Thread: Reduce Illegal Imigration, Fine or Jail Employers

http://www.dailybulletin.com/opinions/ci_3188179
11/06/05

To reduce illegal immigration, fine or jail employers

The installments of the Daily Bulletin’s "Beyond Borders" series that ran last week highlighted some of the aspects of illegal immigration that most rile up opponents.
Jobs. Health care. Education.

Illegal immigrants take jobs that might have been done by native-born citizens or legal immigrants because they will work for lower wages. Those who have come illegally strain our health-care system and drive up costs for taxpayers and the insured, because they typically have no insurance and seek care at emergency rooms, where they can't be turned away.

And the children of illegal immigrants strain our schools by increasing class sizes and requiring extra instructional time in English, draining resources and attention that could have gone to legal citizens.

It's all true. The numbers involved are hard to nail down for obvious reasons, but you can be sure that opponents of illegal immigration estimate the effects on the high side while apologists underplay them.

Jobs, health care and education. The first is the cause of illegal immigration, the others just two of its effects. Jobs are what draw immigrants across our border in the first place. Once they are here, they put pressure on our health-care and school systems – we would be foolish not to care for and educate children who live within our borders – but without the jobs to be had, they would not even come.

Another effect is wasted law enforcement. Those who are arrested for immigration violations generally are jailed, processed and deported only to sneak back across the border. It’s a massive waste of effort and resources.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the only way to gain some control of illegal immigration is to choke off the supply of jobs available to illegal immigrants. And the only way to choke off that supply is to impose and enforce serious sanctions against employers who employ illegal immigrants.

The Bush administration has not yet come to grips with that fact, perhaps because Republicans don’t like to hassle big businesses like agriculture, construction and hospitality that employ illegal workers in large numbers.

Congressman David Dreier, R-Glendora, who has taken a lot of heat from activists against illegal immigration, introduced a bill that would hit employers.

It would raise employer fines from $10,000 to $50,000 and make jail time a real possibility. But his bill has a long way to go.

Simplistically speaking, the way it works now is that taxpayers and those who pay for health insurance are subsidizing agriculture, construction and other businesses. The businesses profit by paying illegal immigrants low wages and giving them few or no benefits. The workers and their families use public health care because they don’t have insurance, so taxpayers pick up the tab. Consumers in turn get lower prices from the businesses that employ illegal workers.

If illegal employment were seriously reduced through workplace enforcement, the businesses would have to hire higher-priced workers and probably give them better benefits. The costs to taxpayers would be reduced because the workers would draw fewer health-care and social services. Consumers would have to pay more for a head of lettuce, a house or a night in a hotel room because of the higher wages and benefits. If, say, the cost of producing lettuce in California rose too much, farmers here would be undercut by growers in Mexico and elsewhere who pay lower wages.

As with all economic changes, there would be winners and losers.

But the current system is clearly flawed, in that the wink and nod the government gives to those who hire illegal workers encourages a lack of respect for U.S. laws. In effect we allow illegal workers in, then make them live in the shadows and do not offer them the full protection of our labor laws.

What’s needed is a sizable expansion of the number of legal immigrants allowed into the country each year, combined with tough employer sanctions and enforcement against those who hire illegally.

Legal immigration feeds the nation’s vitality and economy. But our federal acceptance of illegal immigration is sheer hypocrisy.


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A nation's immigration policy is supposed to be set for the primary benefit of citizens not immigrants. The problem with the illegal immigration anywhere is not the illegality it is the number of aliens. A legalization does not end the problem of having too many people competing for the same jobs.

It would raise employer fines from $10,000 to $50,000 and make jail time a real possibility. But his bill has a long way to go.

OK, have you ever once heard of this law being enforced? Has an employer ever been fined? I think if one of those Nebraska meat packing companies that crosses the border in search of illegal immigrants and helps them get fake papers got fined ten grand for every single illegal they have working on any given day that ought to take care of them for a good long time.

I don't think that raising the fine is going to do a darn thing unless they actually start fining someone. If one little contractor in "podunk holler" hires one illegal and gets fined ten grand when he gets caught, that ought to cure him from ever hiring another one, don't you think?

The key is to enforce the existing law, not make another one to ignore.

And I don't know about putting the employers in jail. Our jails are already overcroweded with gang members who should be executed instead of let out somewhere down to line to repeat their crimes or kept in a cell where they continue to run their illegal drug operations right under the warden's nose. Cleaning out the employers bank account would be a more effective solution. If we throw him/her in jail, we have to feed them, too.