When it comes to employment, adverse actions includes terminations, refusals to hire, and refusals of promotion. If the company based their decision not to send him to training based on a tentative nonconfirmation from E-Verify that is a textbook example of an adverse action.
It wasn’t. When you receive a tentative nonconfirmation from E-Verify it specifically tells the employer they cannot take an adverse action based on that. Either the utility company screwed up, you were fed misinformation on why this person wasn’t in training, or your recollection is off.
Some small employers do have inadequate resources for implementing thorough checking of immigration status for their employees. If Immigration enforcement offered assistance to the prospective employer, without bullying the employees the cost benefit. for both ICE, and small business owners would be motivating. It could be done via email, with minimal physical visits, at local offices. This isn’t rocket science.
The small businesses aren’t the problem, anyway. Employers of fifty or more seasonal employees are unquestionably aware that a large percentage of their employees are immigrants. and the cost of verifying their legal status is THE EMPLOYER’S RESPONSIBILITY. Simply enforce RICO warrants on CEO’s and COO’s all businesses convicted of employing illegal workers twice in the same five year period. Confiscate the business’s assets, as allowed for ongoing criminal enterprises. Declare the shares to have no value, and sell the assets to cover the costs.
When you motivate the people who can actually make the changes, the changes will occur.
Tris
It might cut down on some political campaign funding.
Now you’re just being ridiculous. But sure, fine, religious or extremely small business (less than 3-5 people, not 50!), fine. Barely makes a difference then.
We don’t have a workable system for verifying eligibility to work because powerful interests with political pull want to be able to employ illegals, treat them poorly and pay them less.
There’s already workarounds for that. It would be trivial to add e-verify to the list. There’s plenty of things that are required to be submitted online but employers below a certain threshold (for employee count, income, tax due per period etc) are allowed to do in other ways or not do at all. I’m going to guess the Amish already either fit into one of those categories or they have outside help with this kind of thing and whoever does that would handle this as well. If Amish societies become the new refuge for illegal migrant workers, then we can work on that.
But we’d get back all those jobs they stole. There’s unquestionably thousands of migrant workers that come up from Mexico to work in farms in Summer. If you crack down on that, all the people complaining that they took 'er jerbs, could go work there.
The OP mentioned biometrics, K9bfriender changed that to facial recognition. There’s other types of biometrics. Finger prints and hand stamps, for example. Interestingly, someone I know added a handstamp time clock to his business and his employees wouldn’t use it because they didn’t want their fingerprints being taken. Understood. But to be clear these machines don’t look at your fingerprints or even the bottom of your hand at all. They take a picture from above and use finger length and distance apart (IIRC) to set up a way to recognize you.
One comment: the illegal immigrants didn’t directly “steal” jobs. More jobs were created to take advantage of the illegal immigrants being available. If a *real *set of policies and enforcement mechanisms were put in place, it would need to be done gradually, and the employers probably need at least a partial amnesty program. (so all 10 million or so illegal workers don’t all get thrown out at once. That’s far too much of a disruption)
What they do is they push the market price for labor in the fields that illegal immigrants can perform below minimum wage. So there are little to no jobs for Americans in those fields being offered at all, because the employer doesn’t want to pay minimum wage for a worker who will not work as hard as an illegal immigrant.
If illegal immigrants were to gradually become unavailable (either through deportations or amnesty + training for the ones here) then businesses would have to change over time to use less backbreaking labor in deplorable conditions. They would have to start using more efficient processes and automation and the costs for some things would increase.
I’m only conservative by non-US standards, but I find it interesting that you assume the employee has decided to cheat beforehand and without the knowledge of their employer.
While I do certainly know instances of people who decided to immigrate illegally, every instance I know of someone working illegally (whether they are themselves irregular immigrants, regular immigrants or citizens of the country) has involved employers who knew perfectly well what was going on. Quite a few times, employers who would not employ anybody over the table. Do you think E-Verify would have kept Trump or Koch from employing irregulars?
Have you ever tried to do any of that work, for more than half an hour at a time, at a reasonable rate of speed, and producing a reasonable level of quality?
I raise direct-market produce. I do such farmwork, on my own place, all the time. I’ve been doing it, on my own place or in others’ vineyards, since I was in my mid-twenties. I’ve hired people who haven’t done it before. I’ve trained farm interns.
One of those interns (a US citizen if it matters) had for some years starting in her teens been a professional hand harvester. Twenty years ago when I was more physically capable, I couldn’t come anywhere near keeping up with her. No other farm intern I’ve ever had, people in their late teens and twenties in decent physical shape and some of them really into the work, could have come anywhere near keeping up with her, even after several months of learning how.
And a high percentage of people I took on gave up on the job – despite the fact that they’d taken it up out of genuine interest, and despite the fact that they were being trained in multiple aspects of a small-scale operation, and so almost never did any specific harvesting or planting or weeding job all day long; we were always switching back and forth to different types of work with differing amounts and type of physical stress and different mental requirements.
It’s not unskilled work that can be done by anybody off the bat. It requires not only basic physical fitness, but training of the body in specific fashions, which vary with the job that needs to be done. And it’s not only a matter of physical strength and adaptiveness to particular sorts of movement and to a wide variety of weather conditions. The ability to tell which peach is at the right degree of ripeness to be harvested for a specific market, and to not only judge this but to get that peach off the tree without injuring it in the process, is something that takes time to learn and that some people have a lot of trouble with – especially when the color cues that work for one variety out of hundreds don’t work for another, and the degree of ripeness desired depends on the market. And those cues, and the harvest technique that doesn’t damage either the fruit or the plant, are different when the crop is peppers. And different yet if it’s strawberries. And different yet – I could go on. And then there’s pruning and tying systems; and safe use of a really wide variety of hand tools, power tools, and powered equipment; and safe and appropriate use of chemicals including pesticides and fertilizers; all of which can vary drastically depending on crop, climate, market, and individual farm. And I haven’t even touched livestock handling.
Teaching any of this – I won’t say ‘all of this’ because nobody learns all of it, dairy workers may not know how to harvest peaches or vice versa – to the people who are complaining that immigrants are ‘stealing their jobs’ is complicated, not only by the fact that many of these people are genuinely not physically capable of it without an extended period of conditioning and some of them not capable of it no matter how much physical training would be involved, but by the fact that many of them won’t believe there’s anything that needs learning, because they think it’s all “unskilled labor”. It is really really hard to teach a skill to somebody who won’t listen because they’re unwilling to believe that there’s any learned skill involved.
Plus which, there just plain aren’t enough hands available, at least unless we’re going to massively revamp what other work is getting done. I posted this in another thread, but will briefly drop it in here also:
So, yeah. If the undocumented labor force all disappeared, the rest of the country would be left with a really huge mess. And to some extent (see link above) we’re already in it.
[quote from South Park]
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toL1tXrLA1c), a joke, if you will. And also a slight commentary from me, basically agreeing with what you were saying.
Strictly speaking, it’s theoretically possible to run a business like that offline, but when I owned one, the very first quarter I sent the IRS a paper check for my payroll withholding taxes. They cashed it, but sent me a nasty letter saying that I they would assess a fee on me the next time I sent them a check. So thereafter I used the online EFTPS portal.
I think most businesses of that size are going to be using Quickbooks or similar anyway, and the simplest way to do tax payments is via the program, which is all hooked into the federal and state online payment portals already. In a hypothetical mandatory e-verify world I’m sure Intuit would bake the necessary functionality into their payroll service.
Ah. I am a person who’s clueless about a lot of such references. Thanks for info.
I’m also probably influenced by having read people saying such things entirely seriously – including our US House “representative”, who thought local wineries could just replace their full-time skilled vineyard workers with high school students working in their spare time.
Why not? I don’t think you should pick an arbitrary number of immigrants out of thin air, but I do think the government administrators responsible for managing US immigration should be trying to match the number of economic migrants to the demand for those economic migrants. Likewise, for humanitarian and family immigration, there should be a basis for determining a reasonable quota of immigrants. For economic migrants, I don’t think country of origin is important. However, for humanitarian migration, I think it’s a good idea to prioritise getting people out of the most dangerous situations. For family migration, I also think it’s reasonable to try and ensure geographical distribution of immigrants.
I would hope so, but I’m less and less confident these days that deportation is viewed as a valid response to illegal immigration by the other side of the political aisle.
