a transparent attempt by the young lawmaker to defend a company in his district that discriminates against U.S. citizens in favor of Mexican migrant workers. Scott introduced the bill abolishing Legal Services exactly three days after it became public that Legal Services had won a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission determination that Georgia’s Hamilton Growers “engages in a pattern or practice of regularly denying work hours and assigning less favorable assignments to U.S. workers, in favor of H2-A guestworkers.” Hamilton also “engages in a pattern or practice of discharging U.S. workers and replacing them with H-2A guestworkers,” the EEOC determined.
Scott's not the only one; Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) also wants to defund Legal Services, also because of its troubling (to him) prowess at bringing suit against growers who are either cheating their migrant workers or discriminating against American citizens.
As a side note, you have to marvel at these Georgia growers. If they're not complaining about how crops are at risk because xenophobic laws scared away undocumented immigrants, leaving the growers without enough people willing to work miserable jobs for lousy wages, they're trying to get rid of the few American citizens who do want to work for them. For that matter, Georgia Legal Services deals with cases in which, when migrant workers on H-2A visas complain about being cheated, they're replaced with undocumented workers. It's all about finding the cheapest workers and the ones who won't complain when you mistreat them, in other words.
But never mind the growers. How about those members of Congress—as Dana Milbank writes,
If Scott were true to his Tea Party roots, he would have told the growers to get lost. He would have trumpeted the case as evidence that Americans are willing to do the dirty jobs that businesses claim only foreigners will do. As one of the American plaintiffs put it: “We worked hard at our jobs and really wanted the work, but Hamilton didn’t want Americans to work in their fields.” Americans, after all, would be more likely to know the laws and to complain if they’re being exploited.Instead, Scott chose to side with a large employer of foreign migrants in his district—against his out-of-work constituents.
You don't have to have Milbank's starry-eyed view of tea party members as some new breed, rather than the angry conservative Republicans they are, to think that even they might object to Scott's choice of a corporation over America's workers.
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