When Gov. Charlie Crist named his pal George LeMieux to keep the Senate seat warm for him, Jonah observed that “Any votes Crist Lite [LeMieux] makes in Washington will be, for political purposes, Crist votes.” Well, it’s not just votes — any controversy that arises will become Crist’s problem too.

And now there is such a controversy, which broke even before LeMieux was sworn in on Thursday. Until his accession to the Senate, LeMieux was chairman of Gunster, Yoakley & Stewart, described by a local CBS news report as “a Florida-based law firm which specializes in helping companies hire foreigners to replace American workers inside the United States.” Well, it turns out LeMieux’s firm may have done its job a little too well for his own good; it helped import low-paid Mexican sheet-metal workers for a hotel construction job at a time when there are reported to be as many as 2,000 unemployed sheet-metal workers in South Florida alone, not to mention those elsewhere in the U.S. who’d happily move for a job. And if you search the long table here, you’ll find unemployment among sheet-metal workers was over 8 percent even before the recession.

The gall of lawyers is sometimes striking:

In addition to requesting basic guest worker visas (known as H2B visas), a special plea was also made to the State Department, arguing that the foreign sheet metal workers should be allowed to enter the country because they possessed unique skills that no American worker would have.
The workers were ultimately given these so-called “E” visas which, according to the State Department’s website, are reserved for “persons of extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business or athletics.” Certain executives of multi-national corporations could also qualify, as could others who, in the words of the State Department, possess “highly specialized skills essential to the efficient operation of the firm.”
CBS4 News, however interviewed workers from the job site who maintained the foreign workers had no special skills and that their tools and techniques were outdated.

LeMieux says “I didn’t bill any time on the matter” and isn’t familiar with all the details of the case. He was just, you know, chairman of the firm.

Particularly amusing is the shocked reaction to this from politicians who’ve never met a foreign-worker importation plan they didn’t like. Rep. Kendrick Meek, the likely Democratic candidate for the Senate seat in 2010 and proud holder of a grade of F from Numbers USA, blasted LeMieux for helping import workers “when there are people here who have to pay their bills and have to pay their taxes and are overlooked.” And Rep. Iliana Ros-Lehtinen (another F), while careful to say she wasn’t attacking her fellow Republican, said “Shame on anyone who was involved in scamming the system.”

I haven’t found any comment from Rubio on this, but it offers him a populist line of attack against LeMieux-Crist.