Local opinion: Immigration enforcement should focus on employers

We have had numerous immigration “crises” in the United States over the last 200 years — including in the 1840s during the Irish potato famine, in the mid-1800s with an influx of Chinese immigrants (many of whom provided cheap labor to build the First Transcontinental Railroad), around the turn of the 20th century from various European countries, and more recently from a variety of Asian countries. All those waves of immigration were perceived by many as crises. But we survived those crises. There is a legitimate argument that our many immigrants have continually enriched our country and made it greater — that low-wage workers have substantially helped develop our economy and our country.

Immigrants come to this country to get jobs and improve their lives and those of their families. We remain “The Land of Hopes and Dreams” for many. Whether our current immigration crisis is more severe than the previous ones is certainly open to dispute. The fact is that even today many of our undocumented immigrants are indispensable to the functioning of our economy. We rely on Hispanic immigrants (some documented but many not) to harvest fruit and vegetables in the 100-plus-degree heat of California’s Central and Imperial Valleys. Immigrants perform similar low-paid jobs, such as working in meat packing plants and caring for the sick and elderly in nursing homes, throughout the country. My children would not take on those jobs even if they paid much more than the meager salaries those immigrants make.

Today, we have spent and continue to spend hundreds of billions to imprison undocumented persons and to pay armed masked men to roam many of our cities as well as occasionally murder American citizens who protest their presence. But there is a much simpler and less expensive solution if we truly want to deport such immigrants. We need simply to vigorously enforce existing laws, especially the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, which requires employers to verify the legal status of workers they hire.

That law imposes significant penalties on employers who hire undocumented persons, as well as potential criminal sanctions for knowing and repeated violations. If that law were vigorously enforced, those penalties would pay for the costs incurred by doing increased inspections of worksites, such as meat packing plants in the Midwest and farms in California.

As in many respects, however, our present administration caters to the interests of businesses, not to the interests of ordinary people. The simplest, cheapest and most effective way to end the immigration crisis is to enforce IRCA and impose the penalties provided by that law. The use of modern technology would make it easy to verify the immigration status of employees and would end this crisis much more quickly and cheaply than having masked ICE agents rounding up people on the streets of Minneapolis, Phoenix, San Diego and our other cities.