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.