Employer Enforcement On Immigration Comes To Arizona
01/01/2008
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Randall Parker writes at Parapundit:
A law with real enforcement teeth to get employers to stop hiring illegal aliens is going into effect on January 1, 2008 and employers who knowingly employ illegal aliens can loose their business license.

Businesses knowingly employing illegal immigrants face corporate death penalties.

The first offense can result in a 10-day suspension of a company's business license. The second offense can mean loss of the business license altogether. The law is widely viewed as the toughest of more than 100 passed by states and municipalities nationwide since the summer to crack down on illegal immigration.

Employers can comply by checking all applications against a US federal database.

Now, it will be interesting to see if AZ actually enforces this law. I suspect many of the folks impacted will got to California, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado.

This passage was especially interesting:

Because employers have to compete more for workers, Rademacher said he has raised salaries from about $7 three years to close to $10 this year.

Waters said some growers are paying $15 to $18 an hour this season.

Some of the legal Hispanic field workers think like farmer workers union leader Cesar Chavez did and oppose the illegals since the illegals drive down wages.

Ramona Ortiz, 55, who has been working in the fields since she was 16, said that there are undocumented workers, contrary to growers who say most workers are documented. And she would like to see fewer of them.

Now, think for a moment what $6000/year extra means to someone that was previously making $14000/year. That is what politicians like John McCain and George Bush want to take away from working people like Ramona Ortiz.

I think the state level of law is very interesting here. The law I would be interested in seeing is one that would make employers accomplices to any other violations committed by an illegal alien in their employ—and make the employer liable in civil suits for all actions outside the workplace that involve liability. That would mean that the larger employers would as a matter of course find themselves up on charges of as an accomplice to rape, murder and drug dealing—because with that many illegal alien employees, there are bound to be a few around. Ron Paul has always been hesitant about employer sanctions-I wounder how he'd feel about classifying illegal employers as accomplices to crimes illegal aliens can commit because they are in the US illegally with the help of an illegal employer?

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