Employers should be threatened if they are hiring illegals. I've been saying for how long now it's not an illegal immigrant problem it's an illegal employer problem.
Reclaiming the Issues: "It's an Illegal Employer Problem"
I'm a very liberal person but you are now dug in to argue against anything the conservatives say.
Did you read the other op ed I posted the other day? I'll post the part I'm hoping you saw:
Shouldn't we be compassionate? Of course.
But there is nothing compassionate about driving down the wages of any nation's middle class. It's the most cynical, self-serving, greedy, and sociopathic behavior you'll see from our "conservatives."
There is nothing compassionate about being the national enabler of a dysfunctional oligarchy like Mexico. An illegal workforce in the US sending an estimated $17 billion to Mexico every year - second only in national income to that country's oil revenues - supports an antidemocratic, anti-worker, hyperconservative administration there that gleefully ships out of that nation the "troublesome" Mexican citizens - those lowest on the economic food-chain and thus most likely to present "labor unrest" - to the USA. Mexico (and other "sending nations") need not deal with their own social and economic problems so long as we're willing to solve them for them - at the expense of our middle class. Democracy in Central and South America be damned - there are profits to be made for Wal-Mart!
Similarly, there is nothing compassionate about handing higher profits (through a larger and thus cheaper work force) to the CEOs of America's largest corporations and our now-experiencing-record-profits construction and agriculture industries.
What about caring for people in need? Isn't that the universal religious/ethical value? Of course.
A few years ago, when my family and I were visiting Europe, one of our children fell sick. A doctor came to the
home of the people we were staying with, visited our child at 11 pm on a weeknight, left behind a course of
antibiotics, and charged nothing. It was paid for by that nation's universal
health care system. We should offer the same to any human being in need of medical care - a universal human right - in the United States.
But if I'd applied to that nation I was visiting for a monthly unemployment or retirement check, I would have been laughed out of the local government office. And if I'd been caught working there, I would have been deported within a week. Caring for people in crisis/need is very different from giving a job or a monthly welfare check to non-citizens. No nation - even those in Central and South America - will do that. And neither should the United States.