Like if someone presents a high quality fake ID? Sure.
Heck, just legalize it the whole stupid thing. You’ve already got an underpaid working class and enough people who seem to like it that way, so just create a guest-worker program exempt from minimum wage laws and stop wasting time and resources on enforcement.
Look, it’s easier than it sounds from a technical level. No fancy biometric Id cards needed. No card at all.
There would be an app. And employers would just have to get a smartphone or borrow one.
They would have to enter : the approximate work hours and location of their new hire. Take a photo of his or her face. Enter the SSN and his claimed name.
There is one SSN per living citizen for the most part.
If two people get registered through the app and the 2 different employers list a person working a long distance away during the same hours and their faces are dissimilar.
Then it’s just a matter of scheduling an Ins agent to visit and make the arrest.
Yes, there are a small number of SSNs floating around that belong to someone deceased that haven’t been marked as dead.
A larger number of them that go to people who aren’t in the labor pool.
So the proposed system wouldn’t be perfect, but a few more checks (check the claimed name, check the approximate age and gender. That is, the employer would enter in what they think the new hire’s real age and gender might be, or a machine learning system would guess it from photos within ± 10 years) would close most of the gaps.
Even then, it doesn’t have to be perfect. If 9 of the estimate 10 million illegal workers were found and deported it would still be a huge change.
Or not deported. Since the government could have done something like this decades ago, I think it’s a basic failure of the federal government to enforce the rules. They let all these people in by not doing anything meaningful to stop employers hiring them. So I think these people should have the right to stay, they should just seal the system against more newcomers.
I am actual, native-born American who did take a job as “an extra set of hands” in the construction industry a number of years ago. So there are a few of us willing to do this. You are correct, though, there aren’t many of us. The fact so many American are out of shape doesn’t help, although working such a job can make you more fit and healthy in the long run.
On a couple occasions while doing such work (including working on landscape around a building) I got comments along the lines of “why are you doing this? You aren’t Mexican.” but that just show how entrenched the practices and biases in that area are.
In Canada the essentially universal ID is your medicare card. True, some temporary residents can get one, but I assume they expire when their residency permit expires. It is not biometric, but has a photo. The same photo that appears on your driver’s licence if you have one.
Strict residency requirements for workers never made much sense. But both parties have been pushing variations on punishing aliens, punishing employers, & “securing the border” for so long they’ve come to believe their own press. They think this is what they have to do.
Remember “containment”? How it led to an unwinnable war in Vietnam and atrocities in Cambodia? Once again we refuse to get off the ride to hell.
This fear-mongering about aliens will lead to a race war and the eventual loss of the Southwest. The end is visible now. I think there’s one way it will end up, and it will mean the liberation of whatever we’re calling occupied Mexico. But there are decades of hell before we get there. 
DO they actually make an effort to follow the law, though?
I thought one of the reasons that illegal immigrants were so in demand is that many (not all) employers exploited the fact that they could get away with breaking various labor laws. (Minimum wage was a big one, also various working conditions, etc)
Aren’t a great many of them exploited? (I’m genuinely asking this)
Many aren’t, but if whatever someone is doing is good enough to trick the feds and pass e-verify, I don’t want someone punished for following the rules. The OP is proposing they be punished anyway.
Define “exploit”? They’re coming here looking for work for a decade before going back to Mexico to retire and let the next generation take care of them. They’re getting jobs in the fields that they expected to get before leaving Mexico and they’re making the sort of money that they were expecting to receive.
It would be just as easy to make the argument that they’re exploiting us, since we work our asses off until we’re 70 and spend a lot of it stressed out and in debt for school and housing and cars. In Mexico, no school, you work for ten years, and when you get back you’re largely done for life so long as you make enough babies to support yourself.
I always found it somewhat face-palmy during the Bush administration when people would say that the US couldn’t gain local sympathy in the Middle East so long as we were torturing people and it’s like, wait, you think that all of the dictators and terrorists over there aren’t torturing people? Of all things that they hate the US for, I’m pretty sure that’s only ever raised by any of them in order to use our own media against us not because there’s actually a huge amount of hatred of brutal tactics in the region.
But you’ll note that nobody ever pointed out how silly the US media was for trying to raise that argument, and that’s because most Americans have no external view of life in other countries and other cultures. Looking at Mexico and viewing the people who come from there as doomed migrants with no prospects beyond those that we give them is silly. You may as well say that a hunky young man who tries to suckle up to a rich old woman, to make her his sugarmama, is being exploited by her because well…how else is he to live?
If you give a stray cat food, but you don’t give it a new home, are you exploiting it? I mean, sure, you have the option to have given it a home instead, but it’s not your cat and fundamentally you’re not obligated to take care of it. And it’s not like if you don’t take care of the cat that it’s going to die. It will just hunt or get food from somewhere else.
Mexico is a poor place to live. A significant number of people don’t get a full education. A lot of people live without plumbing or electricity, nor floors. If your skin is too dark, your ability to ever get anywhere in life is going to be severely reduced. But at the same time, Mexico is not the 3rd circle of Hell and not having plumbing doesn’t actually make people die miserable and regretting their life. It’s quite possible that your average Mexican ends up having a higher life satisfaction rating than your average American because the way the human brain works is non-logical.
If we believe that the life that Mexicans live is unacceptable and immoral to allow, then the answer would be to unilaterally annex Mexico as the 51st state and start establishing good infrastructure, proper schools, etc. No? If it’s unacceptable for people to live and work there, then how is it moral to only look after the ones who come here to work? Why are we allowing them to leave and go back to Mexico?
Or, alternately, if we believe that Mexico is a real country with people who are free to stay or emigrate as they will, based on their personal life goals, then saying that we’re somehow “bad” for forcing Mexican citizens and their children to live in Mexico, go to Mexican schools, and work for Mexican businesses doesn’t make sense. Again, if somehow we do believe that Mexico is 3rd circle of Hell, then the right answer isn’t ensuring minimum wage for illegal workers, it’s to invade and occupy the country just to the South of us, so that we can save all these people from the horror of life in Mexico.
The Mexicans have a system that they’re happy with, using the wealth disparity between the US and Mexico, to effectively retire young and make a lot of babies. We have a system that we’re happy with, to leave dull and labor-intense jobs to Mexicans, so that we can work in front of a computer with the A/C blazing. There are issues with this arrangement, but exploitation is not really one of them. Everyone’s coming into it with eyes wide open, no one is going starving or being thrown into a pit with lions, and people on both sides are retiring happy with grandchildren to bounce on their knees.
This post shows incredible ignorance not only of México but of the life of migrant workers in your country. People do not return here after working in the US and retire and make babies! That is ridiculous. Where did you come up with something so absurd? That sounds fantastic! I wish I had known a long time ago I would have gone to the US 50 years ago and have been retired 40 years.
And please spare me the American “saviour” attitude. I’d say the way things are going for your country you need to worry more about your future than ours. We’re starting to think the infamous wall might not be such a bad idea.
Sometimes it’s not that farm employers hire folks from Mexico to exploit them. I have a relative who earned their living growing strawberries in SoCal. I remember being surprised when watching her do her payroll when I saw that many of the paychecks were larger than mine, and I was a graphic artist working the printing trades. No white Americans ever sought employment to pick strawberries. Not even one. I asked.
I doubt many American citizens are just pining to get back to their first love - itinerant farm labor, so no one is stealing any American jobs.
All of this uproar is pure political theater. I guess everyone needs someone to look down upon. I still have a nephew down there who likes to complain that the Mexicans are taking all the jobs - never mind that he’s creeping up on 60 and probably hasn’t held an actual job for more than 10 years in his entire life.
I knew a guy who would both rant about how we need to crack down on illegals as they’re destroying the country, and also griped about how the undocumented workers he hired in his restaurant were always causing him problems. It would be hilarious if there wasn’t so much economic and personal damage from the political theater about immigration.
Concerning #1: I can only assume you’ve never met a farmer.
Concerning #2, (and probably #3): My husband applied to a pork-processing plant. He was never called, despite the constant radio ads and billboards telling us they need workers. There are many illegal and legal immigrants here.
Got a cite for that? There’s a difference between voter ID laws and biometric IDs.
Can you cite this now? Can you tell us where to find it? Because without it, someone might think you are fear-mongering.
Don’t target the employers. Target the money. If there were no benefits given to non-citizens, the nation would be in better shape financially. No proof of citizenship? No SNAP. No Section 8. No welfare. And tax the bejeebers out of remittances. If people could not send so much money back home, it would stay here and be used in our economy. And fewer people would come here if the risks outweighed the benefits.
Most of my family has Mexican passports from living there for 20 years and I’ve spent years of my life there. And yes, it was hyperbole that Mexicans retire after moving back. I believed that was implicit.
I’m pretty sure that my point was the Americans aren’t saving anyone, though I should have done a better job of emphasizing that, for the most part, Mexico is just some country with cars and schools and factories, etc.
Wait, wait, wait… You want to hold wealthy white businessmen responsible for breaking the law? Pffft, LOL, that’s never going to happen.
No sane lawmaker is going to actually punish American capitalists when they could be blaming their problems on impoverished foreigners.
How much of the $98.6 Billion of the 2017 USDA’s 15 food and nutrition assistance programs went to illegal immigrants?
Targeting the employers is simply the efficient and accurate way to target the money. Employers are the ones providing the money. The employer’s payroll is the ultimate source of the problem - unless you count the problems inside of Mexico, and US politicians are not going to fix Mexico. If immigrants taking jobs is a problem, then anyone willing to hire on insufficient documentation is actually CREATING the problem, not just making it worse or something. People would not look for jobs unless they knew there was a good chance of getting them.
I wasn’t aware that living here gave someone citizenship in our country. There are many thousands of foreigners living here. But they are not citizens.