So Why not punish companies and employees ? If no one employs illegals then there are no jobs for illegals wouldn't that solve the problem ? (both border crossing and visa over stayers)
Has no one is the Republican party thought about this ???
Technically, immigration enforcement is the federal government's job. They aren't even allowed to pass it off to state and local law enforcement agencies, although they certainly try. They also aren't allowed to foist it off on employers, though again they certainly try. Big corporate business loves it, since they have a legal department and an HR department mostly just sucking up salaries anyway and keeping up with their "responsibilities" is written into their cost of doing business. Of course, that expense isn't the part that they love. What they love is that it helps eliminate their competition from small businesses. So, yes. the Republican party, good friends of big business that they are,
thinks about this all the time.
I ran a sort of co-op business. My typical client/partner worked about sixty hours a week in the summer on regular maintenance, and they routinely picked up a helper to keep repairs that cropped up from pushing that to a level that would make their business really not worth the effort. They grabbed helpers wherever they could find them, and their primary concerns were
reliability and
trainability. Finding both, or even one, was a challenge and took time...their time, since they were their own "HR department."
They were also their own "legal department." More accurately, I was their legal department. They asked me stuff and I gave them advice. So I checked into the e-verify program. Here's what I learned.
When you sign up, you are signing an agreement that makes you responsible for following the program. That means that if the government changes the requirements of the program
you are responsible for following the new rules. Their update package hasn't reached you? Your problem. You haven't shoehorned in the time to review the changes to policy? Your problem. I'm sure they have things more or less settled by now, but at the time they had issued sixteen change notices in the previous twelve months. Remember, they are trying to install a regulatory process that is fundamentally unconstitutional, so changes to try to avoid direct challenges are going to be pretty common.
So, you submit a potential hire into the system. All of the requirements on you are spelled out, and by registering into the program you become contractually obligated to comply. If the result comes back negative there is an obligation on
you to inform your potential hire of their rights regarding challenges and appeals. Should they choose to appeal
you cannot refuse to hire them based upon the contested result. Now, if you choose not to hire them
for some other reason the potential target of their lawsuit is
you, so you better make bloody well sure that you have the time to show up in court and lay down a very convincing rap about how even though you went to the trouble of submitting them to verification you weren't really going to hire them because <reasons> and them getting rejected, possibly in error, had nothing to do with you not hiring them.
Okay, yeah, no one with a small business has time to go to court over that. Better to just hire them pending results of their appeal. The package, at that time, said that the government
should process their appeal within ten business days. It also required the prospective employer to inform them of their rights under the appeal process, which amounted to "if the government does not respond in ten days, or ten weeks, or ten months, you just have to wait." On my payroll. The language of the agreement was very clear about what the employer
would do and what the prospective employee
would do, but all references about the governments actions referred as
should do. They were under basically no contractual obligation
whatsoever.
So, my advice was "Do not sign up. Period." And I followed that up by telling them that if they thought they wanted to they better hire a real legal department and a real HR department and I would cheerfully consider their business relationship with me to be dissolved. No one ever did, oddly enough.
