The promise of easy employment, with few questions asked, has long been a powerful magnet for illegal immigration. That’s what has drawn an estimated 7 million illegal immigrants across our borders to help pick our fruits and vegetables, build our homes and businesses, work in our factories, perform landscape and maintenance chores and do myriad other tasks.
In effect, we’ve had a gray-market, illegal “guest worker” program ó paralleling the official, legal one ó that looked the other way while both employees and their employers broke the law. The supposed immigration reform act of 1986 just dabbed some window dressing on the problem. While it nominally criminalized employers who “knowingly” hire illegal immigrants, it provided few tools to help verify employee records, and the requirement that employees produce one form of photo identification did little more than fuel the fake-ID industry. After a flurry of raids and arrests, things pretty much went on as before.
This wink-and-shrug system has produced a number of pernicious consequences. It encourages illegal immigration. The illegal workers themselves are exploited through below-market wages and, in many cases, unsafe or unsanitary working conditions. While cheap and plentiful labor may spur profits for some, it depresses wages for others and puts law-abiding workers and businesses at a disadvantage, a complaint that has surfaced in Rowan County. Perhaps worst of all, it fuels anti-immigrant resentment that makes little or no distinction between criminals or free-loaders and the many Hispanic and Latino immigrants who are legal, law-abiding workers.
While stronger border enforcement, increased visas and less cumbersome paths to legalization are all necessary parts of immigration reform, it’s essential to have stepped-up workplace enforcement efforts that target employers, rather than simply rounding up workers. So far, there’s mixed evidence that a three-year-old enforcement campaign against businesses is producing significant results. In recent months, federal agents have staged several high-profile raids that resulted in the arrests of more than 3,000 suspected undocumented workers. Yet, according to the Washington Post, the raids have brought cases against only 100 or so “bosses” ó those who are in supervisory or management positions. Granted, the presence of illegal workers doesn’t necessarily mean that an employer knew he was breaking the law. It’s a lot easier to prove a worker is in the country illegally than to prove a business “knowingly” hired him. But, thanks to digitized verification systems such as E-Verify, which plugs businesses in a federal data system, employers have fewer excuses for hiring undocumented workers than they did in the past.
Businesses that employ illegal immigrants can face stiff penalties, ranging up to $16,000 per undocumented worker, for multiple violators, as well as possible prison time. Throwing the book at a few more bosses would have a much stronger deterrent effect than rounding up illegal immigrants who may simply languish in our overcrowded jails ó or be deported only to return to work for another employer all too willing to look the other way.