Want to fix illegal immigration? Arrest the folks who are doing the hiring

The laws are there. But no one has the guts to enforce them

Which is worse?

Illegally hiring thousands of undocumented migrants?

Or being one?

If you go by our laws, it’s the person or company doing the hiring. If you go by our politics, it’s the person who came to America looking for work.

Some politicians like to talk about illegal immigration as if it were an "invasion." But invaders don't respond to invitations — and that’s precisely what the migrants receive when U.S. companies let it be known they’re looking to hire. Legally or not.

That’s been the case for decades. Sure, some argue it’s our economic reality: agri-business giants and others simply need migrants to do work Americans won’t. And that busting them for illegal hiring would wreak havoc on the economy.

Fine. But if that’s the case, call off the ICE raids and stop pretending that migrants came here — in the vast majority of cases — for some purpose more nefarious than feeding their families.

Stop pretending that the needs of U.S. companies had no role in opening the floodgates. And especially stop pretending nothing can be done about that.

The U.S. has had a working solution since 1986, when Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. It made it illegal to knowingly hire undocumented workers. It’s still federal law.

Border Czar Tom Homan needn’t dispatch a National Guard battalion to find the particulars: 8 U.S. Code § 1324a makes it a federal crime to knowingly hire someone not authorized to work in the U.S.

Right across its border sits 8 U.S. Code § 1325 — the statute used to prosecute unauthorized entry. Both are federal laws. Both are enforceable.

Only one gets enforced.

Each year, tens of thousands of migrants are arrested on suspicion of immigration violations. And many more — including children, elderly family members, and innocent bystanders — live in constant fear of the government in our land of the free.

Meanwhile, only a tiny handful of companies — and none of the giants — pay any legal price for the hiring practices that entice migrants to cross the border. Try searching for “corporate giant indicted for illegal hiring” if you don't believe me.

Just consider the most obvious example: the pandemic. During COVID, border crossings came to a screeching halt — not because of a wall Mexico didn’t pay for, or “tough talk,” or troops at the border. It wasn’t a fear by migrants of getting sick here; the pandemic was hitting their home countries, too.

It was because there was no hiring going on. When the economy shut down, hiring plummeted. And so did the illegal immigration numbers.

That’s not to say jobs are the only magnet for illegal immigration. Just the biggest.

It also isn’t to suggest that the border doesn’t need better security than in the last administration. Or that people in the U.S. illegally who commit serious crimes shouldn’t be prosecuted, and if convicted (with due process), deported.

But none of that cancels out the basic principle of supply and demand: the demand is created by U.S. companies’ hiring. The supply is filled by migrants willing to do the jobs that otherwise would go unfilled.

It wouldn’t take another pandemic to reduce that supply. If you believe the numbers are such a crisis, just enforce the law making it illegal to hire undocumented workers.

Yet so far this year, the only arrest that made news involved a small chain of Jalisco’s Mexican Restaurants. Seven executives, including the owner and CFO, pleaded guilty to a racketeering conspiracy for hiring and harboring undocumented workers across multiple states.

Great work, Batman.

Meanwhile, it’s pretty much common knowledge that certain agri-business giants do just a bit more hiring than the folks at Jalisco’s. Not all of them, of course. But some of them are grossing revenues that may be 10,000 times greater than that restaurant chain.

The disparity might have something to do with what our friends south of the border call cojones. Just a thought.

Homan is fond of saying, “If you’re in the country illegally, you’re on the table.”

Great. Then maybe an occasional agri-business HR executive should hop up there too. Right alongside the CEOs, with whom the buck stops. Or maybe a few corporate board members with their fiduciary duties.

That’s a pretty big table, Tom.

But lacking an approach to enforcement that doesn’t reek of favoritism and cowardice, the U.S. doesn’t need troops or a border wall to stop immigration.

It needs a mirror.

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