What if illegal workers did go on strike?

Now that Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. has signed SB227 into law, requiring Utah's undocumented workers to carry driver privilege cards rather than official Utah drivers' licenses, it remains to be seen whether those affected by the new legislation will walk off their jobs and go on a united protest strike as some among them have intimated.

We should only hope it wasn't an empty threat.

While work stoppage by workers who swam the Rio Grande to get their jobs in the first place would be highly unusual, an across-the-board strike by undocumented workers — a popular euphemism for "illegal immigrants" — would do more to help the ever-growing problem of illegals setting up residence here than anything short of an outright merger with Mexico.

Not only would it identify and personalize the number of people involved, it would reveal the sheer volume of what they do for their daily bread.

Think of the impact if all undocumented workers manned the picket lines and suddenly all the tasks routinely performed by them went undone. Beds wouldn't get made, dishes wouldn't get washed, floors wouldn't get scrubbed, fields wouldn't get weeded, ditches wouldn't get dug, toilets wouldn't get scoured, gardens wouldn't get edged. It's highly possible that there wouldn't be a single house foundation poured along the Wasatch Front.

Overnight, we would see in undeniable and dramatic fashion how Utah, at an escalating pace over the past couple of decades, has become downright California-like in tacitly encouraging the settling of undocumented workers here, the majority of them from Mexico, who will gladly do the dirty work.

---

Of course, you always have to be careful what you wish for, and by demonstrating their mass while refusing to work at the very jobs they were willing to dodge the border patrol to get, the undocumented workers on strike would provide an easy target for immigration officers, who could get their men, and women, without having to do anything but drive the paddy wagon down to the picket line.

Besides that, the INS, as well as the IRS, would have just as easy of a time identifying those companies and individuals among us who illegally employ the illegals.

The resident violators would get fined and the undocumented workers would be deported.

Either that, or with the same pen he used to sign SB227 into law, the governor, providing he could get the proper legislative approval, could declare everyone who is already here free to stay and start paying all their taxes like the rest of us. No questions asked.

Utah would be undocumented-worker free.