The background on Rick Perry’s charge that Mitt Romney hired illegal immigrants from the New York Times in a 2007 piece:

Mitt Romney, who has relentlessly wielded the issue of illegalimmigration against his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in the past few months, is facing an embarrassing new revelation that the landscaping company at his home in Massachusetts was found for a second time to be employing illegal immigrants.

Mr. Romney announced yesterday that he had fired the company, Community Lawn Service of Chelsea, Mass. The announcement came just before The Boston Globe published on its Web site the results of an inquiry it had been conducting over the last two months on the firm.

The Globe had revealed a year ago in the waning days of Mr. Romney’s governorship of Massachusetts that the company, which Mr. Romney employed at his home in Belmont, Mass., for more than a decade, was using illegal Guatemalan immigrants.

Romney told the Times that he had instructed the company not to hire illegals after the Globe revelation was published. Full piece here.