Thread: what's the most effective way to stop illegal immigration?

IMHO, the cheapest and most effective solution would be to go after the employers hiring illegals... Yet, somehow the focus generally is right on the border, rather than at the job site where the demand is created.

Employers often know they're hiring illegals, even though they pretend to be dumb... As we know, Walmart at first denied knowing about it, but then wiretaps revealed they did know... According to the Time Magazine article "who left the door open", Tyson Foods was placing orders by phone for illegals (while the illegals were still in Mexico.).. I believe it was Shaw who posted that the Mid West Meat Packers actually had the audacity to bus illegals from the border to the packing plants in order to bust the union.

Speaking of the meat packers, a recent Lou Dobbs show estimated that 70% are illegals... And of course the companies deny knowing this... It reminds me of the movie Casablanca with the famous line "I'm shocked. There's gambling going on around here."

Occassionally you hear politicians talk about securing the borders, but you almost never hear them talk about punishing employers who hire illegals... Why is that??? (For instance, sometimes John McCain talks about border enforcement, but I haven't heard him talking about the employers.)... Could it be that the politicians are in the back pocket of the corporations??? Could it be that going after the corporations would be a more effective tactic than increased border security???

The corporations lobby our politicians to do nothing about interior enforcement, specifically against hiring illegals... Our politicians have complied... What we need to do is lobby to get our politicians to work for us and start punishing these employers... Easier said than done, but it's the only solution IMHO.

LOU DOBBS TONIGHT - Transcript - May 6, 2005

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DOBBS: Bill, thank you very much. Bill Tucker.

The vast majority of the 3,000 illegal aliens who are estimated to enter this country every day come here most of them look for work. The meat packing industry is a huge draw for poor, largely, uneducated illegal aliens. Those illegals are working grueling hours for wages far below what meat packers earned even a decade ago. Christine Romans reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Small meat packing towns across America have been transformed over the past two decades, bringing sharp criticism that the meat packing industry in these towns is exploited illegal labor. Human Rights Watch has interviewed dozens of these workers.

LANCE COMPA, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH CONSULTANT: A majority of these workers in this industry are immigrant workers. And of those, a majority are undocumented. They told me that they were afraid to file injury reports, to complain about injuries, to file a worker's compensation claim for an injury.

ROMANS: Meat packing is a tough job. The refrain is, Americans won't do these jobs. A generation ago, they did. But the hard work paid better.

As illegal immigration has swelled, wages have fallen. In 1980, $19 an hour. By 1995, as the industry consolidated, $12. Today, $9.

A federal immigration official estimates up to 75 percent of today's meat packers are illegal. The industry refutes that.

PATRICK BOYLE, AMERICAN MEAT INSTITUTE: Our employers are hiring workers that have appropriate documentation.

ROMANS: Working, he says, with the Social Security Administration to verify Social Security numbers and names.

BOYLE: What is still a challenge is being able to correlate 100 percent certainty that the authentic, verifiable documentation that an employee presents as part of the application process is indeed that individual's documentation.

ROMANS: He concedes a quote, "small subset" may have false documents.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's a fiction that everybody recognizes is fiction. It's pretty obvious when a worker who speaks an indigenous dialogue from the Guatemalan highlands, doesn't speak Spanish, doesn't speak English but has a birth certificate showing that he was born in Texas, he gets hired. If the birth certificate on its face looks look a legitimate birth certificate.

ROMANS: No matter how they get the job, critics say they are a boom to the industry. Where majors are thin and turnover's so high, many illegal workers come and go before they're eligible for insurance or benefits.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ROMANS: Again, the industry spokesman we talked to refuted that, and claims most of its pack house workers do have benefits and insurance.

As for law enforcement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement says it periodically monitors these plant. Last summer, illegal aliens were arrested at a food processing plant in Texas where they had been hired by subcontractor for jobs filling military MREs to send overseas to our military.

DOBBS: Absolutely astounding. The idea -- I hope everyone from the Bush administration, in particular, is watching your report. And I want to hear one more time about willing workers and willing employers. Because the meat packing industry are willing employers, were wages since 1990 have declined by more than half.

ROMANS: It's been incredible what's happened in this industry since the early 1980s, in fact. And these meat packing companies, Tyson, Smithfield told us that they, have a zero tolerance for hiring illegal workers. But when they're presented with documents that look real, that's all they need.

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DOBBS: Professor George Borjas is professor of economics/social policy at Harvard University. He says one solution to our illegal immigration crisis is to impose sanctions on employers who hire them. Professor Borjas joins us tonight from Boston.

Good to have you with us, professor.

GEORGE BORJAS, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Hi, Lou. How are you?

DOBBS: I'm very well.

And you are, as usual, bringing light and reason to the subject. Do you think there's any chance in the world that this government, the U.S. government, would actually sanction employers who are, after all, the ones who are incentivizing illegal aliens to cross our borders?

BORJAS: Well, the remarkable thing, Lou, actually is that it's in the law right now that people who hire illegal immigrants are in fact committing a crime and they should be penalized. The only problem is the government is not enforcing that particular law.

DOBBS: And the reason they're not enforcing that law -- please give us your inferences as to why they're not.

BORJAS: The reason probably is that the people who benefit from illegal immigration probably benefit quite a bit from it and have a lot of political power. You know, that's the reason that the system is the way it is right now.

DOBBS: You're talking about the employers, corporations.

Simultaneous pressure done in a closing grid across the country with pressure put on employers and any illegals caught up in the path kinda like the action taken to remove Elian Gonazalez when we got tired of debating the issue.

BORJAS: Well, the remarkable thing, Lou, actually is that it's in the law right now that people who hire illegal immigrants are in fact committing a crime and they should be penalized. The only problem is the government is not enforcing that particular law.

DOBBS: And the reason they're not enforcing that law -- please give us your inferences as to why they're not.

BORJAS: The reason probably is that the people who benefit from illegal immigration probably benefit quite a bit from it and have a lot of political power. You know, that's the reason that the system is the way it is right now.

DOBBS: You're talking about the employers, corporations
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It worried me to say it... I did it anyway. Mr. Bush... Honor your oath of office. Enforce the law. Deport the illegal aliens.

I have no idea where Mr. Bush is coming from. I am worried.

You know something. There is a lot of action around the 14th Amendment and if the Anchor Babies are treated as illegal aliens, there will be a flood of illegal aliens headed back over the border. We need to work for that too. We need to make sure that 14th Amendment is applied to all who were incorrectly assumed to be citizens.!! THAT would mean all the really low life thing Bush has done will be negated. Wiped out and I do believe I like that.