ILLEGALS: Stop at the job stage

No American approves of illegal immigration. Everyone, liberal and conservative, thinks it must stop. Where we diverge is in how to stop it.

Listen to the only liberal in North Idaho: The approach Arizona is taking won’t work. It can’t work because it doesn’t address the root cause of illegal immigration — skinflints who hire illegals because they’ll work for less than minimum wage. If we don’t address the problem of hiring, we could completely encircle the United States in a 100-foot wall and still have illegals because someone in Mexico would start making 150-foot ladders — just perfect for getting to work!

Try this instead.

First, add a space for your employer’s Taxpayer Identification Number to Forms W-2, 1099 and 1040. A little patching of the IRS’s computer will allow them to correlate a business with the people working for it. If you’ve got a construction company doing $35 million in business and eight people reported income from it, you’re probably working for a company that employs illegals. They’d be worth checking out.

Second, send agents into businesses to check eligibility status. These people are working somewhere.

And third, create some meaningful sanctions against employers. Hiring an illegal immigrant is at least as big a crime as being one. I would implement a four-stage program of progressive discipline for those who employ illegal immigrants, in addition to deporting all the illegal immigrants they find there. Create a nice law that pierces the corporate veil so that the company’s president, or the branch manager in the case of a multi-location firm, and the person who hired the illegal immigrant receive a $1,000 fine for each illegal immigrant up to the first 10, and another $10,000 fine for each additional 10 illegal immigrants. On the second offense, throw them in jail: one year for employing up to 10 illegal immigrants, two years for employing up to 50 and three years for employing 51 or more of them. On the third offense, require the business to be sold, for a fair market price, to an American who can obey the law.

If you make it so they can’t work, they won’t come.

JIM MOWREADER

Hayden