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With all the talk about the lack of professionalism on the part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents and about how deportations are a less efficient measure than punishing employers I would like to offer an alternative perspective.
As much as I would personally love to just start "picking up the tuna cans", there is a problem with that plan. The tuna factory has a lot of pull in this town, and the crazy cat-lady is one of their best customers. If I make too much trouble for her, a couple burly guys from the docks might just pay me a visit.
What I'm saying is that companies like Amazon, Marriott, and Tyson Foods are "big fish" and they have far more money and resources invested in fighting things like mandatory E-Verify, employee audits, and eventual prosecution than the proponents of such measures have available to support them. Whether directly through lawfare or indirectly through media-buys, campaign contributions, etc... trying to fight them is not a winning move, it is the last 30 years of US immigration policy. IE exactly what got us into this mess.
Now granted this does not stop the Trump Administration from going after smaller fish, but it has been decided within the administration that the risk of bad optics and taxpayer blowback from going after the local bistro while letting Tyson off the hook far outweighs any possible reward. Furthermore, building out the staff and infrastructure required to actively vet and surveil tens-of-thousands of businesses runs counter to the administration's populist ethos, and said infrastructure would almost certainly be weaponized against Republicans the moment a Democrat took office. As such we are simply not going to do that.
So how do we remove the maximum number of Illegal immigrants while staying within the bounds of both our capabilities and principles?
Ironically this is somewhere where the policies of Sanctuary states like Minnesota and New York present an opportunity. By allowing illegal immigrants to work, to run business/employ others, and to vote in local and state elections all "legally", they have rendered their illegal population "legible" in a way that the day-workers standing outside a Home Depot in New Mexico are not. We know where they live and in cases where their employer is also an illegal immigrant we don't even need to deport them directly we can just deport their employer, killing two birds with one stone. Now that's efficiency even @PmMeClassicMemes can get behind ;-)
Other options are to fight the opposition where they aren't. While raids by ICE may make the headlines auditors working for the Department of Transportation may have a greater impact.
While Driver's Licenses are issued and administered by the individual states they are required to comply with federal guidelines which is why a license issued in Massachusetts is considered valid in Nevada and vice-versa. These guidelines allow for the issuance of non-resident and non-domiciled licenses. The intent being that people who are not citizens or who do not have a permanent residence should still have a means of driving legally. A foreign student should be afforded the option to drive to school, the retiree living out of their RV should be allowed to live their best van-life. What has been happening in practice though is that sanctuary cities and states would use these allowances to issue driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.
After a spate of fatal crashes caused by illegal immigrants went viral four months ago and it became public knowledge that the State of New York has been issuing driver's licenses without requiring the applicant to provide a full legal name Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has announced that the issuance and renewal of non-resident/non-domiciled driver's licenses would be suspended and that there would be an audit of commercial licenses already issued to ensure compliance with federal guidelines.
As a bit of context for our foreign readers or anyone else here who hasn't worked a low level job, the state of US labor law and legal precedent is such that vetting for worker eligibility effectively runs on the honor system. If you have a valid ID of any sort and check the box on the application that says "I am legally eligible to work in the US" your new employer will be considered to have done their "due diligence". This is one of the reasons going after employers, especially the big fish, is so difficult and thus so rarely done. "How was my client to know that the the driver they hired was an illegal" Amazon's attorneys will ask, "they checked the box, and they had a valid driver's license" and Amazon will win that case handily.
If the license isn't valid the big fish's case doesn't have a leg to stand on. Suddenly "tuna" is back on the menu.
If Trump cared so much about business interests, why would he go around raising and lowering tariffs willy-nilly? He only cooled on that when the stock market had a meltdown.
If Amazon had a choice, would they opt for 'tariffs' or 'don't hire illegals'? Surely it would be the latter. The latter would barely even affect share markets short or long term.
Eh, there’s a good chance Amazon literally couldn’t staff itself at current levels without illegals, whereas they can pass tariffs onto the customer pretty easily. Amazon already offers a better compensation package than is normal in blue collar labor markets and their dominance relies on fast turnaround times that require big workforces. I haven’t seen internal numbers, but they’re probably way more scared of a potential labor shortage than of cost increases.
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