Nancy Pelosi's sour grapes

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, preparing to engage in labor relations with her farmworkers

Who woulda thunk it? It takes a self-described `progressive' to really understand the culture of corruption. It seems that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has her own "grapes of wrath" scenario going on.

A large part of the fortune of the Pelosi family is a Napa Valley vineyard worth $25 million that Rep. Pelosi owns with her husband. The vineyard produces expensive grapes for high-end wines. Napa grapes bring up to $4,000 a ton compared with $300 a ton for, say, San Joaquin grapes.

But as Peter Schweizer reveals in his book"Do As I Say (Not As I Do)," Pelosi, a winner of the 2003 Cesar Chavez award from the United Farm Workers, hires only nonunion workers at her vineyard and sells these grapes almost exclusively to nonunion wineries.

So much for championing the working man.

Now , here's the interesting bit. Rep. Pelosi has a long record of opposing border security and any efforts to stem illegal immigration. Meanwhile, she appears to be among those rich employers who financially benefit from a steady supply of cheap foreign labor.

She led the opposition and voted against the Secure Fence Act of 2006 recently signed into law by President Bush to build a 700-mile fence along the U.S.-Mexican border.

She opposed the anti-terror legislation known as the Real ID Act of 2005, while be quoted as sayng that Democrats under her leadership "defeated Republican attempts to restrict the Matricula Consular card" an easily forged document issued by the Mexican government, which are legal IDs in her home state of California.

She voted against a bill to make employers such as herself financially liable for hospital costs if undocumented employees seek medical attention, which means that these people go to local hospitals and ERs where taxpayers foot the bill. As a result, many hospitals and emergency rooms are threatened with closure, especially in Pelosi's home state of California.

In 2005 she voted against stopping the issuance of driver's licenses to illegal aliens and against a requirement that businesses use an electronic system to verify whether new hires have the legal right to work in the U.S.

Speaker Pelosi also is no fan of enforcement of the laws against the hiring of illegal aliens. In 2003, she accused immigration officers of conducting "terrorizing raids" on Wal-Mart stores that led to the arrest of over 300 illegal aliens.

Now, even the most conservative estimates agree that at least half of the migrant labor force in the Napa Valley consists of `undocumented workers', AKA illegal aliens.

You have to wonder if Speaker Pelosi's opposition to enhanced border security might just be due due to the fact that the House Democratic leader personally profits from a steady supply of cheap foreign labor!

An important detail to remember is that the traffic over our border doesn't just consist of cheap immigrant labor. There are also what Immigration and Customs Enforcement calls OTMs (Other Than Mexicans) among whom potential terrorists could sneak in undetected.

So here we have a scenario where Speaker of the House Pelosi not only seems to put her personal financial interests above national security concerns, but apparently makes a point of not checking too closely to see whether her workforce consists of undocumented workers while she's doing it.

Not that it would ever happen, but if the folks at ICE are ever actually looking for an employer to target as a violator of immigration law statutes, there's this vineyard in Napa Valley I know about that might be a good target...