Pacific Standard – a California-based, social-justice-oriented online publication – recently posted an article titled “Rights Groups Blast 7-Eleven Over Its Reported Complicity in Immigration Sweeps.” The piece accuses convenience store chain 7-Eleven of manipulating immigration law in order to serve its corporate interests.
Apparently, the chain’s standard licensing agreement allows the corporation to revoke franchise agreements if the operators violate immigration laws. And the open borders lobby wants everyone to believe that 7-Eleven has chosen to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) solely because it wants to repossess profitable franchises.
According to Pacific Standard and the alleged “rights” groups that it cites, 7-Eleven is “guilty of weaponizing the [Trump] administration’s anti-immigrant agenda to silence opponents of its corporate policy,” and “intimidate” franchisees who oppose current immigration laws.
Calling such claims hyperbolic is an understatement. If 7-Eleven were cooperating with the Department of Labor on wage and hour investigations, or with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on workplace injury prevention programs, there would be no outcry. But the open borders lobby doesn’t like immigration law, so they manufacture false moral and legal arguments for not complying with it.
And Pacific Standard seems more than willing to act as the mouthpiece for the anti-borders contingent, running a story that is so one-sided as to be deliberately misleading. Here’s an alternative view of the situation:
- Like every other corporation in the United States, 7-Eleven is obligated to comply with federal law. If it doesn’t, the organization faces employer sanctions and its corporate principals could face criminal prosecution. So 7-Eleven’s cooperation with ICE would more accurately (and more logically) be characterized as good corporate citizenship, rather than improper manipulation of the government to further some greed-fueled conspiracy.
- The organizations being cited shouldn’t be referred to as “rights groups.” Illegal aliens don’t have any right whatsoever to accept employment in the United States. Any group claiming that enforcement of our immigration laws deprives illegal aliens of a right is simply condoning lawless behavior.
Most Americans don’t find anything remotely improper or immoral about prosecuting illegal aliens for unlawfully accepting work in the United States. Nor do they see anything wrong with prosecuting employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens. But Pacific Standard isn’t interested that side of the story. It simply doesn’t fit the politically correct narrative that any enforcement action by ICE is a violation of illegal aliens’ “rights” and that any company that attempts to comply with immigration law is anti-immigrant.
But what’s most offensive about the relentless attacks on companies like Greyhound, Motel 6 and 7-Eleven is the blatant hypocrisy of both the open borders agitators and the mainstream media. Even as they accuse law-abiding companies of engaging in “intimidation tactics,” the critics of our immigration laws are mounting a libelous smear campaign intended to intimidate those companies into adopting their lawless open borders agenda.
Let’s hope 7-Eleven doesn’t knuckle under the way that Motel 6 recently did. Corporate compliance with our immigration laws is just good business.