woiyo writes
Quote:1. ANY employer quilty of having an illegal immigrant working for them would face severe cash penalties.
At the risk of being accused of 'weaseling', I am not sure what the policy should be on this one. I was in the position of hiring and firing workers during both the Carter and Reagan administrations when employers were required to verify legal status of those they hired. While a lot of my staff had to be qualified professionals, I was nevertheless required, especially during the Carter administration, to require proof of citizenship and bonafide residency - three total proofs required - before I could hire somebody. This became a real problem for us especially when I needed to pull somebody off a volleyball team to serve as referee or needed a spur of the minute model for a life drawing class or needed to recruit a helper in the preschool when somebody called in sick at the last minute.
This was also a problem for the contractor who stopped by the unemployment office to pick up a couple of laborers for the day or who really needed the walkon carpenter who just showed up at the jobsite. The restaurant that needed a dishwasher couldn't just call for one to be sent over and start right to work. And none of us had the ability to determine whether the documents presented were authentic or forgeries. And that meant the illegals were not even slowed down much going right to work.
Most or all of those laws are still on the books and we could demand that they be enforced right now and we should. But it would require some kind of national ID card, I think, that many people fear more than they resent the illegals. At the very least it would require encrypted, forgery-resistant ID of some or amendment of the laws to allow for some kind of good faith provision on behalf of the employers lest they be hamstrung in their ability to do business or criminalized through inadvertently hiring an illegal. And, once you do that, unscrupulous employers would go right ahead using the 'good faith' loophole to hire workers as they are doing now.
If I seem to waffle on matters of policy, it is because I've already been through this stuff once and remember very well what the issues and problems were. Coming up with a workable and reasonable policy is not always as cut and dried as it sometimes appears.