Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
Iowa business owners who repeatedly employ illegal aliens would face civil penalties of up to $10,000 and up to a year in jail under legislation being proposed by a coalition of Democrats in the Iowa House of Representatives.
House File 2026 would lead to the creation of the law that prohibits employers from employing any persons in the United States illegally. Employers would be exempt from penalties if they seek verification of a worker’s citizenship status through the Department of Homeland Security’s verification system.
House Republicans say the bill is one step toward stemming the flow of illegal immigrants into the state, but say that it does more harm to non-unionized independent contractors who would be saddled with additional administrative hurdles in order to comply.
“The problem is it’s not really an illegal immigration bill. The bulk of the bill is something entirely different,” said House Minority Leader Christopher Rants, a Sioux City Republican. “What the Democrats are actually trying to do is prohibit people from hiring independent contractors.”The proposed law, co-sponsored by 43 House Democrats including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, D-Des Moines, is one of several immigration bills likely to be debated in the Iowa Legislature this year.
“We’re not the INS. We can’t track down illegal aliens and have them detained,” McCarthy said. “But we can put the focus on where we as Democrats think it belongs and that is on the employers who hire and often times recruit these workers and then pay them slave wages.”
The first indication of how the bill might fare should be Thursday, when the House Labor Committee meets to discuss a broad range of topics, including immigration.
Immigration was a hot-button issue among Republicans in the recently held Iowa Caucus and many voters listed it as a defining issue in picking a presidential candidate.
Rants said House Republicans are anxious to create a broad-based plan to combat illegal immigration and are open to punishing businesses that hire undocumented workers. However, Rants said the bill is actually pro-union legislation designed to hurt non-unionized independent contractors.
Republicans are also interested in finding ways to identify the illegal aliens themselves and to mete out punishment for unions who encourage illegal immigrants to join their ranks without trying to ensure that they are citizens, Rants said.
“The unions should be involved in this, too,” Rants said. “They are signing these people up, they are making them members. We think they should be susceptible to the same kind of fines as businesses are.”
Rants says an overlooked chunk of the bill would reclassify independent contractors who do work for general contractors.
An explanation of the proposed legislation states any individual performing services for a contractor should be considered an employee unless specific conditions exist:
“The first set of conditions
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