Well, it's a start:
A company that owns 11 McDonald's restaurants in Nevada was fined one million dollars Wednesday after pleading guilty to employing 58 illegal immigrants.
No work, no incentive to come here illegally. Make it a lot more companies and a few billion in fines, and there will be no more illegal-immigration crisis.
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I don't pretend to know the solution; and I'm happy if the government is cracking down on employers who employ illegals as part of their business plan. But, we should probably be cautious about penalties and enforcement efforts that create strong incentives to just avoid employing anybody who looks potentially foreign, regardless of legality or citizenship status.
Doug...if someone brings a suit in court, do they have to prove who they are? Just curious....This whole identity thing seems to bug you...
The largest tomato farmer in Pennsylvania stopped planting tomatoes this year. Every time they had checked him out, he passed 100% - his pickers were either US citizens, or they were properly green-carded. On the other hand, he was having increasing problems with legal workers not showing up on time because they had been stopped by law enforcement officials who locked them up for several days while they took their time checking out the workers' credentials.
In addition to the migrant workers not having those tomatoes to pick, there were hundreds of local people who lost their jobs packing the tomatoes. He could hire college kids, housewives, etc., to do the washing, sorting and packing, but they didn't want to do the stoop labor.
If you can get the tomatoes picked, it's a fairly profitable crop, but if the maters rot in the field, it's better to raise corn or soybeans.
Campbell's up in Archbold stopped contracting with farmers in the early 1970s unless they mechanically picked their tomatoes. You only get about 25% as many tomatoes from a field, and half of them are green instead of red, but Campbell's figures that's good enough for tomato soup or for V-8.
Doug, I think the solution is to fix the immigration process. In some parts of the country, it takes 8 months to get a 6-month renewal for immigration. Is it any wonder that people overstay?
Well, either that, or we can sit at home bitching about jobs being outsourced, while we eat foreign tomatoes that taste like cardboard. After all, if terrorists were after us, they'd mail us anthrax instead of sneaking melamine into food additives, painting our kids' toys with leaded paint, or lacing our tomatoes with salmonella, wouldn't they?
Sounds like that McDonald's franchisee got off cheap. It's a safe bet they've realized far greater savings than $1 million over the years through their employment practices, so this slap on the wrist can be written off as the cost of doing business. And when the political heat turns to something else, as it surely will, this employer knows it can safely revert to its old money-saving practices. This is just a replay of what happened under Reagan in the '80s.
Now if they'd been fined $10-$20 million, that would have some teeth in it. That's the way to do it. Make it so cost-prohibitive they'll never even think about doing it again.