When running for president in 2007, GOP candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was ensnared in a more indirect type of illegal-worker problem. He fired a firm that provided landscape services to his Belmont, Mass., home after the Boston Globe revealed that the company in question, Community Lawn Service with a Heart, had a pattern of hiring illegal immigrants.
The Globe had first reported on the firm’s use of illegal workers in 2006. But Romney fired the firm only after a second round of reports by the paper in 2007. At the time, he said that he gave Community Lawn a second chance, and that it had promised to use only legal workers. “The company’s failure to comply with the law is disappointing and inexcusable,” said Romney in December 2007.
