Nancy Pelosi's Sour Grapes

Typical liberal elitism-- Pelosi wants to keep the borders open to keep a steady flow of workers for her vineyards. From Investors Business Daily (H/T Bookworm Room)

Leaders: Rep. Nancy Pelosi has her own "grapes of wrath" scenario going on. Is her opposition to enhanced border security due to the fact that the House Democratic leader personally profits from a steady supply of cheap foreign labor?

If Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives, the San Francisco Democrat will not only be the first female speaker, but also the richest. The liberal Center for Responsive Politics puts her net worth as high as $55 million.

There is no record of Pelosi's ever returning her portion of those "tax cuts for the rich" to the U.S. Treasury. Or any record, for that matter, of using her (dare we use the word?) windfall to give the workers at her Napa Valley vineyards a raise.

As Peter Schweizer notes in his best-selling expose of liberal hypocrisy, "Do As I Say (Not As I Do)," part of the fortune of this defender of the working man is a Napa Valley vineyard worth $25 million that she 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 Pelosi, winner of the 2003 Cesar Chavez award from the United Farm Workers, hires only nonunion workers and sells these grapes to nonunion wineries. Schweizer places Pelosi in a chapter titled "Workers of the World Unite Somewhere Else." UFW members need not apply at the Pelosi family vineyards.

Which makes Pelosi's steadfast opposition to any attempts to enhance border security and stem the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S. all the more interesting since she seems 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 Real ID Act of 2005, a valuable anti-terror tool, while bragging that Democrats under her leadership "defeated Republican attempts to restrict the easily forged Matricula Consular card" issued by the Mexican government.

She voted against a bill to make employers such as herself financially liable for hospital costs if undocumented employees seek medical attention, preferring that either taxpayers foot the bill or that hospitals close under the burden, as many are doing throughout the Southwest.

In 2005 she voted against barring 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.

Nor has Pelosi been a fan of employer sanctions 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 more than 300 illegal aliens.

Loraine Stewart, a farmworker advocate with Napa Valley Community Housing, in a 2004 San Francisco Chronicle article estimated that half of the migrant labor force in the valley consisted of undocumented workers, without whom "not one bottle of wine would get made here."

The people coming across our southern border aren't just seeking better lives. They're joined by drug smugglers and an assortment of people with criminal records. There are also what Immigration and Customs Enforcement calls OTMs (Other Than Mexicans) among whom potential terrorists could sneak in undetected.

Pelosi apparently puts her financial interests above the security of this nation and the safety of its citizens, exploiting undocumented workers in the process. If the people at Immigration and Customs are looking for an employer to check out, we know this little vineyard in the Napa Valley.

Now, I think we can question her patriotism.

This year, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does.