Charles Murray received the third Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society last April. His book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission is came out in May. When accepting the award, he told this story:
My wife knows a man in a town near us that I will call Bob. Bob operates one of the many kinds of businesses that use Latino workers. What makes Bob different from almost every other such employer in his line of work is that all of his workers are documented. He spends about $20,000 to $30,000 a year for the excruciatingly complicated visa process. He pays good wages, pays for his workers’ airfares, and is in other ways a model employer and member of his community.
My wife started to tell me stories about how Bob has come under relentless harassment by the government. Why pick on him, when his part of the country is full of employers who have 100 percent undocumented Latino workers? Because, by doing the right thing and documenting his workers, he opened himself up to easy inspection by government enforcers of regulations. He made himself a soft target.
The story that tipped me over the edge involved a stupid regulation that Bob could not comply with. He didn’t have enough American-born employees—and there’s no way he could get Americans to work for him. Bob became so frustrated that he told the bureaucrat that he would fight it in court—at which point the bureaucrat said to him, “You do that, and we’ll put you out of business.” And Bob knew that is exactly what would happen.
