Thread: Immigraton Debate: (continued) Workplace Raids

NOTE: to ALIPAC readers: This series of articles appears to be in Opinion ONLINE. I can't find them in my Times daily paper version so draw your own conclusions.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la- ... ion-center

Dust-Up
Late, great immigration debate
Workplace migra raids: security necessity or political gimmick? All this week, Mark Krikorian and Tamar Jacoby debate immigration.


Today's debate is on workplace raids by immigration authorities. Previous discussions treated the Secure Fence Act, immigration economics and and amnesty. Still to come: the politics of immigration.


Raids can't change economics
By Tamar Jacoby
Today, with our immigration system all out of whack—with virtually no way for the workers driving our economic growth to enter the country legally—there isn't much hope of getting control with workplace raids. After all, even the biggest raids net no more than a few hundred illegal workers—out of the eight million currently employed in the U.S. And because of what's wrong with the system, busting a business on the wrong side of the law is like closing down a speakeasy during Prohibition: before the raid is over, another illicit operation will likely pop up not far away.

But once we reform the system—once there is a legal way for the workers we need to enter the country—workplace enforcement will be critical. After all, the only real way to prevent foreigners from entering the U.S. illegally is to make it impossible for them to find work once they get here.

We can't do that with enforcement alone. As Prohibition showed, it's very difficult to enforce unrealistic law—in this case, laws out of sync with our labor needs. But once the law is realistic—once our immigration quotas line up with the flow generated by supply and demand—we'll need to enforce it with all the means at our disposal, including vastly increased worksite enforcement.

This is the be all and end all—the secret—of immigration law. The way to get control on the border is to get control in the workplace—even if that workplace is thousands of miles away.

Getting control on the job is a two-part process—part good-cop, part bad-cop. A big part of the problem right now is that even employers who want to play by the rules—and I believe the majority of American employers, particularly companies with brand names, would rather be on the right side of the law—have no accurate way of knowing whether the workers who apply for jobs are legal or illegal. There's no reliable computerized system to verify the names or ID cards workers provide. And if the employer asks too many questions, he can be, and often is, sued. But once our quotas line up with our labor needs, we can and should expect more from businesses, and we'll owe it to them to provide the means: a national computerized employment verification system modeled on credit card verification.

Yes, this will be expensive to set up. Yes, every new worker hired, immigrant or native-born, will have to be verified—anything else would invite discrimination. And yes, this will mean we all need to show some kind of counterfeit-proof card—whether a new "hardened" Social Security card or a driver's license or a visa or something else—in order to get hired. But that's the choice we face: either a national work authorization system or continued, uncontrolled and uncontrollable illegal immigration. There's just no other way to get a grip.

And then there's the bad-cop part of the routine: raids and fines. Once we've given well-meaning employers a way to tell the difference between legal and illegal workers, we need to crack down, and crack down hard, on employers who persist in breaking the law. Today, with our nudge-nudge-wink-wink system, in some industries, virtually every employer does the best he can and then looks the other way—that's the norm. Once we change the law—once there's a system in place that allows an owner to grow his business legally—we'll need to change those norms. And the way to force a change will be with big, high-profile busts, followed up by hefty fines.

But the key to all this is the combination: first reforming the system, then the good-cop, bad-cop two-step. We need better immigration enforcement—tougher, smarter, less hypocritical enforcement, particularly in the workplace. But we shouldn't expect it to come to much unless it's part of a package that includes more realistic quotas.

Tamar Jacoby is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

And then there's the bad-cop part of the routine: raids and fines. Once we've given well-meaning employers a way to tell the difference between legal and illegal workers, we need to crack down, and crack down hard, on employers who persist in breaking the law

If we started to crack down hard, businesses possibly would think twice about hiring illegals. But none of this will do any good w/ a broken system and an open border.
This is just my opinion, but I feel as if the raids are just window dressing for something worse to come in the near future. Specifically, I have this image of GWB addressing the nation stating, "Now we can move forward with our comphrensive immigration reform to legalize all the undocumented workers in our nation because I have proven I'm serious about cracking down on employers and securing the border."
Then, like after the 86 amnesty, no more raids, employers being punished, etc.

I hope that I'm wrong, but why hasn't any of the Swift upper management been prosecuted yet? Or for that matter, any of the other places which ICE has raided?

but I feel as if the raids are just window dressing for something worse to come in the near future. Specifically, I have this image of GWB addressing the nation stating, "Now we can move forward with our comphrensive immigration reform to legalize all the undocumented workers in our nation because I have proven I'm serious about cracking down on employers and securing the border."
Then, like after the 86 amnesty, no more raids, employers being punished, etc.

Don't you know it! I agree 100%, Sippy. That's exactly what they will do.

Sippy wrote:

I hope that I'm wrong, but why hasn't any of the Swift upper management been prosecuted yet? Or for that matter, any of the other places which ICE has raided?

You're probably not wrong in your assessment, however, I remain hopeful that in the end our politicians will buckle under pressure from us.

We've got to keep the heat turned up all the way if we expect the Congress to sweat opposing us! They may not worry about middle classes job security, but they certainly worry about their own!

I only need to read the couple of lines to see how full of it this woman is.
She was saying for years that it is impossible to stop mass illegal immigration. Now the Bush administration has shown that it can be done, which is proven by all the recent news stories about fruit crops going unpicked and illegal border crossers unable to complete their journey because of the crackdown that started in May '06.

Raids can't change economics
By Tamar Jacoby
Today, with our immigration system all out of whack—with virtually no way for the workers driving our economic growth to enter the country legally

Tamar, the raids do not need to change economics, and you need to learn some economics.


It is a highly flawed statement that the illegal workers, the vast majority of whom are low or unskilled, are driving our economic growth.

In the book Economic Growth, by Robert J. Barro and Xavier Sala-i-Martin,
those two eminent economists are quite explicit that adding unskilled and lowskilled labor is the worst way to grow an economy because it drags down the per capita income of the economy.

Barrow and Sala-i-Martin describe three main types of economic growth. The first kind is economic growth due to improved technology, which in turn improves productivity per worker. An example is the steam engine. A job that used to take 100 coal miners could be done with only 5 miners plus a steam engine.

A second type of economic growth is achieved by increasing the skill level of the workers in an economy, which improves productivity per worker and therefore improves output. The basic idea is that a highly trained welder can do the job of 3 untrained or poorly trained welders and do it better.


A third type of economic growth is achieved adding unskilled or low skilled workers to the economy. The output of the economy does rise in absolute terms, because these workers do produce something. However, they are not as productive as highly skilled workers, so the PER CAPITA OUTPUT of the economy DECLINES. For example, a person comes illegaly from Mexico and earns $15,000 per year. The building probably pays the janitorial contractor $25,000 per year, and the employer pays the worker the $15,000, so the employer's profit is $10,000.

The problem is that the per capita output of the U.S. is $40,000 per person.
So the unskilled and lowskilled illegal worker, who is only producing $25,000 worth of labor, is dragging down our per capita output.

Barrow and Sala-i-Martin are very clear that the best way to grow an economy is to improve the technology that workers use and to improve workers' skills.

If we started to crack down hard, businesses possibly would think twice about hiring illegals. But none of this will do any good w/ a broken system and an open border.
This is just my opinion, but I feel as if the raids are just window dressing for something worse to come in the near future.

Thanks sippy. I couldn't agree more. It can only get worse the longer it is allowed to go on.

I am dumbfounded how breaking the law in the first place by coming here gives you the green light or card to break more without punishment. And as far as the employers go well they profit from aiding and abetting and so on.

[

quote="sippy"][quote:duvpqajq]And then there's the bad-cop part of the routine: raids and fines. Once we've given well-meaning employers a way to tell the difference between legal and illegal workers, we need to crack down, and crack down hard, on employers who persist in breaking the law

If we started to crack down hard, businesses possibly would think twice about hiring illegals. But none of this will do any good w/ a broken system and an open border.
This is just my opinion, but I feel as if the raids are just window dressing for something worse to come in the near future. Specifically, I have this image of GWB addressing the nation stating, "Now we can move forward with our comphrensive immigration reform to legalize all the undocumented workers in our nation because I have proven I'm serious about cracking down on employers and securing the border."
Then, like after the 86 amnesty, no more raids, employers being punished, etc.

I hope that I'm wrong, but why hasn't any of the Swift upper management been prosecuted yet? Or for that matter, any of the other places which ICE has raided?[/quote:duvpqajq][/quote]

EXACTLY, BEFORE WE NO IT, IT WILL BE 200 MILLION, AND WE WILL BE MEXICO!!