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This is honestly the most baffling part of the american immigration system to me.
In Australia, we have a requirement for all workplaces to verify that a new hire has a right to work in the country. You provide your birth certificate or working visa, or other proof upon your first day at work while you're signing a document with your preferred bank account for your salary. This costs the employee and the business approximately zero overhead.
If a business is found to be hiring illegal immigrants, they are fined.
Sure. There are some dodgy businesses who hire undocumented cousins from India. But these businesses are tiny, and the problem is also tiny.
I just don't understand why the US doesn't implement this policy. Like all of the associated issues here would be solved over night.
I'm pretty sure you need to prove you're not an illegal immigrant to study or get a driver's licence here. Why is this not the solution for the States? It puts the pressure on businesses and is totally politically palatable.
Starting in 2015 California has been issuing driver's licenses to illegals. They also illegally issued 17000 commercial driver's licenses to illegals, according to the Federal Department of Transportation.
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Suppose there is a Hotel X in Australia, and instead of hiring cleaning workers directly, they outsource to another company -- Dodgy Cleaning Services, Inc. Who is responsible for immigration compliance - the hotel or the cleaning service or both?
Or better yet, suppose an Australian family hires a contractor to make some improvements to their house. Who is responsible for immigration compliance? The homeowner or the contractor?
The contractor. This isn't a hard question.
I don't think it's as simple a question as one might think. For example, in the United States there is a lot of precedent that with respect to some types of laws, the hotel is potentially responsible for compliance.
Anyway, assuming that compliance responsibility falls solely on the contractor, this seems like a straightforward workaround for immigration compliance. Instead of directly hiring illegals, use a dodgy contractor. If the dodgy contractor gets fined, they just close up shop and re-open under a new name somewhere else.
Combine this with the fact that the American economy is to a large extent dependent on the labor of illegal aliens, and it's easy to see how we can get into a situation where people get away breaking the rules.
To an extent I am speculating, but I am pretty sure that in the United States, things like going out to eat at a restaurant; hiring a crew to do yard work; or going on a week's vacation in Las Vegas would be very noticeably more expensive but for this kind of cheating.
The devil is in the enforcement, as ever.
If there's a huge problem with outsourcing illegal-intensive labor to Dodgy Contractor Inc, it's making things fairly simple: target all the dodgy staffing agencies. In theory like 99% of the work is already done to make it impossible to earn an income in this country without the government being aware of it. And that's what frustrates a lot of people about illegal immigration, even those who are pro-immigration: that the government doesn't use the information and powers that it has to enforce the laws that are on the books.
With fines or with criminal prosecution?
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You are just assuming things will happen in such a way as to make this whole thing complicated. Which, to be fair, it has happened in that way until basically now. But it doesn't have to. Like there is a workaround in your telling of events because the government creates one, which it doesn't have to. If you assume the government actually wants to accomplish its stated goals then this isn't really a conundrum. Just send the dodgy contractor to prison. Its not that hard.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's not necessarily easy. If you look at Dodgy Contractor, Inc.'s personnel files, I assure you that there will be some evidence that they made an effort to comply with the requirements. Ok, so if you go back and look at their photocopy of Jose's green card, it might become apparent that he actually used the green card of Jose's second cousin Juan. The nominal head of Dodgy Contractor, Inc. will tell the authorities that he relied on Maria to review the papers, and well, maybe she screwed up. At that point, how do you convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that this guy intentionally conspired to violate immigration laws? Especially since the nominal owner might not be the actual owner. So the assistant US attorney assigned to the case (and 50 others) recommends pushing for a plea deal of 6 months in prison. Dodgy Contractor, Inc. is shut down. The Hotel is SHOCKED to learn that they had illegals working for them. The next week, they hire Sketchy Contractor, Inc. and we Americans keep getting our trips to Las Vegas with hotels costing only $120 a night.
By the way, I'm not saying that it's impossible to enforce immigration laws. I'm just taking exception to the idea that it's simple and easy.
Maria goes to prison. If there is a pattern or some other papertrail the owners do too. What is complicated?
Good luck showing she acted intentionally. Besides which, even if she goes to jail for a few months (more likely she would just get probation), the owner just hires Maria's cousin Anais and it's business as usual.
Pretty sure its not like your just so stoey 99.9% of the time. Dodgy Inc isnt going to have just one illegal maria is on the hook for. Obviously send her to jail for longer than months
Even so, just change the law to make it simple. Mandate e verify or just outlaw providing false info or make the minimum 20 years.
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Well, Russia is a heavily bureaucratized country, but companies still hire lots of illegals because they are cheaper. As long as you have cash or can convert the money on your account to cash plausibly legally, you can hire them. All it takes is the low probability of your company being raided.
Russia is also full of corruption, which helps.
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I'm going to get another 20 replies saying "it's cheaper to hire illegals" and I understand that.
I'm saying that if you are pursuing a policy to remove all of the illegals from the country, rather than making ICE do it in possibly the least efficient way you could think of, it's easier to just do the workplace check. It's easily advertised as pro-American by a president like trump, who can push it as a policy to give jobs back to Americans.
It's not like Trump is worried about shaking up the stock market or pissing off lobby groups.
The problem isn’t wholly illegals. There are a whole group of people who on the merits are illegal but on procedure are here temporarily until their status is adjudicated. Then there are problems like the Somalis who are here legally but are just a drain. We need to cut off welfare without running afoul of the 14th.
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Trust me, smart conservatives know. This is why many conservatives who actually care about immigration are pissed at Trump. If he simply mandated e-verify, and actually fined businesses who hired illegals, the illegal immigration problem would shape up quite quickly. And with a lot less partisan fanfare, likely.
It's deeply unfortunate that he failed to do so, and I don't have a great understanding of why.
Small business owners who employ illegals are the corest of the core constituency of the Republican party. Exploiting illegal labour requires entrepreneurial spirit, mild evil, and to be working in a sector that is already Republican-dominated (mostly farming or construction).
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That's the huge problem which leaves both sides open to charges of hypocrisy: some sectors of the American economy are reliant on cheap, disposable labour. They can't/won't get the natives to do that anymore, so they need a constant flow of immigrants willing to take on hard, dirty, uncertain work. This is going back decades, my teen years were blighted by every local talent show where someone with a guitar did Deportees (a song from 1948 by Woody Guthrie).
The hypocrisy of the right about economic exploitation is easy to see, the hypocrisy of the left less so: but they are de facto defending the permanence of a serf class for manual labour in order to keep their nice lifestyle of abundance going.
The problem is you have to enforce immigration law consistently, nationwide. Otherwise the non-compliant businesses gain a substantial competitive advantage.
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But it costs those Australian businesses collectively billions of dollars in (direct and indirect) labor costs. Hiring illegals would be significantly cheaper, after all. Which is why the Americans don't do work permit checks. Every push for legislation like that would be met with intense lobbying from employers in the stereotypical sectors (farming, construction, hotels, ect.).
But it certainly also helps that a faction of the blue tribe is also opposed to work permit checks, for different reasons.
I obviously understand that's the situation. I'm saying it shouldn't be.
It solves 100% of the issues re: immigration conversation. Australia has a ruthless immigration policy, and far more immigrants per 100k than the USA, Germany or Britain. And we have far less politicised immigration conversation.
An Australian can reliably depend on virtually every man woman and child they meet to have either been thoroughly vetted by a government bureaucrat or a slob from accounting.
We have something like 30% of people in country born overseas (compared to less than 15% for German, UK and USA) but consistently poll pretty high for our happiness with immigration.
Yes, most of our immigrants are east asian, British or Kiwi, as opposed to African or Middle Easterners, but still.
If it costs businesses money to be forced to hire Australians, and wins back some social cohesion, it's just such an easy policy to pursue in my mind. American politics being dependent upon the random industry association lobbying some spineless boomer in the senate is so foreign to me.
"Stop hiring people who aren't supposed to be in the country" should be the short work of a year of policy making. If you're against it, you're against hiring Americans, right? If you're against it, you're funding illegal immigration. In another world the libs could even have pushed this policy to get back at the capitalists.
My understanding (perhaps wrong) is that Tony Abbott basically forced through hardline illegal immigration restrictions against huge protests from both sides of the isle right before immigration massively ramped up due to easy travel. The problem is that the numbers are so big in other countries, and the use of migrants so structural, that getting from America’s ‘default yes’ to Australia’s ‘default no’ is extremely difficult. Though IMO Trump should definitely do this.
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Maybe I'm just so much more black-pilled than you are. If you're changing something and "it costs businesses money" that automatically means not only is this not an "easy policy", it's going to be an uphill battle. No matter where you are, one of the political parties will be "pro business", and this party will fight you. Because this is actually important. There's actual money on the line. "Social cohesion", "anti immigration vibes", "campaign promises", ect. are all pretty much irrelevant once the wrong people lose money.
And if the same change also, at the same time, disadvantages minorities and/or people struggling with paper work, elements from the other side of the isle will also fight you.
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