A man in the arena

Someone on NPR explained that we have to legalize the illegal immigrants in this country because we cannot deport 11 million people and we cannot give them an incentive to leave. This is more evidence that NPR lacks a basic understanding of economics.

Immigrants come here, mostly, for jobs. It is not within our power to turn Mexico into an economic powerhouse that has comparable jobs, thus giving the illegal immigrants a reason to go home. However, it is within our power to curtail the incentive to come to the US.

The key is not the illegal immigrants. The key is their employers. They employ illegal immigrants because it is cheap and relatively risk free. The laws are rarely enforced and not very tough on the employers.

The change that should be made is to add risk. The chances of being caught employing illegal immigrants can be increased or the penalty imposed can be increased. We are not going to double our government resources in this area, although we can increase them. However, we can make it a serious criminal offensive to hire an illegal immigrant.

The law should state that all employers must have some kind of documentation of their employees’ legal status in the US (i.e. copies of a birth certificate or green card.) Every time a company is audited the documentation must be shown. If it is not there the company pays a fine. If the undocumented worker is an illegal immigrant the hiring manager faces jail time.

The jobs for illegal immigrants would disappear overnight. Then we could get down to the business of improve our immigration system to make it much easier to get a green card. The one caveat being that the green card would be issued by US Embassies. So the illegal immigrant would have to go back to Mexico in order to get their green cards.

Prices will rise, and the suburbanites might have to start cleaning their own houses. This is the trade off that we make so that this country does not have a growing underclass of people whose first action here was to break the law.

# posted by D. W. Eifert @ 11:17 PM