Minister who led anti-immigrant "go home" campaign hired illegal immigrant to clean his house

[kpete]

The immigration minister, Mark Harper, has resigned for employing an illegal immigrant as a cleaner, Downing Street said on Saturday.

Number 10 said there was "no suggestion that Mr Harper knowingly employed an illegal immigrant" but the prime minister, David Cameron, had "accepted his resignation with regret".

Last year Harper launched a government advertising campaign that targeted racially mixed areas with mobile billboards warning illegal immigrants to "go home or face arrest".

In his resignation letter Harper said that while he had not broken the law as an employer, he believed that his position meant he must "hold myself to a higher standard than expected of others".

More here:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/feb/08/immigration-minister-resigns-illegal-immigrant-mark-harper

[Jefferson23]

1. Bye!

[libdem4life]

2. On of those perfect moments for..."shocked, shocked I tell you." Oh yeah, and "Fired".

[Igel]

3. This is Britain, so US laws aren't at issue.

But I'm pretty sure I facilitated hiring an illegal immigrant.

I'm also pretty sure that had I shown she was here illegally I could have had my ass sued off or been fired (and then had my ass sued off). Let's call her "Agnes."

I looked at the ID Agnes presented. She showed the same kind of ID as everybody else. Was it false? I couldn't tell--I'm not an expert on every form of identification that could have been offered. I suspected it was false because this nice monolingual girl who spoke Mexican Spanish (not from the north or from the east coast, and not terribly well-educated) and looked to be perhaps 20 was actually of Scandinavian extraction, was in her 30s and had been born and raised in Oklahoma.

But the rules were I couldn't use such ethnic-based suspicions to investigate Agnes' ID with any greater scrutiny that I had employed in investigating everybody else's. So if I doubted hers, I'd have to go back and investigate everybody else that worked there. Failure to do this was prima facie evidence of racism, and the company, had it caught wind, would be forced to fire me or be complicit in my racism. Or it could countenance my looking at everybody's IDs and checking their backgrounds, which would have been time consuming and difficult, not to mention offensive.

So I made a photocopy of Agnes Jurgensen's (or whatever her name was) ID and plopped it into her personnel file, nicely 22ly caught.

[libdem4life]

4. Yes, in the US, one hires a housekeeper, pays her a legal wage, records said expense on tax

records, pays payroll and SS taxes, and has a 2x4 Wall poster of Worker's Compensation requirements. Also, they have to have an ITN#...which means legal to work in the US if they are not a citizen. They must declare whether they are a citizen or not on application forms. Thus, the employer knows which forms to use.

You're telling me that there are no laws, just some phony ID needed, in Britain? You don't ask their race, duh. She could be illegal from Scandinavia. It has nothing to do with ethnicity, race or country of origin. But citizen? yes, or no. That should be a clue, I'd think.

The Minister of Immigration. Right.