Well, Jeffrey Passel of the Pew Hispanic Center sez (n.b.: I had to get that out of cache) it’s a quarter.
So that would be somewhere around 8 or 9 million illegal residents who didn’t even arrive in the US legally and have no visas to check. So no, I’m afraid I’m still not convinced that the self-deportation effect would take care of a major amount of the problem of deporting illegal residents.
Fair enough. But we’ve cut the cost for 25% by 90% So if this was going to cost $10 billion, we’re now down to $7.75 billion, or just 77.5% of the total. Do some of the earlier things I mentioned earlier in this thread and that number should come down quite a bit more. And another thing that has to be taken into the eqyuation is the amount saved on medical care and education. In fact, we might even make money on the deal.
Sure I do, let me educate you: You accuse me of waging a “war on illegal immigrants”, when actually, I am waging a “war on recalcitrant employers”. My plan will work even if no illegals are arrested; with no jobs, they will go home. But you would rather portray me as being a hardass toward the workers, which is an easier argument to knock down. That is a straw man.
Which means we cannot prosecute them at all, because we have given them no legal means to separate legal workers from illegal ones. You are shielding business.
How about we pass an enforceable law that makes illegals unattractive to employers, and let the free market decide what a fair wage is? You are in favor of a free market aren’t you?
Another straw man. You don’t want to argue about my real proposal for prosecuting employers, you would rather portray me as wanting to allow mass arrests of brown people. That clearly implies racism, and is a strawman argument to boot. Arresting illegals is optional; my goal is to eliminate opportunities for them in this country so they will leave, or at least stop coming here.
Why can’t we address both sides of the problem? Give american companies incentives to improve working conditions and wages at their mexican (hell, why not all foreign) facilities in concert with securing our borders. Is this reasonable?
Sure we do. It’s called the I-9 audit. Every employee hired by a U.S. business since 1986 is required to complete an I-9 form, and employers are required to maintain them for three years from the employee’s date of hire or one year after the employee is terminated, whichever is later. There’s even a sliding scale of monetary fines for violations, depending on number and severity, but in practice, the vast majority of employers are never audited.
I am aware of the I9 requirement, I even mentioned it in post #53. The only problem is, it has a loophole you could drive an INS Hummer through. If applicants use forged documents, the worker is responsible, not the employer. Employers have no incentive (and no means) to insure that the documents are not forged. It simply isn’t their problem.
Under my plan, employers do not have to judge whether documents are real or not. All they have to do is check the website, and avoid hiring workers whose SSN returns a “declined” judgment. And they would be criminally responsible and subject to asset forfeiture if they do.
Would you have this database show the name matching the SS#? If not, then it doesn’t solve the problem of people who use SS numbers that belong to someone else. If so, then I foresee personal privacy issues.
We could try, but how many Mexican workers are fleeing Mexico because they can’t make good wages at American companies there? I don’t think American companies are the problem-- what % of the Mexican workforce is even employed by American companies?
The employer would enter the SSN and the information supplied by the worker (name, birth date, address, etc.); the website would check it against the data associated with the number in the SS records. All the employer would see is “Approved” or “Declined”. I would also envision additional security data, such as the dollar amount of the tax refund or tax liability from the most recent tax return submitted by the holder of that SSN. This number would not reveal anything about the finances of the worker, and it would change each year, which would frustrate workers who share numbers. Each verification would be assigned a transaction number; if the employer is ever challenged on an employee, he can supply the transaction number which can be used to confirm that the number was valid at the time the employee was hired.
I am certain there are other security measures that could be devised to make this plan secure and accurate. As I pointed out in the other immigration thread:
There are buttloads of american businesses in Mexico - especially in manufacturing and retail. I heard a story on NPR the other day (anecdotal perhaps, but its an example) about a woman who had a job in Mexico, but because the pay and opportunities where so much better here, she decided to risk it and sprint across the border with 3 very young children. Now I’m not sure if the company she was working for was american or not, but it speaks to the heart of the issue, which you raised - making people’s lives better in Central and South America will significantly reduce the amount of illegal immigration. If American companies are paying well, it’ll force other companies to pay well over time.