The Hall of Hypocrites Has a New Member

For the past few months, she has been telling California voters that employers who hire undocumented immigrants should be held accountable and sanctioned.

But now that Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman admits she had an undocumented housekeeper, shouldn't the voters sanction her? If not for breaking federal immigration laws, at least for her hypocrisy.

Whitman, the dot-com billionaire and self-proclaimed "tough as nails" anti-illegal immigration candidate, now wants us to believe she had no clue that the housekeeper she employed for nine years was using phony papers.

The scandal threatens to derail Whitman's head-to-head race against Democrat Jerry Brown, who now rightfully questions whether the former eBay boss is even fit to be governor.

The housekeeper, Nicky Diaz Santillan, 39, from Mexico, admits she gave Whitman a phony Social Security number, but Diaz's lawyer says Whitman had a "don't ask, don't tell" relationship with her housekeeper. There is other evidence — including a letter from the Social Security Administration — that shows Whitman should have been aware of her housekeeper's illegal status.

So it turns out that the candidate who wants everyone to believe that she would be tough on undocumented immigrants wasn't so tough in her own home!

Mind you, this is a woman who claims to speak for those who believe there is no need for immigrant workers because there are allegedly many American citizens willing to work as nannies, farmhands and dishwashers. Yet for the past nine years, she depended on immigrant labor in her own home.

And so the Hall of Great Political Hypocrites has a new inductee!

We've seen the gay-bashing and seemingly homophobic politicians who turn out to be homosexuals and the law-and-order zealots who turn out to be crooks and the saints who turn out to be sinners. We've seen immigrant-bashers who have hired undocumented immigrants.

It's simple. Right after Mitt Romney's name, add Meg Whitman to the list of immigration hypocrites.

Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, became an anti-immigrant zealot when, as a GOP candidate for president, he decided to pander to conservative extremists. Less than a month before he was scheduled to leave the governor's office, he cut a deal with federal authorities to allow state troopers to arrest and seek deportation of illegal immigrants. But just as Romney was coming off as a proud immigrant-basher, The Boston Globe reported that illegal immigrants had been mowing his lawn for many years.

Romney's undocumented workers were hired indirectly (he hired a landscaping company that relied heavily on undocumented workers), but Whitman's undocumented housekeeper had a much closer and personal relationship with her boss.

We all have seen hypocritical politicians who are willing to say anything, depending on the audience, to get elected.

Whitman has vowed to end "sanctuary cities" and to block undocumented students' admission to state universities. And to please the conservative extremists in her state, she asked Wilson to narrate the radio spots outlining her anti-immigrant agenda.

Of course, Latino voters remember Wilson as the architect of Proposition 187, that insidious and mostly unsuccessful effort to deny basic services, including public education, to undocumented children. Just knowing that they would be voting against Wilson's heir apparent should be enough motivation for Latinos to reject Whitman.

But if that wasn't enough, the housekeeper put the icing on the cake!

Diaz acknowledges that after Whitman announced she was running for governor, she sought help from her employer to acquire legal status and ended up getting fired.

Though Whitman denies knowing that Diaz was using her sister's green card to pass as a legal resident, Gloria Allred, the housekeeper's attorney, has produced "smoking-gun" evidence: a letter from the Social Security Administration in which Whitman and her husband are asked to verify Diaz's status.

At first, Whitman denied accusations that she and her husband had received the Social Security letter explaining that Diaz's documentation did not match government records. But later, she had to acknowledge that her husband's handwriting could be on the letter produced by Allred.

This gun was really smoking!

Images of the weeping housekeeper at a news conference last week will no doubt have a profound effect on many California voters Nov. 2.

Had Whitman been forthright with the public from the beginning and acknowledged that she was another politician with a nanny problem, perhaps many Californians would have understood. After all, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, some 27 percent of U.S. housekeepers are undocumented workers. But she tried to sweep it under the rug.

And now, how much she actually knew about Diaz's illegal status is no longer the main issue. It is now a question of credibility.

If she knew her maid was undocumented while hypocritically charging that illegal immigrants should be prosecuted, should she be entrusted with the governorship? And if she had an undocumented immigrant under her nose for nine years and the so-called "tough as nails" candidate didn't notice it, should she be entrusted with the governorship?

This is a candidate who has said she wants to not only "prosecute illegal aliens" but also punish the people who hire them. Perhaps now the voters will punish her — not necessarily for hiring an undocumented worker, but for her repulsive hypocrisy.

To find out more about Miguel Perez and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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