xenophobia or bust

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,363382,00.html

I occasionally come across something either worthwhile or worth posting about on foxnews. It's a strange place.

This one deals with immigration (unsurprisingly I haven't yet seen much coverage of the issue elsewhere, leave it to fox to sound like a xenophobic haven).

But what confused me was that the judge indicates 'the law unfairly shifts the burden of immigration enforcement on the backs of businesses'. There are two realities that need to be acknowledged. First, employers who wish to comply with federal laws have a fairly easy and already implemented means of doing so. It may also be possible to make a routine check of a valid social security number. I would think there could be a private agency designated to doing nothing but verifying legal documents of identification (and obviously reporting instances of ID theft, which is not a funny thing to do to someone). Second, employers who don't wish to hire illegal workers don't have to. What they will miss on, if it does impose some sort of cost on themselves, is the decrease in cost from hiring such workers. The idea of the fines is to make the cost roughly higher to make the decision to hire someone who is in the country illegally.

It seems to me the entire point, the most effective means of immigration control, is to make it difficult to find work in the country unless one has gone through legal channels. Building fences and running around with night vision goggles on the border is amusing and pointless in comparison to doing something which rigs the market to prevent people from circumventing the legal system. Then the logical response is to craft a legal system (I'd recommend a full fledged labor-trade agreement with Mexico in particular) which recognizes both the desire of people to work in this country and the desire of employers to hire them. There is in fact already a system in place for such things in the form of temp agencies. Giving them some form of work visa (a document already in place) with verifiable data on the true identity and origin of the worker without which they cannot work is simple enough and shouldn't require a tamper-proof national ID card (as is proposed in DC).

My problem with the entire enterprise has been that, so long as government workers are too lazy to assist in verifying people's ID information, both ID theft and the employment of illegal immigrants will continue at unfettered rates. It might make the most sense to transfer the ID verification process elsewhere, or privatize the agency (which in the case of SSNs might make sense for other reasons). Regardless of what this judge thinks, it shouldn't be the government's job to impose demands made by society itself. If it is xenophobia we want, then xenophobia we shall have.

Apparently if businesses don't want xenophobia, there is a reason for it. Could it be that hiring unskilled cheap labor is important enough to circumvent the legal system? Or in essence the market is telling us that it requires these workers.. and the government has acted too slowly to allow their legal entrance, so it's just going ahead and doing it. I do not see where verification is such a strenuous process, but I might agree that the rate at which legal immigration is occurring is probably insufficient (which is why we may need a labor-trade deal with Mexico).