naatdog wrote:
I usually enjoy reading the back and for but it bugs me when gbaji makes a completely false statement. It has been the law in the US since 1986 (Immigration Control and Reform Act) that every employer complete a form I-9 (Employment Eligibility Verification form) for every hire. An employer is subject to a $200,000 fine for each violation.
Funny, and Xsarus was insisting that there were no immigration reforms focused on the companies who hire illegals. So there's a $200,000 fine for the company, but what happens to the employee? Anything?
Yes. You got me! You do have to come up with some false paperwork in order to get a job "over the table" in the US. Of course, the burden is entirely on the employer, which was what I wanted someone to show, but didn't want to spend the time researching the exact form name. Thanks for taking the bait! :)
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The form has a list of valid documents that are permissible as proof of identity and eligibility to work. For example, a passport is considered both proof of identity and eligibility, or the combination of a social security card (not the number, it must be the card) and state issued driver's license.
Yeah. So I have to fake a school ID and borrow any of a half dozen easily obtained documents and then get them to pass some guy who has no skill to determine if they aren't valid, no ability to double check them (the employer doesn't actually file the form, but just keeps it for records), and no vested interest in denying the employee from working. I'm sure that's going to work just peachy! You get that the employer just has to have the form on file. There's no way for any agency to actually verify that the forms of ID written down were valid or that the employer could have known that they weren't. It's a meaningless form.
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An employer cannot legally hire you with just a social security number provided without any documentation. A driver's license, which can be obtained by illegal immigrants in many states, is not on it's own sufficient proof of eligibility to work.
A drivers license and a birth certificate will work (and it's pretty trivially easy to get someone else's birth certificate. Or you borrow any of a half dozen other documents that someone else managed to obtain. Or you get someone to falsify said documents (and most employers wont know the difference).
The problem with that law is that the "listB, and ListC" documents aren't tracked and are relatively easy to fake. There's also no copies of the documents made, nor is the form itself filed with any agency which might be able to track that the same false ID is being used by several thousand people at the same time.
The gaping hole in our system is that we don't file this information to a common agency which then checks for duplicate names and numbers in order to detect illegal employment. Not only do we not do that, but the one agency which *does* have sufficient information to track that (the IRS) is expressly forbidden to notify immigration services if they find discrepancies. We have multiple methods of documentation used by dozens of different parts of the government, no single one of which is sufficient nor required to establish the legality of a potential employee.
Wouldn't it be easier if we had one card which authorized legal status and put reasonable restrictions and checks on obtaining that document? That way, instead of an employment form saying that you have to have one of listA (which are hard to fake government documents) *or* one each from listB and listC (which are ridiculously easy to fake), we'd just require that one card be provided, and verify that ID against other government documents to ensure that the person using it is the person it was issued to.
If we really want to make sure we're preventing people from working here illegally that is. That we don't do this or anything remotely like it is a pretty good indicator that there are factions in the public sector who just don't want this. And while I'm sure there are a few nutty "number of the beast!" type oppositions, most of them are pro-illegal-immigration and like that the status quo allows them to ensure that the numbers of illegals continues to grow so that the issue itself becomes a bigger one that they can use to their political advantage.
Edited, Jun 25th 2010 4:44pm by gbaji Edited, Jun 25th 2010 4:46pm by gbaji