Victor Leon is alone in the hospital most days.
The 26-year-old was paralyzed nearly three years ago when he fell from the roof of a three-story building in Palm City while working for Jupiter-based Altec Roofing. Since then, Leon has been mired in a legal battle to get workers’ compensation benefits or legal damages from Altec.
Leon is an illegal immigrant. His status puts him at the crux of a legal debate over what rights, if any, illegal workers have after being injured on a job for which the American government says they never should have been hired.
“It’s sort of a legal limbo,” said Chad Hastings, Leon’s attorney. “He’s in a place where basically the American government is saying, ‘Go die somewhere.’ “
Injured on the job. So, he should get workers comp. BUT: as an illegal immigrant, he was breaking the law at the time he was injured. He was injured in the course of breaking the law.
Consequently: provide him with emergency medical care… then ship his ass back to Mexico and send him the bill. If he doesn’t pay… fine. Have the US State Department re-imburse the hospital for its costs (already about half a million$$). Then have the State Department collect that money from the Mexican government.
Not that difficult to figure *this* one out, is it.
UPDATE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZxyqMrb0uU
I’m pretty sure that’s relevant.
7 Responses to “Another ethical quandary”
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Except you know what you’d really like to do is strap a parachute to his ass as-is and then throw him out a C-5 over Mexico as an example. Or maybe that’s just me. LOL
Well, that’s bad. This poor soul was breaking the law because his country didn’t provide him with the opportunities to grow by being productive, and doing constructive things for his own society/people.
I want to make it clear that I’m not victimizing him……he was breaking the law. Period.
Like so many thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands more living illegally in the first world countries. I believe in that solution…..ship him back. Extreme as it may sound, it would put the burden on the originator, and make him react.
I’m totally against the notion of illegal aliens. Being from a country which contributes its fair share or illegals in many first world countries does compound the problem from my perspective.
Think. Why do a person coming from a fair-weather-all-year-round place, with plenty of natural resources to tap from, and people in the numbers necessary (even insufficient sometimes) to achieve a decent development, is forced to emigrate?
Ironically, we have our own illegal population, too.
I would like to have again our old policy of immigrant selection. Those best suited to perform a job we’re in need of should enter, and be assimilated into our society as was the case with uncounted Europeans who chose to come here before, during and after WWII. And impose severe restrictions to sending money to the countries of origin, with the exceptions for humanitarian reasons.
It alarmed me to find myself without the need to speak English in Miami, after coming from up north. While most of the population is legal, you could smell the illegality in plenty of places. I believe that’s bad for business and social stability.
>Why do a person coming from a fair-weather-all-year-round place, with plenty of natural resources to tap from, and people in the numbers necessary (even insufficient sometimes) to achieve a decent development, is forced to emigrate?
That’s the question. By all rights, Mexico, and the Mexican peopel, should be fabulously wealthy. They are laoded to the gills with natural resources; they have easy access to not one by *two* major oceans (with all the shipping and tourism potential that that implies); they are not being oppressed by a foreign power; they are not under serious threat from neighbors; one of their neighbors is the richest nation in history, and welcomes (well, used to, anyway) free trade; and the Mexican people have access to learning and high technology. And yet, on the whole the plac`e is a mess, riddled with poverty. Why? It’s because their culture in general, and their government more specifically, tolerates and even expects corruption on a massive scale. Corruption ruins the ability of people to get ahead through honest, smart labor. Who the hell would want to set up shop someplace where you’ll have to constantly bribe officials *and* criminals? Sure, a lot of businesses moved to Mexico for the dirt-cheap labor, but even that has not worked as well as had been hoped.
Long-term, the best thing that could happen to Mexico would be if:
1) The US started truly clamping down on employers who hire illegals
2) The US started deporting illegals in the *millions* (we’ve got up to 30 million illegals… about 10% of the total population).
This would force Mexico to face their problems squarely, and internally. if that led to a civil war… well, a short, shapr war witha positive outcome is not always the wosrt of things. Dragging Mexico through another century of poverty and misery would be far worse not only for them, but for the US as well.
Of course, what the US *could* do is deport ten million Mexicans straight to Cuba. That’d be freakin’ hilarious.
You just described not only Mexico, but a stretch of land that ranges from the Rio Grande to the Patagonia LOL!!!
“Corruption” is, it seems to me, one of the harder problems for a country to deal with. If it has a foreign occupier, they can be fought off. If it has a dictator, he can be overthrown. But when everyone from El Presidente on down to the garbageman is on the take… what do you do? This is just another facet of the problem that is increasingly plaguing the US… the welfare state. Welfare corrupts from top to bottom, and how do you get people – from the lazy slob on up to the Senator reliant upon the lazy slobs vote, to give up the gravy train?
That’s essentially correct. Scott. Corruption is the “great destroyer of worlds”. People gets used to hand-me-downs and just plain handouts programs, and is bought into a culture of the easy-life. No hard work, much less honest work.
As you say, everyone, from El Presidente on down is then involved in this “way of life”.
I’ve known of cases and witnessed a few of people living off these programs exclusively, stripping then the industry and commerce off of labor force. Then the companies start downsizing and jobs are lost, while the oil-fat-and-rich socialist state provides for the “poor”. Then the state dissolves into government, and government dissolves into the figure of the “great leader”. The magnanimous, all-powerful, great leader, whose spoken word is holy writ.
Poverty, at least in these frames, is an imposed condition, then. Imposed on millions of people by a retrograde culture of the state-sponsored economy, where a state runs everything from oil production, lotteries, tourism, transport, construction, and the count soars. Add the magical corruption ingredient, and you have an economy in a shambles, a dilapidated infrastructure, and a general mess in every level of life.
Enter then, the welfare state. Not that I am against some kind of welfare. That, as the cooperative economy, has a niche in every society. But not, and most emphatically not in the leading roles. But when welfare extends to a sizable proportion of population, the thing starts to corrupt and taint everything it touches. And is then used as a vote-collection tool. Everyone is bought. Everyone has a price.
Apply this to an 84% of poor people out of a 26 million population. Yeah. Nice.
The hospital should send the bill to Altec Roofing for employing him in the first place and the court should make them pay.