Yes, we know that the law is setup to let white business owners break the law with impunity, do you have another point to make?
The law is set up to protect me from an employee committing fraud.
But of course “with impunity” is false. Employers are prosecuted. Although the numbers are farcical.
No, that you’re a US Citizen or US National or authorized to work in the USA; it is perfectly possible to be able to work in the US legally without being a green card holder. A “green card” is a specific type of document granted to certain types of foreign permanent residents: not everybody who’s authorized to work has one, and not every foreign permanent resident is allowed to work.
Here’s an article from 17 August about the Mississippi chicken processing plant raids.
I’m presuming that the ICE officers shared the evidence in the affidavits and reasons for conducing the raids with the local police department or sheriff’s office. If so, I think it’s pretty clear that if the police had probable cause to also arrest the hiring managers if they wanted to.
Exactly. The law is set up to keep the employer blameless.
It defies logic that millions of illegal immigrants have jobs and the employers don’t know, it is simply very difficult to prosecute them when the law is designed to protect them.
It is entirely logical. Employee shows the required documents and we fill out the form. What would defy logic would be punishing me for an employee’s fraud.
You seem to be confused as to what “probable cause” means. First you say it requires no evidence whatsoever and then you say it requires less than solid evidence. The first description is absolutely wrong and the second is mostly wrong, depending on one’s definition of “solid evidence.” Just because PC is one of the lower standards of evidence (and not even the lowest) doesn’t mean it requires no evidence or nothing beyond a hunch or suspicion (the closest to that being reasonable suspicion but notice the word “reasonable”).
Probable Cause is usually defined as something like… “knowledge of facts and circumstances that would lead a reasonable person to believe that a crime has been committed and that said person is involved in the commission of said crime.” Notice those first five words. That knowledge of articulable facts and circumstances along with a reasonable logical/causal connection to a crime is the evidence part. Since, you know, PC is a standard of evidence and the probable part refers to a factual determination of likelihood based on that evidence.
And unsurprisingly the PC for different crimes is different. Just because PC exists to believe that certain workers are in the country or working illegally does not imply that that evidence also serves as PC to arrest the owners for illegally hiring those workers. Similarly, the evidence of PC necessary to obtain a search warrant for illegal workers would not necessarily serve as PC to obtain and execute a search warrant on corporate offices where there is no evidence of the direct presence of illegal workers. As others have said this is how it generally works, law enforcement uses a “foot in the door” to hopefully gather more evidence. And in some situations this is the only practical way to go about it because of pesky things like “due process.”
So, you don’t interview or otherwise check into the fitness for someone to work for your firm? You just hire anyone who can show you a document with a name on it? And this is true for the hundreds of thousands of employers who provide millions of jobs for illegal aliens?
Anyone who hires hundreds of illegal workers should be punished. They cease to be victims and become willing participants in the fraud, if only because they deliberately avoid becoming aware of their workers status.
No the law is set up like the vast majority of criminal laws in the US (and the UK, Canada, Australia, etc) in that it requires a criminal intent. That is the general rule in the US and all Common Law jurisdictions and exceptions are exceedingly narrow. A legislature, state or federal, cannot simply eliminate that requirement without likely running afoul of Constitutional Due Process guarantees. And in many jurisdictions even some strict liability offenses such as statutory rape or selling alcohol to a minor allow for a “good faith” defense based on fraud which is directly analogus to what’s happening here and what the federal government allows with regards to employers.
So do you believe that all criminal offenses that require a criminal intent are set up that way so people can break the law with impunity or is this a special case for some reason?
My understanding of the law l, and I believe it’s been confirmed in this thread, is that employers are required by law to accept the documents as valid if they reasonably appear so. They’re not, I think, allowed to “otherwise check into the fitness for someone to work for your firm”, at least with regard to their immigration status.
Let’s take the selling alcohol offense as an example.
Imagine that law without a requirement that the seller ID the buyer, just that they have to “knowingly” sell to a minor. The result is (the analogy with illegal labor) that you have literally millions of sales of alcohol to minors, with some liquor stores selling to hundreds of minors, with law enforcement punishing ONLY the minors, because they’re the ones caught with alcohol. All with the liquor store owners rarely getting punished because they were “defrauded” by the minors, who told them they’re over 21.
This is the law we have here, where employers are granted cover unless they violate the law in the most egregious and brazen fashion imaginable. Employers reap the benefits of low cost labor, and a labor force afraid to involve authorities in any illegal activity, and are shielded from prosecution by a law that requires they know something, but doesn’t ask them to attempt to discover that information.
That is indeed the law, that (at least in CA) if the Minor furnishes a reasonable looking ID. The same for the feds and hiring illegals- if you fill out the I9 based upon a reasonable submitted iD, you are in the clear.
So your example is faulty.
The law is set up by people who don’t want to really deport workers, or affect business, so yes, that is correct.
If half of a liquor stores customers are underage drinkers, then isn’t that a pretty good indication that they’re doing a poor job of checking for fake ID’s? Your cite has an example of a store clerk being punished for inadequately inspecting a drivers license.
From post #124:
I think wilfully ignoring ankle monitors fails a due diligence test.
Yes, as "*Example: A liquor store clerk checked a minor’s I.D. as he purchased two 6 packs of beer. The clerk neither removed the I.D. card nor asked the minor to remove the I.D. from his wallet where it was partially concealed behind a plastic window. The card purported to be a California I.D. card that was issued by the California Department of Motor Vehicles.
Had the clerk removed the card, she would have seen that the card
had no magnetic strip on the back,
had print that was typewritten instead of computer generated,
had a raised photo which was separately attached instead of one that was computer generated as a part of the card, and
that the colors on the card were actually different than those that appear on California issued I.D. cards.
As a result, the clerk was held liable for selling alcohol to a minor because the court could not conclude that she reasonably relied on a bona fide identification card*"
No, since " …as they waited on immigration hearings", that means they are not necessarily illegals.
Cheesesteak,
I think it’s now fairly well-established that the law doesn’t work they way you’d like it to, but I’m not sure you’ve even thought through the consequences of your apparently-preferred policy anyways. If ICE starts arresting CEOs and HR directors for hiring too many illegal immigrants, companies are going to react to that. They’re going to stop hiring people that they think might be illegal immigrants. And in at least some cases they’ll use factors for determining who might be an illegal immigrant that you (and I) would probably prefer they didn’t. Your apparently-preferred policy would have the effect of harming minorities who are here legally.
If they can’t show me the required documents, that is one reason I may not hire them. If they can show me the required documents, and they appear to be in order, I do not have grounds to reject them based on their immigration status.
You have not justified this policy change.
Prove it.
Based on the USA Today article, I’m presuming they don’t have an Employment Authorization Document. When Can Asylum Applicants Get a Work Permit (EAD Card)? | Nolo In a company where 50% of the employees were not authorised to work, it would be surprising if they were strictly by-the-book on those documents.
Regardless, the two pertinent facts are that ICE had evidence for the search warrants, and subsequently 50% of the employees were found to be unauthorised. At first glance, that seems to me like probable cause for arresting the hiring managers under the statute cited by Broomstick.
8 U.S. Code § 1324a. Unlawful employment of aliens
No, but that might put into question whether or not the papers presented were legitimate. If they HAD legitimate paperwork when they were hired, why are they awaiting a hearing now? One might think that their uncertain immigration status would have been brought up at that time.
In the ‘rational immigration’ thread, I detailed where my thoughts on criminal employer punishments fit into an immigration policy.
However, absent that, I still think it’s racist as fuck to have an immigration law that makes <finger quotes> hiring an illegal immigrant <end finger quotes> a crime but sets the system up so that hardly anyone can be prosecuted for it, while the illegal immigrants themselves (any anyone nearby who’s brown enough to pass) get rounded up by the hundred and thrown behind bars.
You do realize, as with most legal language like this, that terms like “knowingly” when they appear in a statute are not given a colloquial or dictionary definition but a specific legal one don’t you? And when analyzing cases under such a seemingly vague standard (knowingly, reasonable, whatever) that Courts have formulated numerous complex, multi-factor, multi-step legal tests for determining what exactly those terms mean in their respective contexts? This is not new stuff, our legal system has been working this stuff out for centuries and maybe the people who create and administer these laws just might understand the facts and issues better than you do. And maybe if we do need to change a law or procedure that input should come from people who understand how the law exists and functions presently before they advocate for some future change