Illegal Immigration, and the NSA

[pecunium]

The issue of illegal immigration is in the news (what with half a million people coming out in LA to protest the planned legislations being bandied about in Congress and the Senate).

I know what I think would, not solve, but greatly change the face of the problem: Actually enforce the laws, in combination with increasing the fines.

The cause is people being able to come to the states to get work. It doesn't deter them that they might be deported, because the lure of money is a magnet.

Employers aren't paying any real penalty for hiring them. Wal-Mart was caught using them to clean the floors. They were fined a token. Make it costly for businesses to hire large numbers of illegal workers, and they will stop hiring them, which will reduce the number who are interested in making the trek. Doing all of that, and ending up unemployed.

Some will come and get work as gardners, day laborers and the like, but the numbers will drop.

We will have to pay more for grapes, houses, celery, landscaping, chicken, and all sorts of things we get cheaply now because we pay people who can't protest the pittance they are being paid for their work.

But that's not really what I'm writing about.

The people screaming about this have been harping on the fact that these immigrants are here illegally. I just saw some Republican member of the House explaining that amnesties (like Guest worker programs being allowed to accept workers who are already here) are not the answer because rewarding people who break the law will only encourage more people to break the law.

Which is, of course, where the NSA comes into this, because rewarding someone who is breaking the law right now (and admits it) is what DeWine, and Spector and all those who support trying to change the law to make what Bush has been doing legal are talking about.

And these same people admit that rewarding lawbreaking is a bad idea, because it will only encourage the person so rewarded to break other laws.

Comments

[elf]

I keep thinking that one solution to people who hire illegal immigrants is to insist they pay them back-wages equal to what they'd have to have paid U.S. citizens for the same time... get caught with 300 workers at $40/day for six months, and have to pay them the difference between that & minimum wage. If someone's been working for six years and is getting more than minimum wage, but not what a legal worker would be making, calculate their wages based on industry standard for raises and so on, and add that to the penalty.

Pay the workers the difference, and ship 'em home; maybe they've got enough nest egg to get a new start now, or start whatever attempts they want to be here legally, and so on. No point in putting them in prison--we can't afford it, and sometimes our prisons are better conditions than where they came from.

(I freely admit I understand very little about economics; I don't know how much the prices would jump if grape harvesters were paid minimum wage. But I'm all for pushing minimum wage across the board--pay it for jury duty, illegal workers, overseas employees. Part of the purpose of min wage is to keep businesses from exploiting employees and the community, and if there are exempt categories, it doesn't work for that.)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

You've got a decent fine structure there. The only thing I'd add is that there has to be an additional fine; which gets used to fund the enforcement efforts.

TK

[anna-en-route.livejournal.com]

I believe that pretty much describes the situation here, I think but am not completely sure that companies are forced to pay back-wages for breaking employment condition laws and I *know* for a fact that the fines for employing people who do not have the right to work here are big enough to make people think twice.