“I uncovered information that now leads me to question the immigration status of a person who had been in my employ as a housekeeper and nanny,” Kerik said. “It has also been brought to my attention that for a period of time during such employment required tax payments and related filings had not been made.”

In the Homeland Security post Kerik would have been head of the immigration police as Washington has continued to restrict the rights of undocumented immigrants. The latest restrictions came in the “intelligence reform” bill (see article in this issue). The enforcement arm of the massive immigration police structure of the Department of Homeland Security reported in November that during fiscal year 2004 a record 157,281 immigrants were deported.

Kerik was clearly recommended for the post by former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Before his career in bourgeois politics took off, Kerik worked alternately as a military cop, a bodyguard for the Saudi royalty, a prison guard, a narcotics cop, and as a rent-a-cop for the wealthy. He was tapped by Giuliani, while working as his bodyguard, to take an administrative position in the city’s jail system. In 1997 the Republican mayor named Kerik commissioner of the Corrections Department.

In August 2000, he was chosen to be the top cop in New York after his predecessor Howard Safir had presided over a string of brutal police killings that had sparked mass demonstrations in New York. Since that time Kerik has worked closely both in private and public positions with Giuliani and has been a key piece of the pro-cop, “tough-guy” image that the ex-mayor has sought to cultivate. In the process he has made millions by using his connections to cut inside deals with companies. This has included investing in Taser stun guns that he sold to cop agencies. He also bought smokes from tobacco companies and then turned around and sold them at an inflated price to inmates while he was New York City’s top prison warden.

Giuliani felt compelled to apologize to the president for not checking Kerik’s record more carefully prior to pushing him into the national spotlight, embarrassing the administration for nominating someone who clearly violated the very immigration laws he would have been appointed to enforce. “I feel very bad,” Giuliani told the press in a December 12 interview. “I realize that one of the reasons they did it was because of my confidence in Bernie over the years,” he added, referring to the nomination of Kerik by the Bush administration.

Kerik is not the first nominee to lose their post over hiring workers without documents. It was the source of a scandal around the 1993 nomination by William Clinton of Zoë Baird to the post of attorney general, as well as one other Clinton nominee that year and a Bush nominee in 2001.

Baird, a wealthy corporate lawyer, had hired a Peruvian couple as household “help” for 1990-92. She had informed Clinton of this when the nomination was posed, but the Democratic administration at first approached it as a technical matter.

In the Senate hearings, Baird claimed she was acting “more as a mother than as a woman that would be sitting here before you to be attorney general.” But as the Militant pointed out at the time Baird was just acting as “one more greedy boss” by “paying the standard rock-bottom wages for domestic ‘help,’ and also by not paying Social Security taxes…. It was clearly of no concern to Baird that the workers she employed would have no right to Social Security in their old age.”

While all the new immigration restrictions of the last decade have made it easier for bosses like Baird and Kerik to continue these practices, under the spotlight of publicity such credentials are an embarrassment for the wealthy.

What weighed most for the ruling class in Kerik’s case was that he had been nominated for the top spot of Homeland Security, an agency that has become central in Washington’s “war on terrorism” at home and abroad since 9/11.  
 
 
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