Target shift: Feds focus on employers of illegal workers

[SpartanDem]

Now this how you're supposed do it, making employers pay up for their hiring practices.



As an attorney advising southeast Michigan businesses, Aimee Guthat has worked with hundreds of companies that hire foreign workers in industries ranging from agriculture to information technology.

This year, with a new U.S. president has also come a new way of ensuring a legal work force at those businesses.

"With the Bush administration, the focus was really on enforcement with respect to the actual foreign nationals," says Guthat, a lawyer with the Troy office of the international Fragomen law firm. "Now the focus is on looking at employers and focusing the enforcement actions on companies to make sure they're compliant and abiding by the law."

In other words the federal government is moving away from the highly publicized raids of worksites that result in roundups of workers and toward investigating and penalizing employers who benefit from undocumented workers.


http://metrotimes.com/news/story.asp?id=14607

[tekisui]

1. Good.

[jwirr]

2. About time. There should also be a mechanism that would allow

businesses to ask for permission to hire if they cannot get enough workers for the jobs. This last is important because if no one harvests the beets the price of sugar is going to skyrocket. We need to see that they are not allowed to hire illegals but we also need to see that the crops are harvested and the work is done.

[MNDemNY]

4. NO. There should be no such 'mechanism"

Let the market work...If they can not attract enough workers...THEN RAISE THE PAY UNTIL THEY CAN !! Free market, right????Let crops find a "real" price. That's free enterprise!!!

[notadmblnd]

6. McCain said Americans won't work in the field for $50 and hour

I'd like to see him proven wrong.

[jwirr]

7. I have a problem with starving. Do you eat?

[Taitertots]

9. False Dilemma

I have a problem with the idea that for our system to work there has to be several million people being systemically mistreated.


We already subsidize agriculture to keep prices up. We could spend that same money to subsidize agriculture to keep prices down.

[MNDemNY]

13. .

:thumbsup:

[MNDemNY]

12. The market will find the wage.

Will prices go up? Yup! But they are artificially kept down with very poor wages for farm workers.

[notadmblnd]

3. thye have to go after the 3rd parties.

in my career with EDS (28 years), I went from seeing a complete in house American house keeping team into a contracted, non English speaking team.

Don't just go after the contractors that hire these illegals, go after the companies that hire the contractors that provide the people they exploit.

[BobRossi]

5. Well duh!

There would be no illegal employees if there were no illegal employers. It's not rocket science.

[Vincardog]

10. If there were no illegal employers there would be no illegal employees

[Taitertots]

8. Why can't it be both?

Why don't we penalize people who hire illegal immigrants, while deporting the immigrants, controlling the borders, and expanding pathways for legal immigration?

Controlling the border will limit narco/human traffickers from coming in and money and guns from Mexico.
To deincentivize Mexicans from illegally immigrating we can offer more legal immigration and punish illegal immigration. A system where legal immigration is a process that requires living in Mexico to complete will keep people from immigrating illegally. Make anyone caught living in America without proper immigration status permanently disqualified from legally immigrating or even visiting America.
Push hard enough so hiring undocumented immigrants becomes a unusable business model.

[SpartanDem]

11. It should be both

but I think you get more bang for the buck focusing on employers controlling for peoples incentive to come in the first place.

[Taitertots]

14. It is about the total package

Pushing one idea too hard will quickly get diminishing returns. You don't need to do one thing really hard, but a bunch of easy things. You can't pick up something heavy from one edge no matter how hard you try.


How long would undocumented workers stay when they watch the wave of legal immigrants taking their jobs?

Prosecute the employers.
Deport those living here.
Increase legal immigration.
Increase border security.