As the nation’s Great Cities continue to convulse under the immigration sweeps and raids that are now being carried out by multi-agency federal taskforces, the resulting hysteria has produced the same stale fruit that’s invariably set upon the American table when it comes to the fate of illegal immigrants.
Citizens are once again served the tired old tropes that hold immigrants — legal or otherwise — are the lifeblood of the nation and that millions of migrants here illegally are merely the friendly housekeepers and landscapers who are working jobs that Americans are too lazy to do for themselves.
It’s a disgraceful libel leveled at American citizens, but one that occasionally offers its own cosmic dose of karma to those who spread such lies.
Late last year, just days before Christmas, an old college friend who had been a journalistic colleague of mine in the early 1990s contacted me in something of a panic. His sister, who is a high-net-worth individual residing in a tony foothill community in eastern Los Angeles County, had just been burglarized by thieves who made off with more than $100,000 in her jewelry.
The heist had taken place without initial detection in a very tight window of time — less than an hour — one evening after his sister walked over to a neighbor’s Christmas shindig for a brief hello and cup of eggnog. Given that she lives in a gated and patrolled neighborhood, that there were no signs of forced entry, and that the thieves seemed to know exactly what they were looking for and where it was located, my friend surmised that it was “an inside job.”
He asked me if the business intelligence firm I was still consulting for after more than a decade of working as its senior staff investigator might be of assistance to his sister on resolving this matter.
I told him we could indeed help, but that time was of the essence. I further advised him that the end result might not be the recovery of the stolen jewels (though that was possible), but rather a comprehensive assessment of how the theft occurred and a viable plan for risk mitigation going forward.
A short while later, I was on the phone speaking with my friend’s seething sister.
She was furious at the theft and equally contemptuous of the local police, whose response to the property crime she derided as “worthless,” but I also noticed that she was intentionally evasive when it came to my questions about the domestic staff she had working at her home.
I explained to her that we’d need to interview each member of her housekeeping staff and possibly the landscapers along with others who had access to the home and its grounds. We’d need the basic information that she had on hand for all such parties so we could begin running standard database backgrounds on each person in order to pin any red flags that might come up.
“So, you want their names, addresses, and that sort of thing?” she asked rather sheepishly. “Well, um, what if I don’t have all of that?”
I could tell our conversation — and her case — was going to be a very short-lived affair.
She finally fessed up to me that her domestic help and her landscaping crews were all essentially off-book independent contractors who didn’t speak much English and were disinclined to be interviewed by English-speaking men in business suits for some odd reason. When I explained that we could provide translators and also reassure the workers we weren’t immigration agents, she seemed more concerned that her own proclivities of employing illegal workers might somehow be brought to official light.
Suffice it to say, we didn’t catch the case.
But I was once again treated, however briefly, to another surreal glimpse of a high-net-worth individual who had surrounded herself with a constellation of illegal immigrant workers toiling throughout her home. I chuckled to myself as I considered how she must have mistook the smiles of her domestic help as a sign of affection for her, when in fact those grins likely concealed a bitter envy that grew ever more grievous as the migrants from impoverished homelands scrubbed their hands raw for $9 per hour amidst her grand estate filled with glittering wealth.
I have worked such cases before, and yet I am still taken aback at how pervasive cheapness leads even the very intelligent among the rich into situations where their stinginess drives them to hire foreigners whom they literally know nothing about and entrust them with the keys to their castle and, very often, the care of their own small children.
Arrogance and greed collide to produce Americans who are willing to risk their most prized possessions and loved ones to the whims of foreign migrants of whom they know nothing more than they are willing to work long hours on the cheap.
Amazingly, that is all they apparently need to know. At least until something goes wrong, or missing.
My old college pal’s sister enjoys all the comforts and trappings of a deep seven-figure life, and yet she almost instinctually hired a staff from a pool of people whom she could pay pennies in contrast to the cost of an American employee and their associated tax liabilities and labor law requirements.
By ignoring the law — to say nothing of common sense — she surrounded herself with complete strangers.
If she’s honest about it, it’s unlikely she even knew their real names, let alone had accurate information about where they lived, how old they were, and other basic data points that would come with an American citizen and could be confirmed.
Lost in the powerful vortex of unvarnished greed and boundless hubris, she paid the price.
And that price was almost certainly exacted by that retinue of smiling housekeepers, gardeners, and whoever else was being paid off-the-books and at a fraction of the legal wage. She was hit with an equally off-the-books fine of more than $100,000 for felony idiocy with aggravating arrogance.
As public officials like New York Congressman Tom Souzzi — who recently took to the pages of The New York Times with an op-ed that further promoted a defective mass analysis of a population of foreigners we know little to nothing about — push the political dope that demands millions of migrants who entered the country illegally must be allowed to stay if they haven’t been arrested or charged with violent crimes here, it’s good to remember the lesson that rich lady living in Southern California was taught last Christmas.
Just because a migrant smiles at you and is polite in your presence doesn’t mean they like you, and it doesn’t mean you know anything meaningful about them whatsoever, beyond they have learned that deferential etiquette goes a long way in a culture that isn’t really paying attention.
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