Tsurayu wrote...
I have one word to say to that: taxes. Simple fact is illegal immigrants don't pay taxes. Also people that hire illegal immigrants don't pay into Social Security, Medicare, unemployment benefits. etc. Not to mention a lot of illegal immigrants will try to take advantage of public services, which of course they aren't paying for. I don't know about everyone else, but I don't particularly like the idea of paying for someone else to have help who won't in turn help anyone else.
It depends. If they are employed and paid under the table, then they don't pay any taxes. If they are employed by using a fake SSN, then they are at least paying payroll and medicare taxes. Some also pay income tax, because of employers who withhold it or by using an TIN. Still, illegal immigrants as a whole do not pay their fair share of taxes, though the gap is not as wide as most people probably think. However, it would be incorrect to say that illegal immigrants pay virtually no taxes.
Fiery_penguin_of_doom wrote...
It's a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation. Crack down on companies and they won't hire legal Hispanics as much for fear of getting busted in case one turns out to have a counterfeit. People will scream racism no matter what we do. The politicians wont tackle the problem because they have something to gain. Democrats have votes and Republicans have cheap labor.
I think putting pressure on employers is still a much better solution than the AZ law. The stuff that happens right now is a joke. I live in an area with a lot of illegals, and things show up in the news where some company has 10 employees that all are using the same SSN. I have a hard time believing that this couldn't easily be prevented with some basic screening by employers. It shouldn't even be that hard root out counterfeit SSNs in general. However, employers have no incentive to even try or cooperate with the government because there is no penalty when they get caught with 10 employees using the same SSN. They didn't "knowingly" hire the illegals.
I don't think racial discrimination would be particularly bad using this method if a standard procedure was applied and used with everyone. Wouldn't it be fairly simple to require everyone who wanted to work to provide an SSN and a valid government issue photo ID(like a passport, current school IDs are accepted), check with the provider of the ID to make the sure the picture of the original ID provided by the government and the picture on the provided ID appear to be of the same person, cross-reference with the feds to make sure that SSN matches up with that person. This requires that the government keep the photo one submits to get an ID on file(they do with US passports, don't know about other things), but even without something like this, there are certainly improvements that could be made.
Regarding discrimination, if a business fails to execute the procedure correctly with any employee, they get hit with a penalty.