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When the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans ramped up last summer, I asked immigration czar Tom Homan an obvious question:
Why is the federal government spending all its energy chasing individual migrants through the streets? Couldn’t the US, like other developed countries, discourage illegal work at scale by sanctioning employers?
Homan was definitive: That was coming. “Worksite enforcement operations are going to massively expand,” he told me in June.
Now Trump’s deportation push, which has provoked high-stakes confrontations in Democrat-led cities, appears to be at its political limits after a Border Patrol agent shot a man dead in Minneapolis.
And there’s little evidence that the administration has focused on reducing the demand for unauthorized workers, or that American business, large or small, will pay a price for hiring immigrants illegally.
There’s no current ledger of immigration audits and inspections. But top employer-side immigration lawyers told me that, if anything, federal scrutiny of employers seems to have eased since September, when a high-profile raid on a Hyundai plant in Georgia produced an international incident and dealt a blow to US industrial policy.
“The consensus among lawyers is that raids seem to have slowed,” one immigration lawyer who represents companies facing major enforcement actions said. And while raids aren’t necessarily public, reports of workplace enforcement actions in the mainstream and trade press seem also to have dwindled. And there have been no major cases brought against employers.
ICE has announced three worksite cases since November, which netted 74 arrests, and there have been reported small-scale raids on car washes from Los Angeles to Connecticut.
In an email, Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin disputed the notion that the administration is taking it easy on employers: “Worksite enforcement remains a cornerstone of our efforts to protect public safety, national security, and economic stability,” citing a July raid on a marijuana grow site. She added that “the employment of illegal aliens also incentivizes dangerous and illegal practices, including social security fraud.”
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Still, the administration’s boldest efforts are clearly focused both on seizing individual immigrants and on scaring others into leaving the country, while employers quietly try to ride out the storm. That apparent imbalance has a few causes.
One is that prosecuting employers, theoretically possible under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, is very hard: Prosecutors must show that an employer “knowingly” hired someone illegally, while the employer merely needs to establish that documents “reasonably appear to be genuine and relate to the person” they’ve employed.
Another reason is that sectors of the US economy continue to rest on an implicit bargain between the government, employers, and migrants.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote the same day I talked to Homan. “This is not good.”
Ben’s view
There’s a broader American pattern at work here. Leaders of both parties often target the high-profile supply side of what they see as the cause of the country’s woes, rather than the demand side. The “war on drugs” has largely targeted dealers — most recently, small Venezuelan boats with no obvious connection to fentanyl imports — instead of attempting to stem addiction.
And a business-friendly Congress has never tightened the 1986 legislation that barred employing illegal workers — but made it nearly impossible to enforce.
The administration has long been torn between its nationalist impulses and its alliance with America’s biggest businesses. In other areas, like tech regulation, the businesses have decisively won. So far, immigration is following the same pattern.
Room for Disagreement
Undocumented migrants “who help keep America up and operating each day” should not be prioritized for deportation, Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal: “The great majority of those who came illegally over the southern border are in close tune with the majority of Americans both culturally and in terms of their essential understanding of the meaning of life.”
Notable
- The Washington Post looked into this trend last summer.