Texas Lawmaker Pushes Anti-Immigration Bill with Loophole for Certain Employers

Gathering once every two years, the Texas legislature is back in session, and quickly moving to siphon attention from Arizona as a state obsessed with creating rigid laws targeting undocumented workers. CNN reports that Texas lawmakers have introduced measures to make English the state's official language and to slap an 8 percent surcharge on "on all money wired from Texas to Latin America."

But CNN and The Lookout blog highlight a bill introduced by a Rep. Debbie Riddle, a "tea party favorite," that would make it a crime to hire undocumented workers, unless those workers were hired to clean your house, mow the lawn and trim the hedges, or other house-related duties. CNN describes the measure, House Bill 2012, as "a tough immigration bill with a soft side that protects those who hire unauthorized immigrants ‘for the purpose of obtaining labor or other work to be performed exclusively or primarily at a single-family residence.'" If the undocumented worker is hired for any other reason, the employer is could face two years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

State Rep. Aaron Pena told CNN, "With things as they are today, her bill [Riddle's] will see a large segment of the Texas population in prison," if were enacted without the household exemption.

Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez Riddle's bill if enacted with the exemption would still add "between 4,000 to 20,000 additional inmates in her jail, carrying an additional cost of more than $1.2 million," The Texas Tribune reported.

State Rep. Riddle, The Lookout noted, drew media attention last year when "she claimed unnamed FBI officials had told that pregnant women from the Middle East were traveling to America as tourists to give birth, and then raising their children to be terrorists who could later enter the U.S. freely as citizens - so called ‘terror babies,' a devious offshoot of ‘anchor babies.'"