How to make immediate legalization work

Last updated on: January 18, 2016 at 10:51 am by Jane the Actuary

How to make immediate legalization work 2016-01-18T10:51:35-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Give workers standing to sue, similar to the way disabled individuals can collect cash from non-accessible businesses.

Yeah, I’m not sure how it would work, but if you want to take away the carrot of legalization, as a means of ensuring that the government implements a true enforcement and puts a genuine end to illegal immigration,* you need a stick.

So:

Give individual workers the right to sue employers who hire illegal workers in the future (either via false papers or under the table), on the basis that this takes away (a) job opportunity and (b) the opportunity for increased wages due to supply and demand.

Further, to the extent that the federal government stands in the way, e.g., via regulations that make it impossible for employers to truly verify employment eligibility (because, it’s claimed, it’s discriminatory), enable individuals or groups to sue the government, with the obstructing individuals subject to termination as well as fines to be paid out of that department’s budget.

Oh, and one more fix: go to a zero-baseline immigration policy. Set a fixed number of new entrants per year. Use census and other data to derive a figure for the number of new entrants per year — both visa overstays and border-crossers — by country of origin. Subtract these totals from the number of visas that otherwise would have been allotted to that country, to give other stakeholders in the immigration system some skin in the game when it comes to illegals.

I know the preceding is rather pie-in-the-sky, but it’s in response to those who say “enforcement first” is unfair to those who are planned to be legalized in the future, because you’ve taken away their ability to earn an income. Now, to be sure, they never had a right to do so in the first place, but it is a legitimate issue.

So there you go. Could you make this work?

And the asterisk is in the second paragraph above because Bush’s amnesty plan, from 2006, had a different approach: he decreed that illegal immigration would end because we’d just have a guest worker program, allowing anyone who wished to come, the ability to do so legally, to fill all the minimum wage/unskilled labor jobs we thought we’d have. (And that was well before we started the current debate about minimum wage levels, but I think the fantasy then was that Mexican men would come, leave their families behind, and live off their minimum wage salaries with a bit to spare for the family.)

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