Illegal Immigration: Why not just focus on the employers?

[rjung]

@John Mace

Just speaking anecdotally, I know a few guys who run some small businesses and they tell me they hire people they “know” are illegal, but that they have either forged or stolen IDs, and they really can’t do much about it.

Really? Someone held a gun to their heads and threatened to shoot them if they didn’t hire the illegals?

[Fear_Itself]

@Loopydude

Prices for, say, things like California produce skyrocket, and consumers wail and gnash teeth and demand change.

As has been pointed out in other immigration threads, this just isn’t so:

There might be modest price increases. I say “might” because farmworker wages typically account for less than 10 percent of the retail cost of fresh fruits and vegetables, and even in the absence of a new guestworker program, there is no possibility that all illegal workers would disappear overnight; ending illegal employment, were we to make such a choice, would be a process, not an event, permitting farmers time to adjust. But even if the entire illegal agricultural workforce were somehow to magically disappear overnight, the impact on supermarket prices would be extremely modest and short-lived: **Research suggests that supermarket prices for fresh produce would rise about 6 percent ** during summer and fall (when imports are small and prices are lowest) for one or two years, before farmers adjusted to the new circumstances. In the winter and spring, the price rise would be even smaller, perhaps 4 percent for one or two years. Such price increases are less than the variation between supermarkets, and would in any case apply to only a very small portion of the nation’s food bill.

That means apples would go from $.99 a pound to $1.05 a pound. That will hardly cause widespread gnashing of teeth.

[Loopydude]

Well, what will skyrocket, then, nannies?

[Eva_Luna]

@brickbacon

But you must consider that a lot of illegals have real/real-looking documents. Not every business owner can afford a private detective to invistigate their employee’s immigration status. In a lot of places, a crack down on employers just means they won’t hire any Latinos.

Speaking as someone whose job is to counsel HR and recruiters in a very large company (and one which, I may add, does not knowingly hire people who are not authoriized to work) re: which documents are and are not acceptable as proof of employment authorization, and how to handle it if they’re not, let me just mention that discriminating against job applicants on the basis of national origin, race, or ethnicity is also illegal.

My company’s interpretation of employment antidiscrimination laws is such that this covers accent, etc., to the point that even if we suspect someone has presented forged or modified documents, we are concerned about being accused of discrimination for raising the issue (on one occasion, an applicant presented a document that had been modified to have a validity period that doesn’t exist). On those (thankfully rare) occasions, we usually just ask the applicant to specify alternative documentation; even specifying which documents the employer is willing to accept is not permissible, even when, for example, I’ve just prepared an H-1B petition for someone and know damn well that there is only one combination of documents the person is going to be able to present that will satisfy the legal requirements for employment authorization.

The I-9 form, which all U.S. workers have to complete when starting a new job, requires that you list a Social Security number, but a Social Security card is only one of the acceptable documents for proving employment authorization. In fact, there are certain categories of people who are authorized to work in the U.S., but who will not immediately be able to obtain Social Security numbers; Social Security can take several weeks or longer to verify an applicant’s employment eligibility before issuing a card, which frequently happens with people who have just been granted employment authorization pursuant to one of the employment visa categories.

And by the way, the compromise bill currently includes a required employment eligibility verification system. There’s a section-by-section summary here; see p. 24.

Eva Luna, Immigration Paralegal