Return of the son of the bride of…

Time to get my little chronicle of crime and corruption back on track. This time, I'm going to pass on the usual suspects in favor of a story from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina, which came my way via Majikthise…

...Allen McNeely, head of the state Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health division, said the workers were lured into the arrest by a flier announcing a mandatory Occupational Safety and Health Administration meeting.

McNeely said one of the contractors who employed the immigrants faxed him a copy of the flier. It is printed in English and Spanish. It tells all contract workers to attend an OSHA briefing at the base theater and promises free coffee and doughnuts.

McNeely said that neither his division nor the federal OSHA was involved in the arrests. He said the trick has eroded trust between the Labor Department and the workers it is trying to keep safe.

In recent years, the Labor Department has made an effort to reach out to the state's thousands of immigrant workers, especially those in construction, because they are among the most likely to be killed or injured at work.

This is just so wrong in so many ways.

There's a federal agency stomping in without coordinating with the relevant state agencies, upending years of work to nab a few dozen low wage workers. Should those workers have been in the US, let alone on the job? Probably not. Are our borders more secure because North Carolina workplaces may be more dangerous? Not hardly.

There's the matter of a federal agency using fraud and entrapment in pursuit of its mission. Not to foil some spy movie scheme to destroy the world. Just to nab a few dozen mostly Central American laborers. Did the INS get, or even bother to seek, some kind of authority to pose as OSHA workers? If so, what other agencies are they using for cover? Can we be sure that any interaction with a federal worker isn't an interview with the INS?

And then there's the little matter of where those workers were, and how they got there in these days of heightened national security concerns…

Those arrested were employees of private contractors doing roofing, electrical, masonry and other construction work on the base. An investigation determined that they presented false documents when they entered the base, immigration officials said.

That just doesn't cut it. I'm pretty good at spotting a false ID, and I'm not protecting anything but the sanctity of the legal drinking age. We've got to do better at the gates of our military establishments than at the corner saloon. Who's in charge here?

Oh yeah.



Scary, that.

And a scandal, every bit of it.