Quote:I agree almost entirely. The way to stop illegal labor is to beef up e-Verify, fine the living crap out of companies that are using it improperly (or not at all), fine the living crap out of first-time offender companies that are caught employing illegal labor and build in penalties as high as being shut down (and criminal charges brought up against corporate officers) for habitual offenders.
Want to see illegal labor fall off a cliff? Fine Trump a few billion dollars and send him to prison for a year. That'll pretty quickly leave those here illegally out of work.
I'd take it a bit farther, though. I'm in favor of a guest worker program that would allow people already here illegally--not those caught crossing the border tonight--to register for ID, pay taxes and legally go to work for smaller companies (like CA Imperial Valley farms). There would be a separate, lower minimum wage for guest workers, and they would be exempt from benefit requirements. There would also be a cap on company size (revenue and workforce) in terms of eligibility for hiring these workers. That's to keep Walmart from hiring 10,000 guest workers at $4.50/hr. and displacing legal residents in those jobs.
The idea would be to fill the jobs that Americans don't want and employers can't fill (like farm work, for example) with a willing and able workforce that's currently forced to hide in the shadows. The eligibility would be a one-time thing, say a period of one month in which illegal immigrants can report to any number of facilities and be granted an ID, the ability to live here legally and the ability to work for employers that are part of the guest worker program. There would be strict limitations, too. Commit any offense that results in a criminal conviction (i.e., not a speeding ticket) and you're deported, no questions asked, and not allowed to return to the US under the guest worker program again. The enrollment window would only be opened on rare occasions, as needed, and anyone who doesn't report for enrollment is considered here illegally and subject to deportation upon discovery.
Tariffs are a touchier subject to me. Even though they protect American jobs, they also damage international relationships and can result in equivalent tariffs being placed on American goods. The tariffs we'd need to compensate for a kid in a Guatemalan sweatshop stitching together soccer balls at $1.00 per day is pretty dramatic when you consider that we're probably paying an American at least $80 per day to do the same time. I do believe that tariffs are a viable tool for bringing American jobs back over, but I think there are legislative ways to do it as well. Companies that ship jobs overseas make a lot of money: why not simply introduce tax penalties for companies based upon what percentage of jobs are filled overseas vs. at home?
Oh, wait, that would require [BAD WORD REMOVED] off the corporate lobby. Never mind. Better just crap all over our international trade relationships, then.
Bottom line, the solution to illegal immigration isn't a fence, mass deportation or whatever kind of frightening ideas Drifter's cooked up, it's legislating it out of existence through increased accountability and penalties for companies that employ illegal labor, then making it legal for small businesses, farms, etc. to employ immigrants who are already here at lower wages and without Obamacare requirements in play. If illegal immigrants know that there's no work for them here and no opportunity to get work, I think we'll see the numbers start to fall off, and more of those coming across actually will be the drug runners and human traffickers that we should be focused on.
Again, well thought out. In all due respect, we have to secure the border first. Right now we are looking at nearly 3/4 of a million crimes committed by those in this country illegally in the state of Texas over the last 8 years. The first organizing principle of the federal government is to protect the citizens from all enemies foreign and domestic.
Secondly, the point of an immigration policy in general, as an expression of the sovereignty of a nation, is to regulate the amount of people that come into a country. We can't have a carte blanche system by which all 6 billion of the worlds inhabitants can come to this country and compete against our citizens for jobs. We already have 93 million adults in this country that wake up and don't go to a job. At a certain point if the ratio of workers paying a high enough level of taxes to those drawing some form of benefit to the government becomes too low then you have greece. We should be talking about a moritorium on immigration period until the labor force participation rate normalizes.
Third, the problem now is that we have too much undocumented cheap labor. A lower minimum wage for undocumenteds would just codify the current competitive advantage they have over american citizens. a.) its going to be hard to catch people employing people outside the system because they are already doing it and getting away with it. one of the inherent problems with an income tax as it currently exists is the level of inefficiency we have keeping up with the individual activities of 300 million people. And when you factor in the other overhead associated with legally hiring another person (like workmans comp, insurance, etc.) its more often than not cheaper to pay people cash. b.) e verify sounds great, but it would be handled by the same people that ran healthcare.gov into the ground. Then you would have people with a flower shop who couldn't get online facing fines and jail time for higher a gardener with a fake social security card.
I think that what it would come down to is that after you secure the border (wall, fence, drone surveillance, whatever you choose) then and only then you would have the ability to deal with the people already here. The most common sense would be work permits for them in recognition that in large part their undocumented status devoid of rugged enforcement means that they are competing for jobs already and not paying into the system. On the employee side bump up their fica contributions and sur tax on income and call it a day. Mass deportation is going to be impossible with the 5th and 14th amendments and the sheer logistics, and incidentally i think this is the biggest political miscalculation that could keep Trump from the nomination.
