E-verify isnt very accurate either.
About half were let go very soon. It appears they were arrested based upon the color of their skin, not their status.
I think you are making the perfect the enemy of the good. E-verify may not be foolproof, but it’s better than not using it. And if you give employers safe harbor if they use it, that would have a significant impact. Strict liability is fantasy land.
Why not go after the employers? I think a lot of it is that business owners/managers tend to vote Republican. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you. Right wing logic boggles the mind. “We gotta get those lazy moochers out of our country! Let’s arrest them at work!” Wait a minute, if they’re working, they’re not moochers. Then by removing the parents, society has to pick up the pieces and the tab for the children.
No, as I am against strict liability.
Not only does your cite say that there are errors, but also, it only says that most workers were approved. It does not say anything about whether or not the information that they presented to the employer was valid.
My point is only that I wouldn’t rely on e-verify to protect me from prosecution. And yes, if my freedom is on the line, good is not good enough, and perfect is barely acceptable.
You say that you would give employers safe harbor for using it, but it’s not as if it is all that hard to defraud either. If someone presents to me documents that belong to an authorized worker, then it will pass, even if the person presenting them to me wouldn’t, giving employers the exact same cover they currently have on the I-9’s.
Remember, search warrants were served. Likely the evidence will be sorted and assessed, there still could be arrests of the management or fine vs the corp.
Those people arent flight risks.
I think you may be misunderstanding what those statistics mean. As explained in the actual document, “the overall accuracy of E-Verify for employment-authorized workers, as measured by the FNC (Final Nonconfirmations) accuracy rate, was approximately 94 percent” means that about 94% of the people receiving non-confirmations (that is, were denied clearance by e-Verify) were in fact not authorized to work, and six percent of the denials were mistakes where people who really were US citizens or otherwise authorized “failed.”
However, this study focused on the accuracy of e-Verify for employment-authorized workers, which are people legally allowed to work in the US. The study did not even attempt to figure out how many unauthorized workers “passed” by submitting stolen or falsified documents. Research attempting to answer that question is spottier, but see for example the Cato Institute, which thinks e-Verify catches fewer than one in six unauthorized workers.
If you have enough probable cause to arrest somebody for working illegally, how do you not have enough probable cause to arrest his employer for hiring an illegal worker?
Knowingly hiring. There’s nothing illegal about hiring the guy, even if he’s here illegally; the violation is hiring and knowing about his status.
ICE has access to resources that the employer does not.
Telling whether or not someone is authorized to work is one thing. Telling whether or not it was known by the employer is another.
So hypothetically, if ICE believed that the companies were “willfully and unlawfully” hiring illegal aliens to work, they should make an arrest since it would actually be illegal to hire the guy? What about in the case of the actual raids, where documents unsealed after the raid indicate that the agents carrying out the raid to arrest 680 people (300 of whom had to be released the next day) did actually believe that the companies did, in fact know about their status?
If a cop says he doesn’t have the evidence to back it up, but believes someone is guilty, what happens? What do you think should happen?
Well, except for the fact he’s sitting there at a table plucking chickens every day. If you didn’t employ him, what is he doing there? Did he just walk in and start working for free?
Maybe we’d better check all your records. And call in the health department, because you’re obviously not following safety regs. Better just shut you down until we get this all sorted out.
Part of the answer is right there in the OP. The government isn’t interested in dealing with illegal immigration. Why? Due to economic pressures that ultimately mean it’s better off to have illegal immigrants in certain jobs, so that businesses may thrive. The government, as a whole, is interested in businesses staying in busisness, rather than going out of business. And That’s the Business! 
You have 3 business days from start of employment to when the I-9 needs to be filled out, so the answer that I would give, were I an unethical employer seeking to break the law, I would say that that person had just started and hadn’t filled out their paperwork yet.
There are two reasons I don’t employ people under the table. The first is that I think it is wrong. The second is that it is illegal and I wouldn’t want to get caught, even if I thought I could talk my way out of it.
There are other employers who feel otherwise, and do employ people under the table. The precise strategies that they use are not what I am looking to discuss here.
From your post, it sounds like you are skeptical about under the table work going on, is that actually the case?
If he’s white, he’s all right.
If he’s brown, he’s going down.
Anecdote:
My wife used to work in the hotel industry which hired a large number of immigrants to clean the rooms. They all had Social Security cards, but a large number of them were fakes. Sometimes one of them would get flagged as fraudulent, and so the worker was fired, only to show up two weeks later with a different social security card under a new name and get rehired.
These employers know who they are hiring.
And if I, as an employer, deny someone with reasonable documents that appear to belong to the person presenting them, then the defense of, “I knew they were illegal”, will not hold up when I am sued for racial discrimination.
The employee has a number of protections by law that limits what the employer can “know”, or what they can do based on what they “know.” Change those laws, so that the candidate cannot sue the employer because the employer “knew” that they were not authorized to work in the US, and then you can hold the employer more liable.
Surely. And this would probably lead to fewer undocumented workers being hired for these jobs. In times of high unemployment, this would be a boon to citizens and documented workers who are looking for a job. In times of low unemployment, there would not be enough people to fill the jobs, and the businesses would suffer. It’s better for society if these workers are documented, but it still benefits society sometimes when they are not.
What I think should happen is that the same standard should apply whether he’s a poor brown or rich white person. In the ICE raid in question, roughly half the workers picked up were released the next day - why didn’t they pick up some of the rich white guys, look into it more, and then release them if they didn’t have enough to keep holding them?
Also, the vast majority of arrests are made with only ‘probable cause’ or ‘articulable suspicion’, there doesn’t need to be conclusive evidence. So the majority of arrests of poor people happen ‘arrest first, evidence later’. In the case of ICE the standard appears to be significantly lower in practice.
This is not exactly groundbreaking information. John Maynard Friedman I am not. 