Immigrant Workers

VOTERS IN six village centers speak today about government in Columbia: specifically about who runs it -- but also about its shape, tone and intelligence. Some 33 years after the late James W. Rouse's great experiment -- his new town of diversity and democracy -- an overhaul is overdue. Columbia may not need to become an incorporated city -- though an argument could be made for that change. But it certainly should become a professionally run governmental enterprise, open and responsive to the city's 87,000 citizens.

For five years, Adrienne Miranda has been on a crusade to prove that the death of her son - crushed under a Bobcat earthmover while on the job, his body face-down in the dirt under a hot summer sun - was no accident. The mother from Lutherville has made claims of shoddy detective work and has alleged a sweeping coverup by authorities who don't believe a crime was committed against her 19-year-old son, Joseph A. Miranda. She has irritated and at times angered a cadre of police, prosecutors and bureaucrats.

At Barn 27 at Laurel Park, trainer Hamilton Smith is down four grooms, and his reduced crew never seems able to stop for a breath. There are 28 horses to be exercised, fed and cared for from 5:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. There are 28 stalls to be mucked out, too. The work is always hard at the barns at Laurel Park, Pimlico Race Course and Bowie Training Center, and the hours are always long for those whose job it is to care for, train and race thoroughbreds....

THE CITY'S BACKING of a permanent center for day laborers who hang out on street corners at the mercy of sometimes unscrupulous employers is a show of support for efforts to blunt the widespread abuse of "casual workers" operating outside formal employment settings. These mainly homeless and immigrant workers provide cheap but hard labor for construction, landscaping, commercial cleaning and other large companies. The 7,000 to 10,000 of them in Baltimore deserve at least the minimum labor protections afforded employees with formal jobs.

WHEN MEXICAN President Vicente Fox was asked recently if he thought an immigration deal might be reached today when he meets with President Bush in Texas, Mr. Fox did not mince words. "Absolutely not," he responded, voicing his resignation that the U.S.-Mexico migration agreement he once believed was possible may not even happen during his presidency. Who could blame him? For the last five years, Mr. Bush has been promising Mr. Fox an immigration reform plan that would provide willing workers for American employers and paying jobs for unemployed Mexicans.

FEDERAL STING operations targeting undocumented immigrant workers are being increasingly employed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Though they do result in arrests of illegal immigrants, the operations raise a troubling question: Is it fair for the government to go after illegal employees more aggressively than it does the employers who knowingly hire them and profit from their cheap labor? Federal officials say it is, especially when the workers are hired by outside contractors and employed at military bases, nuclear power plants, chemical refineries and other potential terrorist targets.

A federal investigation that shuttered three of Baltimore best-known sushi restaurants this week exposes what authorities say is a local and national problem of employing illegal immigrants that should receive more attention from law enforcement. National experts as well as local restaurateurs say too many establishments rely on backroom work by undocumented workers, and they expressed little surprise at the allegations lodged Thursday against the owners of Kawasaki restaurants in the city.

Last year, Eric Schlosser's book, Fast Food Nation, was an enormous success, and rightly so. It did an arresting, keenly focused job of revealing the evils of fast food production, sales and consumption in the United States and beyond. A staff correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly since 1996, he has written for several national magazines. Now comes his Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market (Houghton Mifflin, 310 pages, $23), for which intense promotion is piggybacking on his previous success.

Ernie Miller starts the day off at 5 a.m. with a smile, a pocketful of pamphlets and a cooler full of water as he tries to recruit Latino workers near Catonsville for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 70. But by 6:30 a.m., he has depleted his supply of pamphlets, water and much of his optimism. "This is like banging your head against a wall," he said. Experts and union organizers say that immigrant workers, particularly Latinos, are becoming increasingly important to Baltimore-area unions.

County Council's wrong on immigrant worker verification Imposing harsh "enforcement-only" measures like the flawed "E-Verify" system on immigrant workers without fixing our broken immigration system will only make matters worse by pushing undocumented workers deeper into the shadows - something that benefits only the most unscrupulous off-the-books employers. ("E-Verify urged for Baltimore County," Feb. 2.) The E-Verify verification system that Baltimore County Council Chairman John A. Olszewski Sr. wants to impose on Baltimore's workers and businesses is not the solution to our broken immigration system.