Those are legitimate concerns. But if conservatives were concerned about terrorism, they wouldn’t be applauding so loudly over calls to build a wall along the Mexican border. If they’re so worried about a poorly-vetted immigrant, they’d be calling for a better vetting process. If they’re worried about law and order, they’d be pushing for more prosecutions of those who break the law by hiring illegal immigrants. The steps they want to take don’t match the reasons you say they’re concerned.
The timing was just so perfect, so I’ve got to ask: Is this the sort of “pushing for more prosecutions of those who break the law by hiring illegal immigrants” you were referring to?
Yeah, I read about that, but you’re missing my point. I didn’t ask if it was happening, I asked where was the push among “law and order” conservatives to make it happen. Now that it has made the news, are conservatives speaking out in favor of locking up the store owners?
From your link, there’s also this:
Where were the “law and order” conservatives while that was going on; did any of them condemn Trump for commuting the sentence of a criminal, or give kudos to Obama for going after more of them?
It is not like there were no raids on employers during the Obama administration, and before that, even.
What happens is the workers get deported, and the employer gets fined. The fine is a cost of doing business, far less than the cost would have been to have hired legal workers in the first place, assuming that they could get enough legal workers at any reasonable wage.
They did not indicate that they were really going to increase the penalties against employers who knowingly employee ineligible workers.
I did find the begining
A bit disturbing, as they apparently shut down a store for 20 minutes in order to harass the employee who was working legally.
Of course, giving trump credit on this is a touch of fake news,
I read that article with a bit of a jaundiced eye. 98 raids on 7-11’s netted 21 arrests, and I’ll bet none of them was one of the employers. Your tax dollars at work.
A Berkeley sociologist liberal couldn’t understand right wingers, so she went to the most conservative place she could think of, rural Louisiana to study the Tea Party. She interviewed hundreds of people over 5 years to understand their opinions and beliefs, which she put in a book called ‘strangers in their own land’. Here is the narrative she came up with that many Tea Partiers she interviewed agreed with. Relative deprivation abounds.
This study looked into Trump voters and their motivations, it came up with 5 major motivations. One was relative deprivation.
Are most business owners that ignorant of basic things that can significantly affect their business? We’re seeing, most likely, 21 separate employees who were working illegally, and not one of their bosses knew? Why does it smell like a cow pie all of a sudden?
My understanding is that if they used fake papers to demonstrate their eligibility, the employers’ options were rather limited. A good fake might not be fake-looking enough to legally allow the employer to reject it.
Yes, in most cases, it would be illegal to reject it. What grounds are your rejecting it on? Are you trained in spotting fraudulent documentation? Do you scrutinize all documents to the same level?
If you reject a hispanic’s documents as being suspicious, but let the white guy slide on forgetting his SSN card (which I have seen countless times), you may rightfully be accused of racial profiling.
Theoretically, you cold use E-verify, but, not only is the use of it optional, that system is a pain in the ass to use. Now, if you only use it on the employees that you suspect could be undocumented, that would make it much easier to use, but that would also be racial profiling.
Then there is the fact that the story is very light on detail. Were these employees hired when they were ineligible to work in the US?, or did their eligibility expire while they were working? Do you review the immigration status of all of your employees on a regular basis, or just the ones that you suspect may not be able to renew their eligibility?
There certainly are employers out there that knowingly hiring undocumented workers to get them to work for lower wages and less rights than a legal worker would demand. These are large operations with hundreds of employees like Koch foods, who paid a fine of a bit over $3,000 per worker. They made money off of that deal, the certainly saved on labor more than the fine cost them. If you want to go after employers, go after these guys, not the small business owner who is doing his best to keep the doors open and may not have the resources to perform in depth background and immigration checks on all his hires.
Ignorance is no defense (unless, of course, you happen to be Bozo the President). As you yourself point out, there are mechanisms available for verifying citizenship. Each of those employers is guilty of negligence at the very least, and could be accomplices to fraud and immigration violations. But I can practically guarantee none of them was dragged off in handcuffs. Too much bad PR.
They are required to verify eligibility to work (not citizenship), but they are also required to accept whatever qualifying proof the employee submits. They can only reject the documents unless a reasonable person, who is not an expert, would look at the documents and believe them to be fake.
So in other words, those 21 arrests were of people whose paperwork was so good that they fooled the owners and ICE was able to determine they were false? Wonder how that worked out?
Also, they are required to accept the paperwork. They are not required to offer employment or not rescind it after the fact when they determine the paperwork is false.
Yeah, I said citizenship when I meant right to work. Sorry.
