But — there's an alternative. Don't worry so much about the workers themselves, and instead crack down on employers. If the total cost of employing illegals — i.e., actual cash wages plus fines and possible criminal charges — goes up, employers will simply decide it's cheaper and more convenient to increase the cash part of that wage equation and hire American citizens instead. And if jobs for illegal immigrants dry up, illegal immigration will dry up too.
And the best part is that it's free! Make the fines big enough and the enforcement consistent enough, and the fines pay most of the cost of the enforcement. Couple it with more generous quotas for legal immigration, and the whole "illegal" part of the immigration problem could dry up almost entirely within a few years. It's as close to a free lunch as you can get.
A free lunch does not exist when you're basically putting law enforcement on a commission. It leads to massive police corruption every time. For instance, if you're living in a community where the drug warriors get to keep your car if they find drugs in your car, the drug warriors are going to make sure they find drugs in every car. Who doesn't want a bigger budget? Red light cameras work the same way, they don't want to make the streets safer they want the revenue from the tickets. If they don't get enough revenue they quicken the yellow light so more people will run the red.
Never mind that we should remove all barriers to entry for immigrants, just document them in some way so they can pay into Social Security and the IRS and not be third class citizens with no police protection. But, the very idea that Drum would want to pay Immigration Control based on the amount of fines they can collect is the epitome of a police state. A police state is certainly not a free lunch.
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