Reply #14: I've been one of the people who hired illegal immigrants. [View All]

And, had the INS (at the time) showed up, I'd have had to say that I didn't have evidence that the obviously illegal immigrants were here illegally. Did I know they were here illegally? Yes, at least in one case. Why? Because she told me. Of course, that was a year after I put her on the payroll.

They had documents. I couldn't tell if they were forged or shared by 20 other immigrants or what. Was that social security card forged? Was that a valid green card? Was the drivers license valid? I had no idea and no easy way to find out. If the INS had asked me before Maria confided in me, I'd have had to say that I didn't know any were here illegally. Suspicions aren't knowledge.

And if the document check showed the documents were forged, I'd still be off the hook. I hadn't knowingly hired an illegal immigrant.

If the INS showed up after Maria confided and I lied, they'd have no way of proving it unless Maria had confided with witnesses around. After all, they can't make me incriminate myself. Granted, many would like the government to be able to ignore the Constitution, but we still are a nation of laws and due process.

Then on top of that I had federal law to contend with: If I had just checked out the Latinos' documents I'd have had to check out the valley girl's documents, the 63-year-old white Californian's documents. Otherwise I'm just checking out the Latinos' documents because, well, they're Latinos. That's illegal. That's discrimination, and prima facie proof of racism--even if there's no racism involved.

Yeah, lots of excuses. Due process, burden of proof, presumption of innocence, civil liberties, Fifth Amendment, Civil Rights Act. All kinds of minor, trivial irritations that we should dispense with at once when they get in our way and prevent us from doing what we want. Bad when they do it, but holy and right and just and positively awesome when we do it, blessed as we are, our sins forgiven, by the sign of the sacred (D).

As I keep saying, we do have an illegal employer problem. And the Congress (D) (blessed be the glyph) promised to make it possible for employers to verify eligibility without running the risk of anti-discrimination claims, of getting rid of the "I didn't know" defense unless it was sanctioned and licensed by official government "we didn't know." That was in the mid-1980s. We're still waiting, although the e-check verification process did become available, for large employers, at least, fairly recently.

Of course, immigration and civil rights advocates fought against e-check implementation because the database used might contain errors. As if any other database the government put together would be pristine and error-free. Or as though the correction process wasn't both simple enough to handle the errors *and* redundant, the errors being those that the employee would eventually have to correct anyway, the sooner the better. And because it would disproportionately affect Latinos--as though any illegal immigration brake wouldn't disproportionately affect Latinos since Latinos are a disproportionate number of illegal immigrants (by that token, any amnesty program would be racist since it would have disparate impact).