Organized Labor

To some unionists, sanctions against employers for hiring illegal immigrants seem just and reasonable. It is the employers, after all, who benefit from exploiting the illegality of their immigrant workers for low wages. It should be the employers who suffer penalties under the law for hiring the workers so as to exploit them.

Problem is, sanctions against employers won’t work.

With reason, the Teamsters have argued that sanctions against employers have historically served as an excuse to wreck union organizing drives. Employers have been content to employ illegal immigrants until the prospect of their unionization arose. Then, suddenly, the employers have recalled their legal obligations and used them to purge union sympathizers from among their workers.

The more fundamental question, though, is, How will sanctions against employers be enforced?

Clearly the employers will not police themselves according to the “self-regulation” model the current administration prefers in other business matters. Clearly their illegal immigrant employees will be more than unlikely to report their bosses to authorities. Enforcement will belong first to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Mike Theriault, Secretary-Treasurer SFBTC, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Mike Hardeman of Sign Display 510 in Washington D.C during the Building Trades Department. National Legislative Conference earlier this month.

The DHS might. We would then live in a police state, and tax ourselves heavily to support it.

Let us assume that this is not how we prefer to live. After the DHS, the next level of enforcement would be that of state and local police and state and local authorities. We can perform a thought experiment. Suppose someone (American, visiting tourist, legal or illegal immigrant, makes no difference) just hours from stepping off a plane walked down from his hotel room to the hotel restaurant and, while ordering two eggs over easy, bacon, and home fries, coughed on the menu, the plate, the tablecloth, and into the air. Suppose this cough was rich with the Mycobacteria of a particularly antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis or with the long-awaited contagious form of the H2NV avian flu virus. Suppose the busboy a day or two later was feeling a little off and then more than a little off but hesitated to visit a clinic because, well, word might get to the authorities and he didn’t want a little case of the flu to result in his employer being busted and he and his coworkers being deported and their families deprived of support.

Would we really want the busboy to hesitate at all?

After state and local authorities, who would be responsible for enforcement?

We would. We would be obliged to look at every new face and many a familiar face and ask ourselves, Legal or illegal? We would have to ask ourselves because we could ask no one else. If someone told us, I am legal, we would have to acknowledge the possibility of a lie. We would understand that appearances could deceive, that documents could be forged. We would know that accents could be unlearned, especially if our suspect had crossed the border as a child. An honest effort at enforcement would mire our daily lives in suspicion.

Honestly, who would want this? It is not hard to conclude that the border will never be sealed, that human ingenuity will always find a way to our country from others so much poorer. Even “guest worker” programs presuppose that this ingenuity will be content to stand in line. What, then, is left but to grant full employment rights to immigrants, so that they will be freed to assert those rights, and so that we will be freed to organize them and advocate on their behalf? The employers will in turn be denied the ability to exploit workers cowed by the threat of deportation. This would be the most effective form of employer sanction.