be prosecuted for perjury.
The deep state would howl, of course. That alone would make the effort worthwhile. But there’s more to it than that.
We might discover that no one in the federal workforce has been breaking the law. That would be a terrific testament to our country’s belief in the rule of law.
Or we might discover that there are thousands of scofflaws being paid by the taxpayers. That would hurt — but why should lawbreakers remain in positions where they enforce laws when they don’t obey laws themselves? Punishing them or getting rid of them would also be a terrific testament to our country’s belief in the rule of law.
Truth matters. Not to the left. Not to The New York Times. Not to The Washington Post. Not to the wokey networks.
But truth matters to ordinary citizens. And so does the rule of law.
• Daniel Oliver is chairman of the board of the Education and Research Institute and a director of Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. Email Daniel Oliver at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.
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