If you want to stop illegal immigration, cracking down on employers like Asplundh is a good start.

No one (from those of us who buy produce at the grocery store to the guy who wants to build a Trump Tower on 5th Avenue) actually wants to stop all illegal immigration.

I want to stop ALL illegal immigration. It distorts the labor markets, for one. It's not fair to hopeful legal immigrants, for another. It's corrosive to the rule of law as well.

I want to encourage illegal immigration.

But I am too cheap to pay someone for landscaping or housekeeping.
What should I do?

I could buy food that is produced in the USA. But everyone does that!

Everyone's seen their tree trimming trucks. Asplundh, a really large company. And a serial violator of the nation's illegal immigrant employment laws, it seems:

The tree-trimming company Asplundh Tree Expert has been hit with a $95 million fine for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants and for bringing on some under different names who used documents it knew were fraudulent.


It is the largest fine ever in an immigration case in the U.S.

Asplundh pleaded guilty to criminal charges in federal court in Pennsylvania, where it is headquartered, admitting that its managers restructured the company's hiring specifically to evade normal human resources processes and hire illegal aliens, many by word-of-mouth, while giving top-level managers deniability.


If you want to stop illegal immigration, cracking down on employers like Asplundh is a good start.

Montco-based Asplundh admits hiring undocumented immigrants, agrees to pay $95 million

I want to stop ALL illegal immigration. It distorts the labor markets, for one. It's not fair to hopeful legal immigrants, for another. It's corrosive to the rule of law as well.

These three points end up being raised and eventually rebutted in almost every single immigration thread.

"It distorts labor markets"

All laws (or lack of laws) "distort" labor markets. There is an honest discussion about what is the best "distortion" of the labor market, but that would involve impartial analysis (good luck! ; ). There is an extremely strong case that the present law never accurately accounted for an optimal migrant workforce. The status quo in many ways is less "distorted" by virtue of matching employers with labor at a given payment.

"It's not "fair" to hopeful legal immigrants" (inner quotes are mine).

Been covered with slightly different wording, when you said that it was an insult to legal immigrants last week: response:. "Sorry, no one (least of all my immigrant wife), made you the unbiased Reader of the Insult-O-Meter for all legal immigrants. You can be insulted as a citizen, and that is your certainly your choice. It seems that level of personal insult is an impenetrable barrier to good policy." The switch to "fairness" is a minor variation on the same argument, and presupposes that legal immigrants (the supposed victims in this situation) have any sort of universal opinion on this. They don't, and they probably lean toward some pathway.

"It's corrosive to the rule of law"

That argument can be made for any law that is significantly at odds with common practice. A normal option would be to modify the law to align it with best social policy, but we have created a convenient corollary that any modification of law is even MORE corrosive, so that it must remain inviolate, no matter how destructive it may be.

These arguments haven't budged in decades, they never will.

Frankly, I think that the hard working illegal aliens should have sponsors, their employers, in order to gain citizenship. The remaining non-sponsored illegal aliens should be sent back to their home country. It may take time, but hopefully the snowflake college kids that don't want to get their hands dirty, will once again.

This is my stance. I'm all for immigration. My grandfather has hired workers from Mexico for quite some time on his farm. Usually the same peole who return legally each year for harvest season. I don't even have a problem if they never intend to be citizens as long as they get the proper visas. My industry does it all the time sending American citizens to other countries to work. But there is a legal process that needs to be followed.