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With all the anger over illegal immigrants taking US jobs, as a European it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the e

With all the anger over illegal immigrants taking US jobs, as a European it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers. If I want to hire someone (local or remote) as an employer here, I better make sure the worker has a valid working permit. Fines for non-compliance towards the employer are huge, even for a single day of work. All paperwork has to be complete before any work is done. Even when hiring through intermediary companies who guarantee it's all legal, liability and fines remain in place for the ultimate employer if it turns out to be not so.

alephnerd 2y ago
> punishing the employer for employing an illegal worker It's already the law. This is why employers mandate I-9 forms as part of employment. This is part of the larger indictment against Christine Chapman by the DoJ, who found she was falsifying employment verification documents and giving access to North Koreans in return for a portion of the embezzled sums. Stories like this are also why there has been a major push for RTO.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  > Stories like this are also why there has been a major push for RTO. Citation needed. I find this very unlikely as the root cause.
  - varispeed 2y ago
    It's about investment funds and shareholders owning commercial property who push for RTO out of fear of their portfolio going down in value if people are not using the offices.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > investment funds and shareholders owning commercial property Are you in San Francisco? This is a conspiracy theory I hear a lot in San Francisco.
      - alephnerd 2y ago
        It's a dumb conspiracy theory at the macro-scale, and the overlap between CBRE or JLL and a company's board is minimal
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        It is, but I’m curious about why it’s so popular. Is it a Musk thing?
        alephnerd 2y ago
        It's an HN+Reddit thing. The userbases overlap significantly now.
        consteval 2y ago
        To be fair I think the only reason the conspiracy even exists is because, apparently, nobody knows what RTO is really about. IMO it's mostly just a power play and insecure executives, but they won't come out and say that of course. We're left to speculate, and naturally conspiracies thrive.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        varispeed 2y ago
        https://unherd.com/newsroom/a-commercial-real-estate-crisis-is-coming/ https://unherd.com/newsroom/a-commercial-real-estate-crisis-... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/commercial-real-estate-crisis-empty-offices/674310/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/commercial... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-02/how-home-working-and-higher-interest-rates-tipped-real-estate-into-crisis https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-02/how-home-... https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/27/office-blocks-banking-crisis-interest-rates-commercial-property https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/27/office-bloc...
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > already the law There is practically zero enforcement. Criminalise hiring illegal workers while stepping up enforcement and you dramatically reduce the value of illegal migration while shutting down large sections of the economy, thereby prompting supply-side inflation. We don’t do it because this is a politically convenient middle ground that keeps illegal labor in the system while segregating it from competing with most of us. (Put another way: we have a regulated and an unregulated labor market. We like the fruits from the latter.)
  - MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
    This is the next key talking point for a winning candidate, and may be the ultimate solution to US immigration. It can and will gain popular support, but it will take someone sneaky enough to gain their party's support on other matters first; either after becoming the party's nominee or after being elected. Either one. (If you propose this after being elected you might only last one term though; it's a bit of a rug pull. Better to pull the rug out from under your party rather than the voters.)
BadHumans 2y ago
The anger over illegal immigrants taking US jobs is mostly fearmongering from the people employing illegal immigrants.
- mkatx 2y ago
  Wait, the ones who are getting a great deal on labor costs are the ones complaining about the source of that great deal? I'm not so sure..
  - BadHumans 2y ago
    The current Republican nominee ran his entire campaign on hating immigrants and has been known to hire illegal immigrants. They don't actually want to crackdown on it they just want to campaign on it.
    - mkatx 2y ago
      I see that, yes. But they will still create legislation against those means.
      - varispeed 2y ago
        Legislation is meaningless if it is not going to be enforced or if it will be used to destroy competition. As in law enforcement cannot deal with all cases, but they certainly can be nudged to deal with businesses that corrupt government doesn't want operating.
      - consteval 2y ago
        I don't know that they will. For example, 90% of Trump's previous platform was the wall. That's all he could talk about. No wall to be found, and he doesn't even mention it anymore. Things change from campaign to office.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    Lucy with the football, bro. It’s a playbook as old as time. “At least we’re not <the other guy>” When slavery was a thing, white southern workers made a lot less than northern workers. Racial superiority pumped the suckers up. Johnny Reb volunteered to be slaughtered so some aristocrat could own people.
Spooky23 2y ago
Most of the illegal immigrant hoopla has been performative bullshit to make to easier to control employees. If you’re in the chicken processing business or need casual labor, it’s a hell of alot cheaper to avoid paying for social security, worker’s compensation, etc by hiring people whom you can easily exploit by dangling the sword of ICE over their heads. The US governance model segments immigration and work regulation - the former is a federal matter, the latter is almost exclusively regulated by the states (including enforced of federal rules). In recent years as conservatives have veered into a more overtly racist and reactionary movement that’s shifted a bit.
DFHippie 2y ago
Legislation is frequently proposed to do just this: require all employers to use E-Verify to ensure they don't hire illegal workers. The same people who are constantly firing up voters about immigration are opposed to this. The political issue is valuable to them, as is cheap, cowed, disposable labor. And they know if they succeeded in shipping their workers back over the border there would be economic and political mayhem. I expect endless demagoguery about immigration and performative cruelty, but nothing that will challenge the bottom line. Here's a recent bit of commentary on E-Verify: https://jabberwocking.com/the-long-sad-story-of-e-verify/ https://jabberwocking.com/the-long-sad-story-of-e-verify/
gwbas1c 2y ago
The people who complain about illegal immigrant labor in the US also like their cheap chicken and other fruits from illegal immigrant labor. It's a weird case where one business undercuts another by hiring cheap labor, and then the other business has to do the same thing or else risk going out of business. Better enforcement might help, but remember, people like cheap chicken; it doesn't matter which way you vote.
- neuroelectron 2y ago
  I don't like cheap chicken
- silisili 2y ago
  There are legal means of hiring seasonal workers. If it needs fixing in law, let's do that... not this weird system we have now of turning our head the other way and waving it off as necessary while ignoring any criticism of said crazy system.
- frmersdog 2y ago
  People say this, but I always wonder if some rejiggering of the revenue allocation calculus might make it possible to keep chicken cheap while paying the workers a living wage. All you'd have to do is make a handful of executives very disappointed when they open the letter containing their tax bill - or when a federal law enforcement agent knocks on their door.
  - hulitu 2y ago
    No. The profits _must_ grow.
  - gwbas1c 2y ago
    I think we're more likely to see AI-based automation further take humans out of the loop at chicken factories. That being said: I personally think it makes more sense to lower the cost of plant-based proteins. It's always going to be cheaper when we eat the plants directly instead of having an animal convert the plant to protein.
jandrewrogers 2y ago
In the US, there is no reliable way to verify employment eligibility. What systems do exist tend to produce many false positives and false negatives. Furthermore, you are required to accept documents the demonstrate employment eligibility at face value, even if they are likely to be fraudulent. In industries that famously have many illegal employees, the companies have cover because the employees always have fraudulent documents. And since the company is required to accept those documents and not discriminate, the company can't be held liable for hiring them even though they are illegal. Underlying this situation is that it is unconstitutional for the Federal government to issue mandatory ids to citizens that could be used to reliably determine employment eligibility.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > you are required to accept documents the demonstrate employment eligibility at face value, even if they are likely to be fraudulent Genuine question: source? > mandatory ids to citizens that could be used to reliably determine employment eligibility Yes, state-issued IDs, the infallible line keeping underage drinkers out of bars.
  - jandrewrogers 2y ago
    It is against Federal law to reject any reasonable documentation that satisfies the I-9 requirements. Historically, you can bootstrap your way to meeting those requirements with not much more than affidavits and basic forgery. There are many people who are US citizens that due to history or circumstances have no reliable documentation of such with which to bootstrap an ID -- I have people with no foundational documents in my own family. The system is designed to enable these people to bootstrap their paperwork without a reliable root document, which is of course exploitable by people that are in the US illegally. State-issued IDs do not contain sufficient information to ensure eligibility for employment under Federal law.
  - cj 2y ago
pumanoir 2y ago
The scammers in question use stolen US citizens' identities. Same thing happens in Europe to a lesser degree.
MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
> it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers This has been my proposed solution to the immigration problem in the US. Stop attempting to corral the people coming over, and shift 100% of your resources toward punishing those who employ them. How many people will attempt to sneak into the US when no one is willing to hire them? I also view this as a "put your money where your mouth is" stance. It changes it from a political issue into one with a practical solution, and the people benefiting from cheap labor would have to be very creative to find fault with it.
anon115 2y ago
too much work im gonna hire the immigrant sorry not sorry~
danans 2y ago
> it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers. The anti-immigrant politicians can't punish the employers because they would be punishing their own donors. If that sounds like a contradiction, consider that undocumented/illegal immigrants are effectively pawns who have no political power in the system, and the contradiction disappears entirely.
- hollerith 2y ago
  How does that make the contradiction disappear? It doesn't. The resolution to the contradiction is that few candidates to Federal office are opposed to illegal immigration, and those that have opposed illegal immigration have mostly gotten away with merely saying they are opposed while not doing very much to stop illegal immigration.
  - JambalayaJimbo 2y ago
    Being anti-illegal immigration is a very popular political position.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - hollerith 2y ago
      In some states it is, but state-level elected officials have only weak levers with which to influence the rate of illegal immigration. I don't know much about the topic, but conservative commentator Ann Coulter complained that although he certain got votes by talking about it, Trump didn't do much against illegal immigration and probably doesn't really want to do much about it.
    - hulitu 2y ago
      Because it makes them look like they care for the people who elected them ("the imigrants make crimes/are taking jobs" narative). In reality the politicians only care about the biggest bider.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

alephnerd 2y ago

> punishing the employer for employing an illegal worker It's already the law. This is why employers mandate I-9 forms as part of employment. This is part of the larger indictment against Christine Chapman by the DoJ, who found she was falsifying employment verification documents and giving access to North Koreans in return for a portion of the embezzled sums. Stories like this are also why there has been a major push for RTO.

ceejayoz 2y ago
> Stories like this are also why there has been a major push for RTO. Citation needed. I find this very unlikely as the root cause.
- varispeed 2y ago
  It's about investment funds and shareholders owning commercial property who push for RTO out of fear of their portfolio going down in value if people are not using the offices.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > investment funds and shareholders owning commercial property Are you in San Francisco? This is a conspiracy theory I hear a lot in San Francisco.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      It's a dumb conspiracy theory at the macro-scale, and the overlap between CBRE or JLL and a company's board is minimal
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        It is, but I’m curious about why it’s so popular. Is it a Musk thing?
        alephnerd 2y ago
        It's an HN+Reddit thing. The userbases overlap significantly now.
        consteval 2y ago
        To be fair I think the only reason the conspiracy even exists is because, apparently, nobody knows what RTO is really about. IMO it's mostly just a power play and insecure executives, but they won't come out and say that of course. We're left to speculate, and naturally conspiracies thrive.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - varispeed 2y ago
        https://unherd.com/newsroom/a-commercial-real-estate-crisis-is-coming/ https://unherd.com/newsroom/a-commercial-real-estate-crisis-... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/commercial-real-estate-crisis-empty-offices/674310/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/commercial... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-02/how-home-working-and-higher-interest-rates-tipped-real-estate-into-crisis https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-02/how-home-... https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/27/office-blocks-banking-crisis-interest-rates-commercial-property https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/27/office-bloc...
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> already the law There is practically zero enforcement. Criminalise hiring illegal workers while stepping up enforcement and you dramatically reduce the value of illegal migration while shutting down large sections of the economy, thereby prompting supply-side inflation. We don’t do it because this is a politically convenient middle ground that keeps illegal labor in the system while segregating it from competing with most of us. (Put another way: we have a regulated and an unregulated labor market. We like the fruits from the latter.)
- MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
  This is the next key talking point for a winning candidate, and may be the ultimate solution to US immigration. It can and will gain popular support, but it will take someone sneaky enough to gain their party's support on other matters first; either after becoming the party's nominee or after being elected. Either one. (If you propose this after being elected you might only last one term though; it's a bit of a rug pull. Better to pull the rug out from under your party rather than the voters.)

BadHumans 2y ago

The anger over illegal immigrants taking US jobs is mostly fearmongering from the people employing illegal immigrants.

mkatx 2y ago
Wait, the ones who are getting a great deal on labor costs are the ones complaining about the source of that great deal? I'm not so sure..
- BadHumans 2y ago
  The current Republican nominee ran his entire campaign on hating immigrants and has been known to hire illegal immigrants. They don't actually want to crackdown on it they just want to campaign on it.
  - mkatx 2y ago
    I see that, yes. But they will still create legislation against those means.
    - varispeed 2y ago
      Legislation is meaningless if it is not going to be enforced or if it will be used to destroy competition. As in law enforcement cannot deal with all cases, but they certainly can be nudged to deal with businesses that corrupt government doesn't want operating.
    - consteval 2y ago
      I don't know that they will. For example, 90% of Trump's previous platform was the wall. That's all he could talk about. No wall to be found, and he doesn't even mention it anymore. Things change from campaign to office.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  Lucy with the football, bro. It’s a playbook as old as time. “At least we’re not <the other guy>” When slavery was a thing, white southern workers made a lot less than northern workers. Racial superiority pumped the suckers up. Johnny Reb volunteered to be slaughtered so some aristocrat could own people.

Spooky23 2y ago

Most of the illegal immigrant hoopla has been performative bullshit to make to easier to control employees. If you’re in the chicken processing business or need casual labor, it’s a hell of alot cheaper to avoid paying for social security, worker’s compensation, etc by hiring people whom you can easily exploit by dangling the sword of ICE over their heads. The US governance model segments immigration and work regulation - the former is a federal matter, the latter is almost exclusively regulated by the states (including enforced of federal rules). In recent years as conservatives have veered into a more overtly racist and reactionary movement that’s shifted a bit.

DFHippie 2y ago

Legislation is frequently proposed to do just this: require all employers to use E-Verify to ensure they don't hire illegal workers. The same people who are constantly firing up voters about immigration are opposed to this. The political issue is valuable to them, as is cheap, cowed, disposable labor. And they know if they succeeded in shipping their workers back over the border there would be economic and political mayhem. I expect endless demagoguery about immigration and performative cruelty, but nothing that will challenge the bottom line. Here's a recent bit of commentary on E-Verify: https://jabberwocking.com/the-long-sad-story-of-e-verify/ https://jabberwocking.com/the-long-sad-story-of-e-verify/

gwbas1c 2y ago

The people who complain about illegal immigrant labor in the US also like their cheap chicken and other fruits from illegal immigrant labor. It's a weird case where one business undercuts another by hiring cheap labor, and then the other business has to do the same thing or else risk going out of business. Better enforcement might help, but remember, people like cheap chicken; it doesn't matter which way you vote.

neuroelectron 2y ago
I don't like cheap chicken
silisili 2y ago
There are legal means of hiring seasonal workers. If it needs fixing in law, let's do that... not this weird system we have now of turning our head the other way and waving it off as necessary while ignoring any criticism of said crazy system.
frmersdog 2y ago
People say this, but I always wonder if some rejiggering of the revenue allocation calculus might make it possible to keep chicken cheap while paying the workers a living wage. All you'd have to do is make a handful of executives very disappointed when they open the letter containing their tax bill - or when a federal law enforcement agent knocks on their door.
- hulitu 2y ago
  No. The profits _must_ grow.
- gwbas1c 2y ago
  I think we're more likely to see AI-based automation further take humans out of the loop at chicken factories. That being said: I personally think it makes more sense to lower the cost of plant-based proteins. It's always going to be cheaper when we eat the plants directly instead of having an animal convert the plant to protein.

jandrewrogers 2y ago

In the US, there is no reliable way to verify employment eligibility. What systems do exist tend to produce many false positives and false negatives. Furthermore, you are required to accept documents the demonstrate employment eligibility at face value, even if they are likely to be fraudulent. In industries that famously have many illegal employees, the companies have cover because the employees always have fraudulent documents. And since the company is required to accept those documents and not discriminate, the company can't be held liable for hiring them even though they are illegal. Underlying this situation is that it is unconstitutional for the Federal government to issue mandatory ids to citizens that could be used to reliably determine employment eligibility.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> you are required to accept documents the demonstrate employment eligibility at face value, even if they are likely to be fraudulent Genuine question: source? > mandatory ids to citizens that could be used to reliably determine employment eligibility Yes, state-issued IDs, the infallible line keeping underage drinkers out of bars.
- jandrewrogers 2y ago
  It is against Federal law to reject any reasonable documentation that satisfies the I-9 requirements. Historically, you can bootstrap your way to meeting those requirements with not much more than affidavits and basic forgery. There are many people who are US citizens that due to history or circumstances have no reliable documentation of such with which to bootstrap an ID -- I have people with no foundational documents in my own family. The system is designed to enable these people to bootstrap their paperwork without a reliable root document, which is of course exploitable by people that are in the US illegally. State-issued IDs do not contain sufficient information to ensure eligibility for employment under Federal law.
- cj 2y ago

pumanoir 2y ago

The scammers in question use stolen US citizens' identities. Same thing happens in Europe to a lesser degree.

MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago

> it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers This has been my proposed solution to the immigration problem in the US. Stop attempting to corral the people coming over, and shift 100% of your resources toward punishing those who employ them. How many people will attempt to sneak into the US when no one is willing to hire them? I also view this as a "put your money where your mouth is" stance. It changes it from a political issue into one with a practical solution, and the people benefiting from cheap labor would have to be very creative to find fault with it.

anon115 2y ago

too much work im gonna hire the immigrant sorry not sorry~

danans 2y ago

> it surprises me that nobody in the US seems to even mention the idea of punishing the employer for employing illegal workers. The anti-immigrant politicians can't punish the employers because they would be punishing their own donors. If that sounds like a contradiction, consider that undocumented/illegal immigrants are effectively pawns who have no political power in the system, and the contradiction disappears entirely.

hollerith 2y ago
How does that make the contradiction disappear? It doesn't. The resolution to the contradiction is that few candidates to Federal office are opposed to illegal immigration, and those that have opposed illegal immigration have mostly gotten away with merely saying they are opposed while not doing very much to stop illegal immigration.
- JambalayaJimbo 2y ago
  Being anti-illegal immigration is a very popular political position.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - hollerith 2y ago
    In some states it is, but state-level elected officials have only weak levers with which to influence the rate of illegal immigration. I don't know much about the topic, but conservative commentator Ann Coulter complained that although he certain got votes by talking about it, Trump didn't do much against illegal immigration and probably doesn't really want to do much about it.
  - hulitu 2y ago
    Because it makes them look like they care for the people who elected them ("the imigrants make crimes/are taking jobs" narative). In reality the politicians only care about the biggest bider.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]