Putting a Stop to Slave Labor

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For obvious reasons, the statistics are somewhat unreliable. The reality of the situation, however, is not lost on Wall Street or anyone else who cares to take a good, hard look. Our nation is full of undocumented workers. We see them every day. We know why they're here, and most of us are smart enough to figure out why we won't do anything meaningful to change the situation. We don't want to lose the cheap, efficient labor.

'Four to six million jobs have shifted to the underground market, as small businesses take advantage of the vulnerability of illegal residents,' Justich concludes in his report. 'In addition to circumventing the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, many employers of illegal workers have taken to using unrecorded revenue receipts. Employer enforcement has succumbed to political pressure.'

Hiring undocumented workers is illegal. Yet we don't require that employers verify an applicant's documents, and there is no simple system for doing so. How hard would it be to give employers access to a database that would, without violating any privacy rights, check a couple of basic facts related to a Social Security number, such as zip code, name, and work history? In this era of instant online credit, when a teenager working at your local car dealer's parts counter can check a credit score in 15 seconds, it would be neither difficult nor prohibitively expensive. As it is, we don't even check to see that the Social Security number matches a name.

We are systematically tolerating, even encouraging, undocumented workers to come to the United States. Then, in order to placate a vocal and ill-informed minority, enforcement agencies stage various law enforcement dramas at locations across the country. We erect costly and ineffectual fences on the Mexican border.

Some write off undocumented workers as criminals. Factions within the law enforcement establishment stage sporadic raids with little strategic value on high-profile employers like Wal-Mart and Swift & Company. The raids placate the neoconservatives demanding an emphasis on law enforcement, but that's all the raids accomplish. Given that there are somewhere between 10 million and 20 million undocumented workers, if just 10 percent of them were arrested there would be no place to incarcerate them -- and the sheer numbers would make deportation logistically impossible. How would we transport a million people to the border? Two million? And how do we fill their jobs when they're gone?

What's most appalling is that we have the audacity to label entrepreneurial immigrants 'criminals' when the vast majority of undocumented workers are sincere, skilled, industrious men and women doing what they must to support their families. Just ask the people who hire them. A Texas rancher recently told me he gets 50 percent more work from an 'illegal' Mexican day worker than from his legal U.S. counterpart. The Mexican 'is generally a family guy, working for his wife and kids,' he said. 'The American is some kid who doesn't really care, or he's got other problems -- alcohol or whatever -- keeping him out of the permanent workforce.' (Most honest farmers I've talked to over the years, in fact, will tell you that their Mexican laborers have better skills and work harder than the rest of their documented employees.)

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