With all the anger over illegal immigrants taking US jobs, as a European it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers.
If I want to hire someone (local or remote) as an employer here, I better make sure the worker has a valid working permit. Fines for non-compliance towards the employer are huge, even for a single day of work. All paperwork has to be complete before any work is done. Even when hiring through intermediary companies who guarantee it's all legal, liability and fines remain in place for the ultimate employer if it turns out to be not so.
In the US, there is no reliable way to verify employment eligibility. What systems do exist tend to produce many false positives and false negatives. Furthermore, you are required to accept documents the demonstrate employment eligibility at face value, even if they are likely to be fraudulent.
In industries that famously have many illegal employees, the companies have cover because the employees always have fraudulent documents. And since the company is required to accept those documents and not discriminate, the company can't be held liable for hiring them even though they are illegal.
Underlying this situation is that it is unconstitutional for the Federal government to issue mandatory ids to citizens that could be used to reliably determine employment eligibility.
I'm an employer, and this is the form that needs to be filled out when we hire someone.
Notice the 2nd page of eligible documentation. A "School ID" and "birth certificate" are adequate documentation for employment. Both can be easily forged and difficult to verify.
Also notice the bottom of the 2nd page: it allows (for a temporary period) a "receipt" of the document to be considered acceptable if it is "stolen" - meaning you don't even need to have the physical document at all.
And here's the kicker: This form does not need to be submitted to any government agency. (You literally just fill it out and put it in a filing cabinet)
> A "School ID" and "birth certificate" are adequate documentation for employment
No, they're not. They're adequate to establish identity. (List B).
> form does not need to be submitted to any government agency. (You literally just fill it out and put it in a filing cabinet)
Correct. We're on the same page in respect of employers having no real requirement to verify work authorisation. This appears part of the policy choice that lets certain politicians rail against illegal immigration without threatening the economics they support.
Turning away potentially underage drinkers is encouraged (and not doing so badly punished) but denying someone legal allowable employment is subject to litigation.
"ANTI-DISCRIMINATION NOTICE: All employees can choose which acceptable documentation to present for Form I-9. Employers cannot ask
employees for documentation to verify information in Section 1, or specify which acceptable documentation employees must present for Section 2 or
Supplement B, Reverification and Rehire. Treating employees differently based on their citizenship, immigration status, or national origin may be illegal."[0]
It is against Federal law to reject any reasonable documentation that satisfies the I-9 requirements. Historically, you can bootstrap your way to meeting those requirements with not much more than affidavits and basic forgery.
There are many people who are US citizens that due to history or circumstances have no reliable documentation of such with which to bootstrap an ID -- I have people with no foundational documents in my own family. The system is designed to enable these people to bootstrap their paperwork without a reliable root document, which is of course exploitable by people that are in the US illegally.
State-issued IDs do not contain sufficient information to ensure eligibility for employment under Federal law.
There is already a Federal law that punishes employers who do not accept documents that satisfy the I-9 requirements. Illegal immigrants have documents that satisfy these requirements.
> Illegal immigrants have documents that satisfy these requirements.
This reminds me of a Beavis and Butthead scene: "At the border. -Policeman: let them through. -Other policeman: Why ?. -Policeman: Mexicans know the capital of Texas, Americans don't"
How many times does everyone who knows have to explain that it is illegal NOT to accept the documents. The more the law is enforced, the more such documents must be accepted.
There are conflicting valid problems, different problems that are both valid, but the solution to one inhibits the solution to the other, and the law as it stands favors preventing discrimination as being the higher priority over preventing illegal employment.
I doubt either you or I knows if that is even a wrong priority, because I can't say which is the bigger problem. I'll say I don't begrudge any immigrants getting jobs, whether they are technically illegal or not. They are human and until they actually commit theft or violence I don't get off on making them suffer.
Regardless, the problem is not enforcing the law. The law says you must accept the documents. There is no "diverted blame". If you find the prospect of the wrong person getting a job so outrageous, the "blame" is on the government for making it easy to fabricate their documents. The various documents that the law says you must accept, should not be so easy to fake up, and there should probably be some office that accepts these documents and vets them instead of just telling employers to file them and never looking at them.
The people who complain about illegal immigrant labor in the US also like their cheap chicken and other fruits from illegal immigrant labor.
It's a weird case where one business undercuts another by hiring cheap labor, and then the other business has to do the same thing or else risk going out of business.
Better enforcement might help, but remember, people like cheap chicken; it doesn't matter which way you vote.
People say this, but I always wonder if some rejiggering of the revenue allocation calculus might make it possible to keep chicken cheap while paying the workers a living wage. All you'd have to do is make a handful of executives very disappointed when they open the letter containing their tax bill - or when a federal law enforcement agent knocks on their door.
I think we're more likely to see AI-based automation further take humans out of the loop at chicken factories.
That being said: I personally think it makes more sense to lower the cost of plant-based proteins. It's always going to be cheaper when we eat the plants directly instead of having an animal convert the plant to protein.
For protein. That doesn't account for micronutrients. For better or worse, humans are omnivores. We might be able to live on less meat. (Collectively-speaking; this individual weightlifts and accumulates injuries like crazy if he doesn't eat enough meat, sorry.)
There's also an issue of lower fat/connective tissue content in plant-based meats (again, necessary to support joint and muscle recovery). Also, IIRC, the fats and oils in meat hold up better to high-temperature cooking than the ones in meat analogues. Best I can do is go pescatarian (which has its own issues at-scale).
If it needs fixing in law, let's do that... not this weird system we have now of turning our head the other way and waving it off as necessary while ignoring any criticism of said crazy system.
> it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers.
The anti-immigrant politicians can't punish the employers because they would be punishing their own donors.
If that sounds like a contradiction, consider that undocumented/illegal immigrants are effectively pawns who have no political power in the system, and the contradiction disappears entirely.
How does that make the contradiction disappear? It doesn't.
The resolution to the contradiction is that few candidates to Federal office are opposed to illegal immigration, and those that have opposed illegal immigration have mostly gotten away with merely saying they are opposed while not doing very much to stop illegal immigration.
Because it makes them look like they care for the people who elected them ("the imigrants make crimes/are taking jobs" narative). In reality the politicians only care about the biggest bider.
In some states it is, but state-level elected officials have only weak levers with which to influence the rate of illegal immigration.
I don't know much about the topic, but conservative commentator Ann Coulter complained that although he certain got votes by talking about it, Trump didn't do much against illegal immigration and probably doesn't really want to do much about it.
Because they never actually intend to, in any meaningful way. Trump is the wildcard; he was the first to actually do it, and the result was a lot of people complaining about rising construction costs and a shrinking labor pool. The actual goal for these donors and politicians is to keep a steady influx of exploitable labor to serve as the poorly-compensated, mistreated underclass that most Americans would riot rather than let themselves become; enough so that they always have something to run on, but not so many that they actually have to take action (e.g., when even liberals or progressives start having an issue with it). Same thing with Democrats and abortion.
The "interesting" (in Chinese proverbial terms) part is that we're living in times where a certain charlatan's actions have lead to the big red button actually being pushed on both matters. Whoever wins tonight, it certainly looks like we're about to test if each respective development has any bearing on polls, or if parties can just run on anti-immigration/pro-choice vibes ad nauseum, regardless of what's actually happened wrt each policy over the past (few) decade(s).
> it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers
This has been my proposed solution to the immigration problem in the US. Stop attempting to corral the people coming over, and shift 100% of your resources toward punishing those who employ them. How many people will attempt to sneak into the US when no one is willing to hire them?
I also view this as a "put your money where your mouth is" stance. It changes it from a political issue into one with a practical solution, and the people benefiting from cheap labor would have to be very creative to find fault with it.
> punishing the employer for employing an illegal worker
It's already the law.
This is why employers mandate I-9 forms as part of employment.
This is part of the larger indictment against Christine Chapman by the DoJ, who found she was falsifying employment verification documents and giving access to North Koreans in return for a portion of the embezzled sums.
Stories like this are also why there has been a major push for RTO.
There is practically zero enforcement. Criminalise hiring illegal workers while stepping up enforcement and you dramatically reduce the value of illegal migration while shutting down large sections of the economy, thereby prompting supply-side inflation.
We don’t do it because this is a politically convenient middle ground that keeps illegal labor in the system while segregating it from competing with most of us. (Put another way: we have a regulated and an unregulated labor market. We like the fruits from the latter.)
This is the next key talking point for a winning candidate, and may be the ultimate solution to US immigration. It can and will gain popular support, but it will take someone sneaky enough to gain their party's support on other matters first; either after becoming the party's nominee or after being elected. Either one.
(If you propose this after being elected you might only last one term though; it's a bit of a rug pull. Better to pull the rug out from under your party rather than the voters.)
It's about investment funds and shareholders owning commercial property who push for RTO out of fear of their portfolio going down in value if people are not using the offices.
To be fair I think the only reason the conspiracy even exists is because, apparently, nobody knows what RTO is really about. IMO it's mostly just a power play and insecure executives, but they won't come out and say that of course. We're left to speculate, and naturally conspiracies thrive.
Legislation is frequently proposed to do just this: require all employers to use E-Verify to ensure they don't hire illegal workers. The same people who are constantly firing up voters about immigration are opposed to this. The political issue is valuable to them, as is cheap, cowed, disposable labor. And they know if they succeeded in shipping their workers back over the border there would be economic and political mayhem.
I expect endless demagoguery about immigration and performative cruelty, but nothing that will challenge the bottom line.
The current Republican nominee ran his entire campaign on hating immigrants and has been known to hire illegal immigrants. They don't actually want to crackdown on it they just want to campaign on it.
Legislation is meaningless if it is not going to be enforced or if it will be used to destroy competition. As in law enforcement cannot deal with all cases, but they certainly can be nudged to deal with businesses that corrupt government doesn't want operating.
I don't know that they will. For example, 90% of Trump's previous platform was the wall. That's all he could talk about. No wall to be found, and he doesn't even mention it anymore. Things change from campaign to office.
It’s a playbook as old as time. “At least we’re not <the other guy>”
When slavery was a thing, white southern workers made a lot less than northern workers. Racial superiority pumped the suckers up. Johnny Reb volunteered to be slaughtered so some aristocrat could own people.
Most of the illegal immigrant hoopla has been performative bullshit to make to easier to control employees. If you’re in the chicken processing business or need casual labor, it’s a hell of alot cheaper to avoid paying for social security, worker’s compensation, etc by hiring people whom you can easily exploit by dangling the sword of ICE over their heads.
The US governance model segments immigration and work regulation - the former is a federal matter, the latter is almost exclusively regulated by the states (including enforced of federal rules).
In recent years as conservatives have veered into a more overtly racist and reactionary movement that’s shifted a bit.
If I want to hire someone (local or remote) as an employer here, I better make sure the worker has a valid working permit. Fines for non-compliance towards the employer are huge, even for a single day of work. All paperwork has to be complete before any work is done. Even when hiring through intermediary companies who guarantee it's all legal, liability and fines remain in place for the ultimate employer if it turns out to be not so.