Guest Post by Karl Denninger
Many have decried Trump’s positions on illegal immigrants.
Folks, this is not a complicated problem, and it revolves directly around The Rule of Law, as with so many other issues.
In the 1990s, as anyone who’s read this column knows, I ran an Internet company. Even at that time I was required, under federal law, to collect certain information and make a good faith effort to verify it for everyone I hired. The most-obvious were the W-4 and I-9, both of which were required at the time. The I-9 dates to 1986.
It was a violation of the law for me to hire someone without completing that form. In addition it was a serious violation of the law for me to fail to report and deposit payroll taxes (FICA and Medicare) on an itemized basis for each employee within a very short period of time (days) of payroll being distributed.
Since most people are paid either weekly or bi-weekly (in MCSNet’s case it was bi-weekly) this meant that the government had actual notice and funds from any such employee within two weeks of their being hired.
Since individual Social Security numbers were required for each such person it would be trivial for the government to determine if someone was working here illegally if they gave a good damn. If a person’s SSN shows up in two or more places at once it’s pretty easy to figure out whether you ought to raid one or both of them; odds are good you’re going to wind up arresting someone. If a false or deceased person’s number is reported you show up at the business immediately and either get the error corrected or arrest the employee who intentionally provided false identification.
E-Verify makes this easier and even more-immediate. If you enforce the law against employers — that is, you jail any employer who fails to file E-Verify for every employee — this problem goes away immediately.
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