That’s a funny way to say “stop bussing in illegal immigrants and then call ICE when they get uppity”.
They may be permitted to stay at the conclusion of their hearing- but no one who is currently in the US legally should be waiting for an immigration hearing. It is possible for people with pending removal hearings to receive work authorization - but I would be very surprised if any of those placed on an ankle monitor had such authorization. One would think that those who qualified for employment authorization would be among those released on their own recognizance or on bond rather than ankle monitors. And if electronic monitoring as an alternative to incarceration wasn’t closely associated with lack of work authorizations, then ICE wouldn’t have used the information form those monitors to target raids
Thus, when we have a law that criminalizes the hiring of illegal immigrants, AND millions of illegal immigrants are hired anyway, AND almost no prosecutions of employers happen, I’m forced to conclude that it is not an accident.
It is deliberate.
It is designed to allow business owners to profit off of illegal immigrant labor while facing little risk of prosecution. Back to the title of the OP, “Why Weren’t Employers Arrested, Too?” It’s because our laws were crafted to make sure they aren’t arrested .
You left off “for good reasons, just ones I can’t see or understand”
Do some people/corporations game the system? Absolutely. We all know that they do, at all levels. People ALWAYS game the system. But you seem to want to ‘fix’ this by taking out some important checks on our system, such as plausible deniability. I mean, you’ve been shown that there are, literally, millions of people who are using false identities to get around the system. They are either buying black market papers or using someone else’s papers. What, exactly, do you expect employers to do? Assume the valid paperwork they are getting isn’t valid? How will that help the majority of legitimate, legal citizen Hispanics?? It’s, rightfully, on the employee to be providing legitimate paperwork. If they aren’t, it’s not on the employers to be digging into that to figure out if the paperwork is both valid AND legal, and the person presenting it is actually the person the paperwork is on. But if you start taking away plausible deniability on this the real effect will be companies will start questioning ALL Hispanics and their papers.
Screw that. It won’t affect you, but it WILL affect me and my family if they start doing that. I have no problem that, if caught doing something like a supervisor providing false paperwork to an employee to bring them on you throw the book at that person…we all know that happens, and that person SHOULD be prosecuted. I’m good with a large fine or whatever to the company as well. Make an example of them. But what you seem to be suggesting undercuts our very legal system, and I don’t think you even realize that. 
This is a complicated law in a complicated area of law. It was linked earlier, but here it is again.
There are exceptions and cross references, and defenses, and provisos about when defenses become unavailable. You cannot sum up what the law is with a sentence or two. It can be fun to play amateur prosecutor, but remember Dunning-Kruger. If you are not a lawyer in this field, you almost certainly don’t know all of how this works. (I am not a lawyer in this field. I do know a lot about how some of this works. But not all of it.)
Some reasonably well-informed notes:
Local police wouldn’t make the employer arrests. If there will be any, it will most likely be by federal agents after federal grand jury indictments. Those will come after the seized evidence has been examined, and, I predict, after some people who have intimate knowledge of the hiring practices have testified before the grand jury. Often there is no arrest and perp walk because, after an indictment is handed down, the person negotiates through their lawyer to turn themselves in.
The law contains a defense based on making good faith efforts to comply with documentation requirements, but that defense is unavailable if there is a “pattern or practice” of knowingly hiring ineligible workers, or if the employer has been informed of a failure to comply, and has not corrected it within 10 days.
Employers are informed of SSN issues such as apparent mismatches of information.
There is no requirement that an employer who is rejecting a document as not reasonably appearing to be valid or to relate to the person presenting it, tell the person specifically why it is being rejected. The employer is permitted to reject on that basis, and then ask if the person can present another document. The employer should probably document the issue in case of questions later, but no, I see no requirement that they have to point out, e.g., a typo in the spelling of the issuing state. (“Misissippi,” e.g.).
They aren’t gaming the system, they are using it as intended. Everything happening is exactly what it’s supposed to be.
Millions of illegal immigrants work for low wages.
Employers and the rest of the economy benefit.
Sweep up hundreds of illegal immigrants in well publicized raids.
Employers can continue to use this low wage/low benefit underclass of worker and threaten them as needed to keep them in line.
Illegal immigrants continue to enter the country with the prospect of employment, because they remain easily employable.
I think you want to use a different phrase than “plausible deniability” - typically “plausible deniability” doesn’t mean that I don’t know the papers are fake. It means that I can deny knowing that they are fake and be believed because there is no evidence to prove that I knew they were fake - even though I did know. Or that I left or was sent out of the room when discussions about hiring illegal aliens started specifically so that I can truthfully and plausibly deny having been present for any such discussions. IOW, if I don’t know it’s because I made an effort not to know. I don’t think that’s what you mean.
I don’t disagree with you about the effect of expecting employers to dig into every document - it probably would have the effect of making employers question documents provided by certain groups, just like the “ban the box” laws appear to be having an unintended effect of making it more difficult for certain groups to get hired. But I also want to point out that it’s not terribly uncommon to hear about employers who hire some or all employees “off the books” to avoid paying payroll taxes, or unemployment/workers comp premiums getting fined. Somehow, I find it hard to believe those employers are meticulous about getting I9 documentation - but I never hear about anyone being arrested for hiring people who can’t legally work. I don’t recall any of the prominent people who hired those who couldn’t legally work as household help getting arrested, not from Zoe Baird in 1993 to Heather Nauert in 2019. Now, some of the cases may have come to light after the statute of limitations had run out, but a couple of them were discovered within a year or two of the employment. It doesn’t look to me like the reason employers don’t get arrested is simply due to a lack of proof.
Because they vote Republican.
Yes, really. Welcome to Trump’s America.
Quite a useful tool for the corporation if the employees doing the grunt work start to get demanding! Always good to have a threat like that built right in!
I think that the law is set up to protect donations to the re-election campaigns of the authors of the legislation (but that is just the cynic in me).
No, it’s not. Entering the castle with a 14-year-old is illegal, period. But the Immigration Reform and Control Act requires only that employers make a good-faith judgement when deciding whether documents proving identity and right to work in the U.S. appear legitimate. With use of E-Verify not being mandatory (and by the way, it’s been said by some that E-Verify has a high error rate, perhaps as high as 15%) and employers not required to keep copies of documents (except those used for photo matching), it can be tough to prove the employer is in violation if all the Forms I-9 are completed and retained properly.
Your conclusion doesn’t logically follow because one of the main difficulties in prosecuting illegal hiring is the same as prosecuting any other type of criminal case, especially white collar crime - the difficulty of obtaining evidence to prove intent and other elements of the offense. White collar crime is its own animal in many ways and one of those is in terms of how it is investigated, how and what types of evidence are gathered, and how legal culpability can be ascertained and subsequently proven in court. Now there are certainly other issues like whether the relevant enforcement agencies are underfunded or understaffed but those issues with prosecuting/enforcing white collar crime will still remain to some degree or another.
So you can’t just cite the low number of prosecutions or convictions (whatever they are) and assume that is dispositive evidence of some rigged system. Just like you can’t easily dismiss the sometimes sophisticated means people use to commit fraud as to their work status. Seems to me to if the work status documentation is that easy to forge then the government should take steps to make such fraud more difficult to achieve or use some other means to reduce the incidence of illegal workers attempting such fraud. As far as the employer’s burden it should remain essentially what it is now and the most that can be fairly expected, making a reasonable effort to insure the relative documents are valid.
Except it IS mandatory in Mississippi. And that law was not followed. And there’s still not a single white person arrested in connection to it.
If it is mandatory in Mississippi, that’s state law, not federal. ICE has no jurisdiction to go after an employer for failure to comply with state law. If the state doesn’t want to enforce its law, that’s on the state.
So why hasn’t a Mississippi law enforcement agency (local police, county sheriff) gone after the law breakers?
Quick question: What is the lowest level law enforcement action that involves a person suspected of a crime being brought into custody? I know the television terms are detained, brought in for questioning, and “arrested under suspicion”, but I’m not sure what the proper actual term is.
Next question: What is the threshold of evidence required for probable cause for the above law enforcement action for illegal employment of unauthorised workers, and how is that threshold different than the threshold required for an ICE raid?
My view is that if there is suspicion and evidence that a company is illegally employing dozens of unauthorised workers, enough suspicion and evidence to raid that company’s factory floor and detain all its floor workers, that should also provide probable cause for a custodial action against the company’s hiring managers. I understand people saying that’s not how it’s done. However, I think the people arguing for the executive “perp walks” would like to know why it can’t be done. If the police and agents involved in the Mississippi raids had wanted to also go after the hiring managers, could they legally have done so? If not, why not?
PDF: https://www.e-verify.gov/sites/default/files/everify/data/FindingsEVerifyAccuracyEval2012.pdf
“A 2012 audit commissioned by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) division of the Department of Homeland Security, which maintains E-Verify, found that the system had erroneously cleared nearly half of unauthorized workers because of document fraud.”
But yes if employers aren’t using it despite state requirements, it’s going to do even less.
I don’t think there’s really a way to make E-Verify work without kicking a bunch of Americans out of the workforce too.
As gets discussed ad nauseum in threads about voter ID, REAL ID cards, etc., the realities of people’s lives mean that names don’t always match from document to document, and fixing these discrepancies can take a lot of time, effort, and money. And being banned from working is a lot more serious than being banned from commercial air travel or even being banned from voting.
How do you know they aren’t? Maybe right at this moment they’re going over evidence seized at the initial raid. Maybe they’re going to use that evidence to request a search warrant for corporate HQ in order to gather more evidence of this offense and possible others.
You have no idea what evidence they were able to gather or what kind of case they could make now or in some hypothetical future. In either case you might have a team of attorneys spending years going through thousands or tens of thousands of documents (that may be lowballing it) and trying to figure out who knew what, who was in charge of/ordered what and how to make a winnable case out of it. Prosecuting white collar crime can not just be difficult from an evidentiary standpoint but that’s further complicated by the fact that even finding that evidence can be incredibly time-consuming and expensive.
Then you can add in the fact that many subjects of a white collar criminal investigation are powerful entities with abundant resources and who cross jurisdictional lines. These are all reasons why local law enforcement usually leaves such cases to either state or federal agencies with greater resources and reach. They may be able to prosecute something locally or they may gather evidence with the aim of turning it over to such a state or federal agency for them to take up. Either way all of this can take a great deal of time before anything reaches the level of actually bringing something to court or making arrests.