Were those legal or illegal immigrants?
Yeah, sure. Good luck finding a politician willing to fine or jail his campaign contributors.
There were certainly illegal immigrants among them. I didn’t ask, mostly, but many of the stories made it clear that at least some were illegal. The one I remember most clearly was a pre-teen whose parents sent her on a trip to Disneyland (so, crossing the border legally on a visa) with instructions to walk away from the bus and rendezvous with an aunt she’d never met in the parking lot. She didn’t see her parents again for several years. I asked why they did all of that, because if they could afford to send their kids on trips to Disneyland it didn’t sound like money was the problem; she explicitly said “for the education.” At that point a lot of other people in the room chimed in that education had been the primary or sole motivation factor for immigration.
Until that moment, I hadn’t realized it was a factor at all. I assumed all migration was economic, or to join family. Since that conversation, now that I know to ask, I’ve heard from a lot more people that education was a strong pull accross the border.
In Mexico, education is expensive, and of inconsistent quality (sometimes great, sometimes terrible).
Edit: she never did get to Disneyland, at least by the time I talked to her some five years after immigrating.
What about illegal aliens opening there own businesses? That’s what most of our ancestors did when they came to this country for the first time.
Businesses licenses can be a problem.
Since the things you propose require amending what is probably the most important part of the Constitution (the Fourteenth Amendment), I think it’s a bit hard to square them with “very little change to the U.S.”
If they crossed the border illegally, I doubt they are going to bother with getting a legal business license. Open a bodega, a lawn trimming business, pool maintenance/installation, house cleaning, unlicensed taxi, house painting, roofing, etc,
That looks like a decent system, I don’t think I’ve heard about it before, thanks. How reliable is it? And according to the Wiki, the feds require all federal agencies and their vendors to use it. Why isn’t it a requirement for all employers?
Because farmers.
I’m thinking for reasons like Steve MB points out. Large employers have too much clout with politicians and would balk at them taking away their source of cheap labor.
Probably for political reasons. I couldn’t say myself. I know that for most regular employees I-9s are required so it’s not like the collection of employment eligibility information isn’t already being gathered. These I-9 records are supposed to be subject to review within 72 hours as it is.
My company currently uses E-verify. When I hire someone, I sit with them and we fill out the information. It’s easy, takes about 3-5 minutes depending on how fast you type.
The biggest objection I could see would be businesses that don’t have computers capable of running the software for whatever reason.
Basically, it’s because employers don’t want to do it and they’re the biggest lobbying group of all. For some, it’s because they want to keep employing undocumented aliens; for most, it’s because it requires time and resources that could be more profitably allocated elsewhere.
Your last question sort of answers your first questions. I don’t doubt that enforcing labor laws as a form of immigration control, which conservatives have been historically for until very recently it seems, would help the problem. But some of these families from Central and Latin America are primarily fleeing so that they and/or their children can not be murdered by criminals and corrupt law enforcement. Baltimore is bad, but it is better than some of the places these immigrants are fleeing from.
I have some issues with requiring citizens to enforce a law. Employers, landlords, doctors, and teachers didn’t enter the country illegally - but this proposal wants them to check on other people to see if they entered the country illegally and report them to the police. We already have a problem with citizens being encouraged to conduct drug tests. Do we really want to go further with this?
Have fertility rates collapsed across Latin America? Cite?
I don’t see this as onerous even for a business with two employees, owner included.
I also think that one night in jail would be enough to gain a reasonable compliance level. Fines can be a cost of business, but I can’t see jail as being seen that way. Of course, you never can get law-breaking down to near-zero. Just doesn’t happen, or need to happen.
I don’t know if it is an objection, exactly, but I think the biggest problem in getting it passed would be – who goes to jail? You, yourself, Bone, if you are ordered, on pain of firing, to push through the boss’s visa-overstay girlfriend? That doesn’t seem fair. The owner of the company? Sounds fair if the company is very small. But if there even ten employees in the company, that’s enough so the owner might not know. I guess that you could write a law saying that it will always be the CEO, or, if one exists, the head of personnel. However, in a company with tens of thousands of employees, not everyone obeys the rules. I can see the HR chief at WalMart spending half his time in jail even though the company is doing a good job.
I do hope that if there ever were serious – meaning jail time – employer sanctions, immigrants already here would get amnesty first. Also, I don’t think employers should have to turn people in. Just don’t hire them.
In Australia, illegal immigrants are sent to offshore Pacific island prison camps where they are incarcerated indefinitely in harsh conditions with no chance of settlement in Australia.
They still come.
As long as people have no hope at home, they will chase whatever sliver of hope they can find, no matter how long the odds. People coming to Australia know they will be thrown in a prison hundreds of miles off shore, but they can still hope the laws will change, or they’ll somehow be the exception, or that they can somehow escape. And that tiny bit of hope is better for them, in their mind than sitting at home hopeless. The human spirit is a tough thing to crush.
To make the U.S. a place of no hope for illegal immigrants would take an extraordinary effort, either in just making it a miserable place all around, or in establishing total control over movement and employment. Maybe it could be done, but I don’t think we would be better off for it.
I may be misunderstanding you but I have never known any information recorded on I-9s to be collected and reviewed by anyone outside the business doing the hiring. It is always filled out, the relevant IDs are examined and then the form is filed away with the other employee files. Maybe if INS or ICE or whatever they are called came in with a warrant to check a businesses employment files then someone might be inspecting the info but that is pretty rare.
As I said in my previous post, if there were really a strong desire on the part of the Federal or state governments to crackdown hard on employment of illegal immigrants, E-Verify or something like it would be required by law.
I’ve gotten the impression over the years that as long as people are being paid through payroll and taxes, FICA, etc. are being deducted then no one in an official capacity really gives a shit. Whenever I hear of raids happening by INS, etc. it seems to always be a business that pays people in cash.
Are you seriously unaware of that?
I don’t know how to post links on my phone, but you can just google 'countries by total fertility rate" and see for yourself. El Salvador, where Roman Catholicism is the established religion and abortion is illegal for any reason, currently has a fertility rate equal to America, and they’re not atypical of the region. Latin
America in twenty years is going to have a demographic profile similar to Ireland right now.
given that the federal government’s first duty is the welfare of it’s own citizens, the only solution would be to crack down on all sources of revenue for aliens. No jobs, no government handouts, anything. being hyper-solicitous to aliens is an injustice to all of the american men who would otherwise be employed as gardeners or lower-level tradesmen as well as Mexico, which has no real incentive on it’s part to deal with the immigration problem. After all, having men leave your country and funnel American dollars back to their families still residing in Mexico doesn’t suck so much for your country.